Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed something that happens to newspaper columns come this time of year. Every August your favourite columnist goes away and is replaced by someone paler and more morose. Who are these people, you might have wondered? Why do they only appear in August? Shouldn’t they be on holiday like everybody else? Perhaps they’re the canteen staff, filing the odd column between stuffing vol-au-vents because the journalists are away. But interesting that they never write about children or dogs or organic gardens or husbands or wives or dinner parties or the complexities of village fête status anxiety, as normal columnists do. A normal columnist will happily spend 800 words musing breezily on compost heaps. A stand-in holiday season columnist, by contrast, favours other topics. Death, the plague, that’s our bag.

Want to know why? Because we’re single. We’re spouse-free zones. And usually garden, children and pet-free zones, too. I’m not on holiday because there’s no one I want to go with, ever since my best friend and I inexplicably chose to travel to Gujarat last October and fell out over a difference in opinion about a woman’s amputated arm. And, being single, I’m wary of holidays anyway. They remind me of that realisation I always seem to have abroad, that I can’t spend the rest of my life with this person. Because single people spend most of their time inside their heads, we tend to exaggerate bad past experiences. So maybe my holidays were good, but how would I know? The inside of my brain resembles the combined plots of The Poseidon Adventure and Saw III played on loop with all the uplifting parts edited out.

That’s the truth about being single; it can be horrendous, only I’m not allowed to admit it. For a few months I have been leading what most anthropologists would describe as a highly unusual existence in my one-person flat, and yet prevailing 21st-century thought – the publishing industry, marketing bods keen to get their grubby paws on what’s left of my disposable income – are trying to convince me that being single is the best thing in the world that can happen to a person. It reminds me of what Phill Gramm, John McCain’s economic adviser, said last month about the recession. It’s not a recession; it’s a “mental recession”. It’s all in your mind.

Likewise, there’s a myth being perpetuated that being single is great! The loneliness, the effort, that musty smell in your flat because you spend far too much time in it, the fact that children think you’re weird – that’s all in your mind. A fabrication. You’re not bored, you just think you’re bored because being single is fabulous! There are more than 3 million single people living in Britain today – everyone’s at it, why not join in the fun? You can drink cocktails like they did in Sex and the City! You can play Nintendo into the dead of night! Absolutely nobody in the world gives a toss about you, but, never mind, you’ve won the lottery of life.

Connected to this syndrome is another unacknowledged truth: that a lot of single people are mad. Some of them are single because they are mad. They tack uplifting quotes to their bedroom walls; they try to lure the attached away from their beloved with promises of a fabulous new life in which no one ever need share a tube of toothpaste again. They begin to excel in those activities that are traditionally dominated by the singleton culture, stalking and conspiracy theorising. But most of them are mad because they’re being driven insane by the pressure to be ecstatic about being single. Under the cover of normality they’re sectionable, trying to justify why they want to be alone so much. To this end they forensically inspect the relationships of their friends. “A lot of people are with the wrong people for the wrong reasons,” is their mantra and sincere hope. They gullibly fall for the claims of their friends with children who tell them how lucky they are to have nothing to do at the weekends. “How I envy you!” new mothers will tell their single friends. It’s an exercise in self-pity, of course. If in doubt, ask them to swap your life with theirs and watch them clutch their children.

If only there was some service that would reliably predict when any period of non-voluntary solitude would end, it would cut out the anxiety and allow single people to enjoy the good things about their lives: increased lucidity, productivity, creativity and self-awareness. More time. Not being welded together in some smug symbiotic ticking relationship time-bomb. Having your own personality. Less risk of divorce. But drinking cocktails whenever you like with three single and neurotic friends for company is for most people a definition of hell.

Kate Muir is away

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