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April 18, 2008: on my own terms

Linda Franklin

This week, our internet dating blogger, Linda Franklin, explains why 21st-century single women have to pioneer new ways of being women

'I'm leaving Jack!' Ewan's voice sounded resolute over the phone. 'I'm going back to my flat in Brighton - I've already given the tenants notice.'

'But I thought he was cool, kind, funny and sexy,' I said. 'What else do you expect to get from a man?'

'Yes, he is all those things,' Jack said. 'But he doesn't give me what I need. I need to be told I'm beautiful and that he'd do anything for me and buy me gifts so I feel special - and he doesn't. And he's always working late: he doesn't make enough time for me and I feel as if I'm not important enough. And that isn't good for me.'

'I'd like someone like that who gave me my own space,' I said.

'I know that would suit you, but I want to live my own dream - not yours,' he said. 'Look, we all have to work out what we want for ourselves and make sure we get it - and it doesn't matter if someone else doesn't want that, that's neither here nor there. I've struggled a lot to get where I am now and I won't let someone undermine me. I've let people hurt me in the past and - no more, honey! I'm not doing that script again. I'm not that damaged...'

It got me thinking: Ewan has had to fight to be allowed to be who and how he is, and women like me do too. My husband left me with two young sons when I was forty-two and he went to live in the States, and I had to not only mourn the loss of the life I thought I would have, but find out how to build a new one for our family. And also to learn how to be a single woman at a time I would never have envisaged happening for myself when I was younger. I'm writing a book about my experience and what I learnt and how I found happiness after divorce. But, the truth is, women of my generation have had to face many challenges as conventions have been overthrown in the pursuit of freedom and change: we've had to make up our own rules about how we act, what we do and how we look - in a way that suits us as individuals.

And a lot of that is true for married women, but solos don't have the option of hiding behind the facade of being in a couple, or being a 'plus one'. If a single woman is going to get a life, she has to be uniquely herself and stand up and be counted as that. She is a new role model in a way that women in the past just weren't: before the sixties a woman in her forties, fifties or sixties on her own would mostly have been a widow or spinster and certain traditions would have gone with that. These days she is able - if she wishes - to play it however she wants to.

I was in a very lively bar once and got talking to a young woman of twenty two who was about to get married: she pointed to her Hindu fiance who was doing a dance routine on the bar with a couple of mates - it was that kind of place.

'Tell me,' she said. 'I can see you're older than me, but I have no idea how old you are. How old are you?'

So I told her.

'Wow!' she said. 'That is so cool. I know now I can get older but look like you and be like you and have your kind of style.'

And I learned from that that you don't have to worry about looking like 'mutton dressed up as lamb' or any of the other judgements used to put women down. You just have to work out for yourself how you want to be and what you want - whether it's how you look, or how you live, or what you do with your life in terms of work and study or the way you arrange relationships. And keep it changing and evolving as you go with no-one to tell you can't.

'You're not the passive recipient of your life,' says Ewan. 'It doesn't just happen to you. If you don't like it, change it. If you don't like how you are - do the work so you do. March to the sound of your own drum beat and no-one else's.'

Seems like a good way to me.

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