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The Unexpected Joy of Being Single: Locating unattached happiness

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With humour, The Unexpected Joy of Being Single sets out to help us be happier and content, as singles; but reassuring in reminding us we’re also, still human after all. Author and journalist Catherine Gray’s new book The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary implores us to celebrate the normal and average (but joyful) things in our everyday lives. Singles are often treated as Peter Pans, overgrown adolescents, grown-ups in training, but actually they're the ones who should be given Advanced Adulting awards, since solo life is often no cakewalk. Catherine Gray is a Sunday Times bestselling author of five books, including The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober. A good book for those in “heartbreak hotel” I would say or already don’t know the value in being single.

Instead of sitting through another mediocre round of drinks with a teetotal accountant preparing for his next Tough Mudder, I would rather spend time doing the things I love. The book encourages you to re-evaluate your assumptions about singledom and find the contented single in yourself. Reading her book is like having a conversation with a friend that really gets you, plus her dating stories will always make you laugh. A culture shift which repositions a single person as someone who is relationship-free, complete, and not lacking is long overdue. Being single for an extended period - or for life - can be incredibly empowering, fun and emancipating.But an increasing number of “single-positive” people are rejecting the notion that true love is the only path to happiness. She's sold over half a million books in English-speaking territories, her work has been published in the likes of Stylist, Marie Claire, The Lancet Psychiatry and the Guardian, and her books have been translated into nine languages. This book turns self-love on its head entirely by asking us to love ourselves like our entire lives depend on it (because they kind of do).

She sets out to investigate the sources of single stigma, while charting her own journey through “rampant” love addiction. Have we been slow to appreciate the benefits and are they only realised when a single life proves to be a long term experience? It is comforting to have someone rationalise your most irrational thoughts, the weird hypothetical situations you create in your head before actually meeting someone, and those intense digital connections which fray rapidly in real life. After a couple of months I start dating again, how everyone starts dating nowadays, by downloading an app and uploading pictures of myself that show I am sporty (diving shot, tick), fun (silly shot of me wearing a bear hat, tick), refined (dressed for dinner shot, tick) and well-travelled (Yosemite shot, tick).Anyone who’s been single long enough has likely been plagued with the same thought — what if I die alone?

Our tips are sorted into seven main categories — Communicate, Design, Fix, Money, Organise, Travel and Work — and tagged so they’re easy to browse and locate. This is not a criticism of the book, just a word of caution that it will not apply to everyone's experience. My drinking enables me to secure boyfriends, and when it falls apart, my drinking is there to console me, or to catapult me on to the next conquest. My alcohol dependence and my love addiction prop each other up, like a smashed people trying to walk home from a party.

Having travelled full circle through the highs and lows we, and society have of love, coupledom and being married; Catherine is now living a comfortable and joyful single life. In The Unexpected Joy of Being Single, author Catherine Gray is single and happy at the end of her story.

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