Chanté Joseph is tired of the endless torrent of advice telling us what to change about ourselves in order to find love. What if, she asks, we simply embraced ourselves as we are?
In her brand new column for Glamour UK, the viral journalist and broadcaster will explore what it means to be a single woman in 2026. But this isn't just another magazine column purely about romantic relationships. Chanté will delve into all facets of modern singlehood, and how it impacts everything from our friendships, families, and our relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
As she writes in her very first column: ‘This is a space for women who, when it all feels too much, can set aside hope and longing for a brief moment, and dive deeper into how we can have a fulfilling single life’…
What if, for a moment, you decided to put hope aside? I’m not saying you should give up on love entirely, but why not start thinking about what life outside of it might look like? Does that scare you?
After five years of being single, there is nothing that makes me want to climb into a car (I can’t drive by the way) and run someone over quite like being told some variation of: ‘It’ll come when you’re not looking for it’, or ‘You just need to be ok with being alone’. The rage is incandescent.
I know this doesn’t come from a bad place. However, it is a constant reminder of how people in relationships either: suffer from a unique amnesia, in which they've shacked up with someone and suddenly have no recollection of what it is like to be single; or they’ve been out of the game for so long that they have nothing of value to share. In both cases, the privileging of coupledom means that even people who were single moments ago feel entitled to start pontificating about what keeps you loveless, despite luck being the only thing that separates us.
I’ve come to realise that it isn’t as lucrative or self-aggrandising to simply assert that the successful pursuit of love is a matter of chance. A mythology has developed around love to make people who find it feel special, and continue to place the couple at the centre of our social lives. We create new hoops to jump through, funnelling single women into emotional army camps, forcing them to spend an inordinate amount of time self-scanning for the flaws that are keeping them from meeting The One.
One thing the current trend of chronic online over-sharing has taught me is that no dating experience I’ve had is unique. We live completely unoriginal lives. We think every situationship that comes to a crashing end is about us, and we dig deep trying to make any connection between our childhoods and why the text back we didn’t receive kept us up at night. Very rarely do we consider the cultural space we’re dating in; we cannot separate increasingly divided communities and stressful lives from our difficulties in finding the love we want to keep.
Unfortunately, instead of having those conversations, we are stuck consuming nebulous spiritual language about energy and positive thinking. These ideas recognise love as a random force we can’t control, yet somehow still offer a behavioural script to follow if we want to find it. We have a list of qualities to measure ourselves against to see whether we’re deemed worthy of love, and it is exhausting. All the tips, tricks, and hacks that promise to fix us are just more time and energy not spent creating a life that feels meaningful in the absence of love. I can’t take any more dating advice. I want to start living and stop analysing.
Forget dating apps, I'm taking things to the streets.
The evolution of dating advice has shifted from encouraging women to be as malleable and compensatory as possible, to fixating on how our “low self-esteem” and blighted confidence make us unlovable. Relationship self-help at its core needs women to believe that they are broken, and require a deep renovation before love enters their lives. It teaches us that a happy relationship is a prize that women can only achieve through the kind of self-improvement that we never ask of men.
We often tell women specifically to look inwards to find the root of their dating woes, forcing them to take responsibility for men’s bad behaviour and wider social structural problems that make dating difficult. We’re now descending further into content that encourages women to be as callous, ambiguous, and unkind as the men that they are engaging with. A tit-for-tat take factory that acknowledges the difficulties of dating, but provides no real solution. I think it is time for something new.
I don’t want to be as declarative as to say I’m giving up on dating – I love a brief holiday romance too much – but I am putting down hope for a while, and I think a lot more women should too. With 45% of women aged 25 to 44 projected to be single and childless by 2030, we have an opportunity to create a new reality for ourselves; one that isn’t so beholden to being loved by someone. We need new social scripts for women that don’t make their lives feel ‘on hold’. I’m so excited to be writing this column exploring modern single life, what it means and feels like to be a single woman existing rather than obsessively self-improving and dating.
My column is a space for women who, when it all feels too much, can set aside hope and longing for a brief moment, and dive deeper into how we can have a fulfilling single life. Is there a gentler way to think about living outside of love? If so, how do we use this column to find it? I want to share my stories, talk with experts, and even crowdsource from you what single life means in 2026 and how we make sense of it, while giving ourselves a moment to unburden ourselves from the weight of longing.
Photographer: Hannah Cosgrove
Stylist: Jack O'Neill
Photographer's Assistant: Ruby Griffiths
Location: The Ship and Shovell
