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.
In her second column, Chanté explores the financial disadvantages of singlehood, and what it means in a world that forces unmarried, child-free women to be consistently remarkable in other ways.
I’m 30 in just over a week, and if there is one thing I can say about my 20s, I really did indulge – especially in my late twenties. I denied myself no pleasure, I worked hard – and I spent even harder. Now I find myself standing at the foot of a new decade, and I’m freaking out. I spent most of my twenties single and just under half of them living alone, working for myself and managing my life completely independently in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I don’t have many regrets from that decade; sure, there are several texts I should never have responded to, and moments when chasing the night led me in questionable places. However, I really gave myself what I wanted, and waited for no one to start living my life. In some ways, I felt like I had to.
So much of single life in my twenties felt like performing exceptionalism. While friends hunkered down into domesticity, I needed to fill the silence after “Are you dating anyone? No?” with something more extravagant. Sometimes this looked like a career win; other times it looked like living a truly indulgent life, one that felt good not only because I was doing what I wanted, but because I had something to share that would deflect from my single status. I felt I had to earn my place – which almost always cost money.
A recent study by Ally Bank found that although women are more content being single – and, in fact, enjoy it more than men – they are more likely to be worried about money. I am one of those women. Part of what makes the absence of a relationship sting is the cost of living. Renée Sylvestre-Williams, author of The Singles Tax: No-Nonsense Financial Advice for Solo Earners, defines the ‘singles tax’ as the “financial penalty that single people are paying as a result of a society that has primarily focused on ‘the couple’.”