The Heartache Of Living Alone

Amanda Platell makes a brave and honest confession that will chime with a growing number of older singletons

- Amanda Platell

As I walked past a charity shop one hot day recently, a rack stuffed with slightly shabby, yellowing wedding dresses caught my eye. Something made me venture inside. Rummaging through the gowns, I saw one that still had mud stains on its hem, and I imagined the happy bride posing for her wedding photos in a garden as she and her beloved swept through what they thought would be the happiest day of their lives.

Why had this dress, along with so many others, been exiled here to a little shop in a minor high street, already stuffed full of broken dreams? For that’s what these dresses represented. No woman who is still happily married dumps her wedding dress in a charity shop.

This collection, as the woman behind the counter confirmed, represented the spoils of middle-aged divorce. As she put it, ‘Who needs a reminder of happier times when your husband has run off with a blonde 10 years younger than you?’

My own wedding dress, in case you were wondering, remains stuffed in a suitcase in the attic, where it has been hidden out of sight for almost 30 years since my own divorce. The only reason I haven’t taken it to a charity shop is that I wouldn’t want to pass on my bad luck to anyone else.

The woman in the shop wasn’t wrong in her observation. There are now eight million people living alone in this country – the largest ever number, as revealed recently by the Office for National Statistics. Family lawyers put this down to the rising number of couples deciding to divorce in older age – the ‘silver splitters’.