The crazy cat lady is having a much better time than you are

I have friends, with cats, who would happily describe themselves as crazy, with a certain shiny-eyed pride. The part that doesn't fit through the cat flap is the idea that any of this is a loss.

Society has long peddled the lie that women need men to be happy, and while we're waking up to what nonsense that is, the notion that single women shuffle off into some Cath Kidston corner of the unchosen and seek solace in the nearest feline is more laughable still.

Having worked with women in midlife going through divorce, breakup and grief, my reaction to the faux-sympathetic mockery of the cat lady isn't amusement. It's consternation.

Have you seen these women?

They aren't choosing cats because you didn't choose them. They're choosing peace because you did.

The idea that they're at home reading Jane Eyre with one hand resting idly on a hirsute Persian is, on the evidence I've seen, a long way from the truth. My single midlife friends share tales of life, love and frankly filthy acrobatic exploits that would make most men shrivel.

Who's actually alone here

If you're smarting at the idea that they don't need men, look at what happens to the men.

Divorced men remarry more often and sooner than divorced women do. When Pew asked in 2014, 29 per cent of divorced men said they definitely wanted to marry again, against 15 per cent of women.

The reason isn't romance. It's that a great many men had one confidant, and she's gone.

Men arrive at fifty having never been taught to build the thing women have been building all along. And when they're cast adrift, even if it was them who cut the rope, the lack of it shows.

That's the old invisible labour again, paying its social pension to her in spades. She spent thirty years maintaining the friendships, remembering the birthdays, keeping the family in touch. He benefited from all of it and built none of it, and now he's the one sitting in a flat wondering who to ring.

The comments underneath

The men in the comments aren't talking to her. They're performing for each other.

A pile-on is an audition, and the applause they want comes from men they've decided sit somehow socially above them. The loudest contempt for women tends to come from men who are deeply submissive to other men.

It's simple, really. Women like men who like women. And it seems that so many men just don't.

I wonder if you can imagine how heartening it is to receive messages from men rebuilding after heartbreak. How rare and unusual it feels to read of a man's emotional pain and support his vulnerability. Sadly, as someone with a large social following, it is a far more isolated occurrence than the little cat lady comments they post.

But a glimmer is a glimmer.

One last thing

It's perhaps worth keeping in mind that spinster is a term for women who made wool to support households because men couldn't support them.

And cats? Well, we know that cats only spend time with people they like.

Give me a midlife date in a black linen dress with a few cat hairs on it over the twenty-six year old who's still in her performance era, any day of the week.