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.