The Pursuit of Connection: Why Being Single After 35 Can Feel So Complicated

There is a particular kind of loneliness that doesn’t announce itself.

It doesn’t arrive on the heels of a breakup or announce itself at 2 am.

It creeps in on an ordinary Tuesday, maybe when you’re eating dinner alone for the fourth night in a row, or when someone at work asks if you have a plus-one for the office party and you pause just a half-second too long before answering.

It’s not devastating. It’s just there … quiet, persistent, and increasingly hard to ignore the older you get.

And for many women over 35, in particular, being single is not the simple, uncomplicated fact it might appear to be from the outside.

It is a lived experience woven through with layers of psychology, history, culture, and expectation, most of which remain unexamined precisely because the world tends to reduce it to a problem with a solution…

Just put yourself out there. Have you tried the apps? You’re so great, I don’t understand why you’re still single.

Well-meaning people say these things.

They mean comfort, but they deliver something closer to pressure.

But the experience of being single in your late thirties or forties, and particularly the experience of wanting companionship in that season of life, is far more nuanced than the conversation usually allows.

And understanding what’s really happening beneath the surface isn’t about fixing anything.

It’s about seeing yourself more clearly.

And going from there.

So, let’s start with…

The Weight of Time

Age does something strange to desire.

When you’re in your twenties and single, there’s an ambient sense that everything is still ahead of you, that love is a future tense thing, not yet urgent.

But somewhere in your mid-thirties, the temporal quality of wanting shifts.

It acquires a weight it didn’t have before.

Whether or not children are part of the picture, there’s a cultural and biological clock that begins to tick louder, and the internal experience of wanting a partner can start to feel less like a preference and more like a need.

Now, this shift in urgency is significant because urgency changes how we make decisions.

Research in psychology consistently shows that when people feel scarce of something, whether time, options, or opportunity, their decision-making becomes less deliberate and more reactive.

The cognitive bandwidth we usually apply to evaluating whether someone is actually right for us gets quietly redirected toward managing the fear that we might run out of chances.

And so we overlook things we would not have overlooked at 28.

We explain away red flags with an ease that surprises us later.

We invest quickly and emotionally, before there is enough information to justify that investment.

So, with that in mind, it’s worth sitting with it for a moment:

The very urgency we feel about finding love can work against us in finding good love.

And there is a difference between any ‘love’ and good love.

However, it’s not just later in life that can affect our feelings and decisions; we also need to consider the time of our childhood experiences.

What We Carry From the Beginning

Long before apps, first dates, and awkward getting-to-know-you conversations, we all developed a blueprint for intimacy.

Attachment theory, first articulated by psychologist John Bowlby and later expanded by researchers like Mary Ainsworth, describes how the emotional bonds we formed with caregivers in early childhood create templates for how we relate to others in adulthood.

For instance, someone who grew up with a parent who was emotionally inconsistent, present one day, withdrawn the next, loving but also critical, the nervous system learned to interpret inconsistency as normal.

Maybe even as love.

And so as an adult, a partner who runs hot and cold doesn’t feel like a red flag; they feel familiar.

The anxiety of not knowing where you stand with someone can register in the body as excitement rather than alarm.

The very chemistry we describe as attraction can be, in part, the neurological signature of an old wound recognising itself.

Another example is of someone with an avoidant attachment style who typically grew up in an environment where emotional needs were minimised or met with discomfort.

Maybe the caregivers weren’t cruel; they might have been perfectly loving in practical ways, but emotional expression was quietly discouraged or withheld.

So, as a result, you learned early that needing too much was somehow a problem.

That self-sufficiency was the safer bet.

That, depending on someone else, created a vulnerability that wasn’t worth the risk.

Fast forward to your late thirties, and on the surface, this person can look like they have it together.

Independent, capable, not visibly desperate for love.

But underneath, there’s often a painful push-pull happening that they can’t quite name.

They genuinely want connection; the desire is real, but the moment a relationship starts to feel serious, something in them recoils.

Not dramatically.

Just a subtle cooling.

A growing awareness of the other person’s flaws.

A creeping sense that this isn’t quite right, that they need more space, that something is missing.

So what happens to someone like this, single at 38 or 42?

They have a string of relationships that started with genuine promise and ended with them feeling vaguely suffocated or underwhelmed, and a growing private suspicion that maybe they’re just not built for long-term love.

They might frame it to themselves and others as simply having high standards.

Being selective.

Not settling.

And there’s often genuine truth in that framing.

But it can also be a very elegant way of never having to be truly vulnerable with anyone.

The cruelty of it is that the longing is real.

The avoidantly attached person isn’t cold or unfeeling.

They often feel the absence of a deep connection acutely, just not acutely enough to overcome the discomfort of actually letting someone in.

And the older they get, the more entrenched the pattern becomes, because each relationship that didn’t work becomes further evidence for the story they’ve been telling themselves: that real intimacy just isn’t available to them, or isn’t something they’re capable of.

It’s a quiet trap.

And it tends to be much harder to see from the inside than anxious attachment is, because it doesn’t look like a struggle.

It looks like independence.

Which is part of what makes it worth naming.

Now, none of this is a comfortable thing to acknowledge.

Nobody wants to believe that they are, in some sense, chasing their own unhealed history.

But the pattern is so common and well-documented that ignoring it does a disservice to the people who experience it.

However, understanding attachment, your own particular style of it, is not about blame, either toward yourself or toward your caregivers.

It’s about recognising that you have been operating with a map that was drawn for a different terrain.

Now, what makes this more complicated for women over 35 is that, by this point, there is often a long relational history layered on top of the original attachment wiring.

Past relationships have reinforced certain patterns, sometimes deepened old wounds, and created additional stories about what you deserve, what you’re capable of, and what love actually looks like, that may be running in the background without your awareness.

But, apart from all of that, there is also,

The Cultural Noise

It would be incomplete to talk about any of this without acknowledging the environment in which women in particular are navigating singlehood.

Because the cultural messaging around women, age, and partnership is neither subtle nor kind.

From early girlhood, women absorb the narrative that partnership is not merely desirable but definitional.

It literally determines who you are.

In fact, when I was growing up, many women were referred to as Doctor or Pastor so-and-so’s wife, almost as if they were an extension of their husband rather than individuals in their own right.

More than that, the stories we grow up with in literature, film, family conversation, and social ritual position love and marriage not as one possible shape of a good life, but as the shape.

Everything else, no matter how genuinely fulfilling, tends to be framed as something happening in the meantime, while the real story gets underway.

So by the time a woman is in her late thirties and single, she is contending not just with her own feelings about her situation but with the accumulated weight of everyone else’s interpretation of it.

The sympathetic looks.

The questions at family dinners.

The social architecture that is still, despite all cultural progress, largely organised around coupledom.

The way solo travel, solo dining, and solo attendance at events can feel, in certain moments, is like a declaration you didn’t intend to make.

Now, what’s insidious about this is that the external pressure doesn’t stay external.

It gets internalised.

We turn it on ourselves.

It becomes a voice in your own head, one that’s difficult to distinguish from your genuine desires because it speaks in the first person.

I need to find someone. I’m running out of time. Something must be wrong with me.

But the BIG question worth asking here, and it’s genuinely hard to answer, is how much of what you want is what you actually want, and how much is what you’ve been told you should want.

Not because your desire for partnership isn’t real (it almost certainly is), but because desire gets complicated when it’s marinated in shame.

And shame is the operative word here.

There is still, despite the cultural conversation about independent women and self-sufficiency, a residual shame attached to being a woman of a certain age without a partner.

It may not be spoken aloud.

It might live only in the glance someone gives you, or in your own pre-emptive embarrassment before you’ve even registered any judgment.

But it shapes behaviour in profound ways.

Shame narrows us.

It makes us more likely to settle, more likely to hide, more likely to accept less than we need because some part of us believes we are lucky to be chosen at all.

But the truth is, there is NO shame in being exactly who and where you are right now.

The Pursuit That Doesn’t Serve Us

It’s important that you understand that all of these forces, the urgency of time, the pull of old attachment patterns, the weight of cultural expectation, the low hum of shame, can converge in a particular way:

They can drive you toward connection in ways that don’t actually lead you toward connection.

It shows up as staying in something you know isn’t right because at least it’s something.

It shows up as an anxious, hypervigilant monitoring of a new relationship, reading every text, every pause, every shift in tone, because the need to secure the attachment has overtaken the curiosity about whether the attachment is worth having.

It shows up as choosing partners who are unavailable (emotionally, geographically, situationally) because, on some level, unavailability feels safer than the full risk of being truly known.

It shows up as an idealisation of people in the early stages, filling in the unknown spaces with the story you hope is true rather than waiting to learn who someone actually is.

But none of this is weakness.

It is, in the most precise sense, the mind and body doing what they were wired to do, seeking connection, avoiding the pain of rejection, and managing fear.

The problem is that these strategies, developed to protect us, end up obstructing the very thing we’re looking for.

Now,

The Question Underneath

There is a question that tends to sit underneath all of this, rarely voiced directly:

Am I the problem?

It’s the question people are often terrified to ask because they’re afraid of what the answer might be.

But there is a better question to ask here that becomes more generative…

It is:

What is mý role in the patterns I keep finding myself in?

And that is not a question about fault.

It is a question about agency.

And it opens something important…

The possibility that the most meaningful work isn’t in finding the right person, but in understanding what you bring to finding them.

Your attachment style.

The particular qualities you tend to overlook versus the ones you overweigh.

The situations where your nervous system signals danger, and you override it, and the situations where it signals safety, and you run toward it too fast.

This kind of self-examination is not comfortable.

And it is not something anyone can be argued into.

But for many women in this life stage, it is the beginning of something, not a solution, not a formula, but a truer relationship with themselves that changes, in ways both subtle and significant, how they show up in relationships with others.

Let us finish with a word on the notion of complexity.

What Complexity Allows

The experience of being single after 35 is often treated by the people around you and sometimes by yourself as something to be fixed as quickly as possible.

But,

Complexity, when you allow it rather than fight it, can be instructive.

It can highlight what you actually need in a partner, rather than what you’ve been told to want or what you’ve settled for.

It can reveal patterns in your relational history that have never been examined properly.

It can force a reckoning with what you’re willing to accept and what you’re not, and that reckoning, however uncomfortable, has its own kind of clarity.

Now, let me be clear…

None of this makes the loneliness easier to sit with on a Tuesday evening.

None of this dissolves social pressure, quiets the internal clock, or magically rewires the nervous system.

What it does, what it might do, is shift the relationship you have with the experience itself.

From something that is happening to you, to something you are moving through with more understanding, more self-compassion, and, eventually, more intention.

The pursuit of connection is one of the most human things there is.

The fact that it gets complicated, especially here, at this age, in this cultural moment, doesn’t say anything about your worth or your prognosis.

It says something about how layered being a person is.

And perhaps that’s worth remembering, the next time Tuesday rolls around.