Culturally, we’re fed the idea that our lives should follow a certain path; that as the years ahead of us unfold, they will take a certain shape. After finishing with education, so this cookie-cutter schedule goes, we’ll get a job and spend a couple of years sowing our wild oats.

We’ll fall in love with ‘The One’ in our mid-to-late twenties or early thirties (because if we leave it any later, our chance of having children may be reduced – and we’ll definitely want children, of course). We’ll get married, buy a house and have those aforementioned kids. And that marriage will last until we slip this mortal coil at the end of a long and happy life.

Of course, we also know that this is nonsense. Increasing numbers of couples in modern Britain are choosing not to marry at all, while the idea of actually buying a home looks ever more out of reach for a generation of young adults. There remains a persistent lack of understanding of women who don’t want to have children – but generally speaking, if you want to stay single and child-free, you can do so with relative impunity.

Women who became single in their 30s and 40s reveal what they discovered about themselves