When Tinx was growing up, “all of the onus was put on women”, with endless magazine column inches devoted to how to make a potential partner like you, and very few devoted to working out if they were actually worth your time or not. Now, she says, we are wondering: “How do we date with these new expectations? We don’t want to settle, but we are still looking for partners; we’re still having sex, but now we do expect to, you know, orgasm every time and so on”.

Tinx takes her agony aunt responsibilities “very seriously”, ensuring that she is “the only person who ever sees any of my messages on all my social media… I don’t for a second take it for granted that they are telling me their deepest, darkest secrets and opening up to me”. When she became the focus of a social media scandal last year, after a journalist resurfaced fatphobic posts from 2012 on her Twitter account, it was messages from the followers who did stand by her that stopped her from feeling “almost catatonic”, as she puts it in The Shift. She issued an apology, saying she was “ashamed and embarrassed” by the tweets and admitting that she had felt “deeply, deeply insecure” with her body when she posted them as a 21-year-old. “I don’t ever want to let them down,” she says of her fanbase now.

The Tinx who wrote those messages was “extremely lost”, she wrote in that apology. She is open about her twenties being a difficult, messy time, and how anxiety around milestones fuelled insecurities. “I felt like everyone was getting married and having a baby, and did an amazing job,” she says. “And I was just so lost, and I didn’t have any of those things… It can be this really, really unnerving experience.” What changed things around for her were a handful of (related) realisations.

The first? That timelines “are made up. Especially for women, it never ends - you think, ‘oh my God, as long as I just get engaged, people will leave me alone.’ They won’t. They want to know when you’re gonna get married, then they want to know when you’re gonna buy a house and have a kid and have the second kid and then it’s like, what, just a race till you die? So once you release yourself from that, especially once you realise you’re not going to be a young bride, it’s the most freeing, amazing thing on the planet.” The second and third? That “comparison is the thief of joy”, and that “if you can dig deep and find that sisterhood when you’re in different stages [of life]” to your friends, “that’s where the good stuff is”.

Grappling with this, she says, is easier said than done, when “all societies are good at celebrating when a woman is [seen] in relation to someone else”, but not so great at celebrating what they might have achieved on their own. “It’s no wonder that women can feel left out or behind if they’re not getting engaged or having a baby because then they’re never celebrated,” she adds. “That’s so obvious why we feel down on ourselves sometimes. But again, that’s not the fault of your married friends… Once you switch and realise that your friend getting married doesn’t mean that you’re not gonna get married, it’s very powerful”.

In other words - your friends’ gains aren’t your failures. It’s simple advice, but in trademark Tinx style, it might be just what you need to hear.

The Shift: Change Your Perspective, Not Yourself by Tinx (Bluebird; £16.99) is out now.

Tinx, the internet's favourite agony aunt, wants to change the way you're dating