You can’t ask me that! Continuing her series tackling socially unacceptable questions, Christine Manby asks the real meaning behind querying someone’s relationship status

[Skipper ✪]

“Are you single?” This is exciting. Why are they asking? Do they want to know if you’re unattached so they can ask you out on a date? Or is it just small talk again? It’s a fairly innocuous question, isn’t it? Are you single? Or the flip side, are you married? Read more Is a public proposal more likely to lead to divorce? It’s the kind of thing you ask someone you’ve met at a party after “what’s your name?” and “where do you come from?” It’s impossible to cause offence by asking someone whether or not they have a partner, surely… Are you mad? Once again, the problem with the question is in the answer. What are they going to do with it once they find out? Let’s take it from there.

“Yes. I’m single,” you respond, casually stroking your moustache. “Are you busy this weekend?” they reply. “I need a date for a party on a yacht moored in Monaco. Blumenthal’s doing the food. Sheeran’s doing the music. We’re getting there by private jet. Just bring your swimming costume.”

That would be your best case scenario (except perhaps for the Sheeran). More likely, as has frequently happened to me since I’ve looked old enough to sign a register, the person asking the question puts their head on one side and gives a smile that says not “fantastic, now I can make my move” but “I wonder what’s wrong with you?” (It was probably the moustache).

Since Noah shuffled all the animals except the manmade ones* onto the Ark, mammals have been going two-by-two. Admitting that you’re without a “better half”, or even “a half you would push under a bus if you thought no one was looking”, generally elicits pity and not a little distrust. You feel it even at an actual singles’ night, where people without partners, who are supposedly looking for love, approach potential dates in a spirit of anxious trepidation, each convinced they’re the only person in the room who is single by circumstance and not because they’re a potential bunny boiler. To be single is to be suspicious. And yet the number of people living alone is very much on the rise. The Office of National Statistics calculated that almost eight million people were living alone in the UK last year. The ONS further estimates that by 2020, the number of households where people live alone will increase by another two million. That’s an awful lot of weirdoes. Or widows. Widowers. Divorcees. Single people who haven’t started looking. Single people who are actively looking. And single people who’ve looked and decided they don’t actually want to be in a relationship at all. That’s a pretty broad group to consider somehow lacking. Yet we do make judgements based on people’s relationships or lack of them and the most prevalent assumption is that coupled up is better. “Four legs good, two legs bad,” to borrow a phrase from Snowball in Orwell’s Animal Farm. (Six legs is something else entirely.)