I'm 35 and I've never had a girlfriend. What am I doing wrong?

Swipe Right is our advice column that tackles the tricky world of online dating. This week: what to do when all your friends are shacking up – and you’re not

• Got your own online dating quandaries? Send ’em to Eva: askevaguardian@gmail.com

Dear Eva,

I’m 35 and I’ve never had a girlfriend.

I’m pretty unremarkable in most respects – neither fantastically attractive (if only), nor absolutely hideous. I’ve got plenty of friends, male and female. They always express confusion and disbelief that I’ve been unable to get a girlfriend in the 20 years or so I’ve been interested in the idea.

Apart from this, I’ve lived a full and active life, but somehow this particular aspect has passed me by. It’s a cliche, but it really did seem seem like one day all my friends were suddenly shacked up with a partner and squeezing out kids right, left and center.

The older I get, I don’t even know how to go about meeting women – I work in an almost exclusively male environment and most of my interests are male-dominated activities. I’ve heard the advice about salsa dancing for instance, but I think I’d be so awkward that my desperation would be obvious.

I’d love to be able to introduce a girlfriend to family and friends, but the chances are surely becoming smaller the older I get.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Hey, you.

Reading your letter I can’t help but wonder: do you really want a girlfriend? You note that you’d love to be able to introduce one to family and mates, but what would you want to do with her the rest of the time? If your life is full of other kinds of good relationships – and it certainly sounds like it is – then maybe you don’t need a girlfriend. What you do need is to feel more confident that your lifestyle choices are acceptable to the people who you care about.

I say this as someone who has often found myself feeling a bit bad about being single, usually in a scenario where distant relatives making sorrowful remarks to me about how interesting my career seems. I’d absolutely still like to get together with someone who becomes a lifelong partner, but in the meantime I also have come to accept that my life without one has been good and fun and interesting and still full of love.

All of this is to say: maybe you’re not desperate. If you were, you might well have settled down long ago with a woman who you didn’t particularly want to be with, because you cared more about what your family and friends and society thought about your relationship status than what it meant, in reality, for your life.

The world can be very hard on single people, but paying attention to the world over one’s own feelings is a thing that makes many people very unhappy and have messy divorces. Half of adults in the US and Britain are unmarried, and I think it may be because we’re bucking the norm of marry-or-bust in favor of making smarter choices about our lives and the roles that partnerships should play in them.

That said! If you do want to continue looking for a partner, I think you’re probably a great candidate for online dating: not necessarily because you will meet The One that way, but because it will give you opportunities to meet Some Ones.

This could get you back in the habit of spending time with women, beating anxiety around talking to strangers, and polishing your best jokes. Get one of the friends you mentioned to help you write your profile so that it shows you in your best light, and set yourself the goal of meeting someone new for coffee.

It’s just a small step, really. But it may be a beginning of something, whether that’s a relationship or just a better understanding of what it is that makes you happy.

Love,

Eva

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