I sat, head down, quivering furiously at their inferences of female sell-by dates and life as game of musical chairs where girls without a chair/man when the music stops/they pass thirty are 'out.'
Huh. As if.

the nation's young men have
been proved by surveys to be completely unmarriageable, and as a result there's a whole
generation of single girls like me with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and
don't need to wash anyone else's socks.

I will not sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance,complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.

I think it is a kind of subject matter that needed exploring ... the identity of the single woman had not caught up with what was happening. Which was that a lot of perfectly attractive, intelligent, nice, normal girls in their 30s had decided not to get married for very good reasons. And they were paralyzed somewhere between the Cosmo girls, you know with the good life and their own flat and car and independence and lots of fun, and haunted by this horrible image of ... the tragic spinster who ends up dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by a dog.

Can officially confirm that the way to a man's heart these days is not through beauty, food, sex, or alluringness of character, but merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.

Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.