Amy Roullier is a British writer and author of Silent Reflections of a Fragile Heart. Through her blog, she challenges the negative stereotypes surrounding being single, while candidly sharing her experiences with mental health, personal losses, and the complex, often misunderstood realities of adulthood.
I wasn’t aware that I had such a deep rooted disagreeableness with being single until about four years ago. Aged thirty six, fresh out of yet another short lasting relationship and back into my seemingly inescapable interconnection with being single, the overwhelming disappointment of being single again hit me hard. Wasn’t I supposed to be with someone by now? Who’d have thought nearly six years after my divorce that I’d still …
It wasn’t until I went single no mingle, that I realized how much dating had become an important part of my conversations with people. And by making who I was dating a highly discussed topic, I had inadvertently sent the message to myself that nothing else was more conversation worthy than this.
And if nothing else was as interesting, then nothing I had to say that wasn’t about when or who the next date was lined up with, mattered much.
I’d always hoped intuition would kick in with age with a resolute answer to this question, but I feel more confused than ever about whether or not I want to have children. If you’d asked me a few years back at 35, I’d have responded with a fairly confident, ‘No’. It wasn’t so much a feeling that I didn’t want children, more that I’d never felt strongly enough up to …
Rewind back to 2016, when I was 31, going through a divorce, and newly single. I didn’t plan to be single in my 30s of course, but there it was. Singledom. Suddenly feeling so much more irreversible than it had in my teens or 20s. Would I be single forever? Who knew. But what I did learn, is that a lot of people don’t understand being single at all and …
I feel overwhelmed constantly with, well, just life really. I didn’t used to feel this way, I had better coping mechanisms. But things that didn’t used to feel like a lot feel like so much now. Like days when there are multiple what’s app threads to respond too and my brain cannot seem to cope, so I ignore messages until a time where I can make space to intake more …
Being a single woman in her 30s is a weird place to be. There’s like a pariah status that comes with the territory. Other people have made my being single feel like a curse at times. Because a single woman, especially an older single woman, is apparently all kinds of crazy! And it’s for this very reason that I’ve sometimes struggled myself with the concept of being single. The single …
When I was 19, I was diagnosed with depression. At the time I didn’t know much about mental illness. It wasn’t something I’d heard people speak about and I didn’t know anyone who’d had depression. And even now at 37, I’ve rarely shared what I went through with anyone other than the very few people who supported me throughout that time. But as its Mental Health Awareness week, I wanted …
Last year my boss (who is also a woman) ended a virtual meeting by saying, “This comment is for the ladies on this call. Stop. Apologising.” She said it because I’d apologised numerous times for the basic look of my PowerPoint slides. Another female colleague had apologised for explaining what they were there to explain in great detail. The third, as they thought the subjects they were bringing to the …
Throughout the last six years of dating since my divorce, there has steadily been a worrying decrease in respecting of sexual boundaries in the bedroom. And that line of respect and trust appears to be becoming thinner as the years pass. Maybe it’s just me? I’m possibly attracting the wrong kind of men. Or rural Lincolnshire is a haven for men with a lack of respect for sexual boundaries? Because …
I’ve balanced varying degrees of depression throughout my life, the worst being in my late teens where it lead to a drop out of University. But throughout these past two years, I’ve swayed back and forth between thinking I was doing okay (I mean, I wasn’t. But I was clinging on to thinking that I was) to really struggling. And this winter has been particularly tough. Not sort of, or …
