Trigger warning: grief, suicide, trauma

Today is a special newsletter as I’ve spoken to a good friend and will be sharing some of her wisdom below. One of the reason I decided to start doing interviews for The Single Supplement (and the reason I commission other writers to do guest pieces) was to make sure I covered a broad range of topics from a diverse range of experiences. Although I’ve shared some articles by people who are single after loss, I haven’t interviewed anyone about this yet and I know some of my readers have experienced their partner or spouse dying.

Long time readers will know that Tiffany Philippou is someone who has made a regular appearances in this newsletter but the reason I’m featuring her today is that her first book Totally Fine (And Other Lies I've Told Myself) came out last week. (Side note, apologies this is going out late, I came down with a nasty cold and have spent the last few days on my sofa sneezing my head off). For those who haven’t seen, Tiffany’s book is a memoir about her boyfriend taking his life and the decade of denial, shame and grieving that followed.

As well as being my friend, Tiffany Philippou is a writer and podcaster and her writing has been published in Stylist, Refinery29, Sifted, The i Paper and The Startup. She also writes a weekly newsletter, about love, loss, finding meaning and some of the messier sides of life called The Tiff Weekly. She is the host of the podcast Totally Fine with Tiffany Philippou and she co-hosts the work, life and happiness podcast Is This Working?

Back when her memoir starts, she was a teenager away from home for the first time at university having a totally normal time, making friends, falling in love, stressing about exams and getting a bit too drunk and posting pictures on Facebook of her antics. The boy she fell in love with was Richard and things got serious pretty fast. “It’s funny, we were so young and yet my relationship with Richard felt so serious,” she says. “We lived together, spent all our time together and were very committed.”

Then one day, in the summer of 2008, she was travelling back to London from visiting a friend when she received a phone call that suddenly changed everything. She was told her boyfriend Richard was in hospital. He died seven days later. She then spent most of my twenties pretending this never happened.

In her own words:

I was trapped within my own silence, left alone to absorb the discomfort, blame and judgement of others that I felt after Richard’s suicide. I was suffering, but telling everyone that I was totally fine. The shame consumed me and I desperately wanted to find love again, but the rejection and heartbreak that followed proved to me, yet again, that I wasn’t worthy of love and belonging.

I asked her what it was like to lose her boyfriend at a time when all her mates were doing the university dating thing and were out having fun all the time. She says although she didn’t know anyone who’d lost a partner and hadn’t had much experience with grief before losing Richard, she thinks it actually could be harder if she was going through this experience now as her friends all lead such busy lives.

“My friends were all having a variety of experiences, many had boyfriends, some single and having fun but during the time after he died, I never found myself that aware of the differences in our dating lives,” she explains. After his death she also entered a new serious relationship herself.

She says:

This stirred up complicated feelings during an already difficult time. But I also have to say, what’s amazing about your twenties is you feel like you’re moving as one with your friendships. I find that the older I get, the more diverging our lives become with our friends and that’s really hard. In some ways, if I was to lose a partner now, from that perspective I’d feel really isolated. But we were young, friends would sleep in my bed and be around me all the time. I think how friendships are harder now and people are busier, perhaps not as able to rally around in the same way. It’s why this newsletter and communities like these are so important!

I recently shared an article in this newsletter by someone who calls themselves a widow even though they never married the partner they lost. I asked Tiffany how she felt about the lack of language around losing a partner. She remembers the article I’m talking about and says she loved it.

“There is also a scene in my book where I say to my friends that I don’t know what to call myself and I can’t even call myself a widow,” she says. “I think that was my way of articulating how I was lacking a language for my experience. I also didn’t feel like the magnitude of my grief was legitimate because we were so young and hadn’t spent much of our lives together. It further complicated feelings.”

After years of pretending she was ‘totally fine’ following Richard’s suicide, her grief and trauma finally caught up with her and she decided to tackle it head on. Therapy played a crucial role but I wanted to know whether being single during that time helped her with the healing process. But first a caveat, something both Tiffany and I hate is the narrative that people are single because they have issues they need to work on and if they could only sort their shit out, they’ll be able to find romantic love. The idea that everyone who is coupled-up has their shit together and have no issues to work on is obviously laughable and it also disregards those who choose to be single and are not interested in finding romantic love. It goes hand in hand with my hatred of the phrase “You have to love yourself before anyone else will.” (Back in December 2019 – before this newsletter had its own logo – I wrote about my thoughts on this subject, which you can read here.)

Despite this, I do believe being single, especially for extended periods like Tiffany was and that I am does give us the time and space to really focus on ourselves. (I am all about self-love and self-work but I do it for me, not to make myself more appealing to a future partner.) Given what Tiffany went through so young, I thought it was important to ask whether being single had helped and what she learned about herself during her time being single. She started a new relationship last year, interestingly, she says, this began not long after she finished writing the book. Before that, out of eight years, she spent one year in a relationship so “single was very much a big part of my mid-twenties to now experience”. 

She says being single definitely helped her with her trauma and grief. “I think it was easier to hide from it when I was in relationships. It took me a few years of being single before I faced up that I’d been pretending to be totally fine about my trauma and grief,” she says. “The second part of my book was all about running and escaping and one day, I stopped running, moved back home, was single, not sure about my career. It was like I had stripped everything back and had to rebuild my life again.”

She continues:

Processing my trauma and grief has been a process and being able to focus on myself and not deal with another person has perhaps made it easier (although I don’t know any different!) There’s so much negative press about being single, but what about being in a relationship? Dealing with another person is a lot and I feel really fortunate I got to spend so much time without someone so I could just focus on this.

Tiffany says she wrote the book the book because she had been hanging on to a lot of shame about the way Richard died and she realised that lots of people are carrying around shame of their own but sharing her story has made her feel less alone and she hopes others will feel more confident in sharing their own stories too. Shame is something I think about a lot and is one of the reasons I launched this newsletter and shout loudly about being single. There is still so much stigma and shame around our relationship status and I want to help create a world where people don’t feel embarrassed that they don’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend and feel comfortable talking openly about the highs and the lows.

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Tiffany describes shame as being like a monster that can stop us living our best lives. In own words, she says:

In our twenties, we are thrown into the adult world without a guidebook. I experienced a turbulent decade with what felt like catastrophic failures. Then one day, I started to speak about my shame, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. And I’ve come to realise that shame is like a monster – one that can grow so large that it can hold us back from a life worth living. And that it is only by sharing our stories that we can give a voice to what is unspoken. A voice to the stories that we don’t want to tell.

As well as the book, which by the way is only 99p on Kindle at the moment, Tiffany has launched a brand new podcast called Totally Fine with Tiffany Philippou. In each episode she interviews someone about a life-altering experience and the ways in which they hid how they really felt about it and pretended they were ‘totally fine’. The first two episodes are already out and they are so good.

Tiffany hopes the podcast will serve to “to break the silence, taboos and tackle people’s shame and like with all my work - help others feel less alone”. And honestly two episodes in and I already feel that way. Fans of Dear Sugar, How to Fail with Elizabeth Day and We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle podcasts will enjoy the vulnerable, open and honest conversations about the things we find difficult to admit to and talk about.

tiffphilippou

A post shared by Tiffany Philippou (@tiffphilippou)

As I type this, I have actually just finished being interviewed by Tiffany for an episode of the podcast. Obviously I talk about being single in it, but I specifically talk about an element of being single that I struggle with. It’s funny because if you had told me two years ago I would be openly chatting about it on a podcast for the whole world to hear, I would have laughed in your face but here we are! I don’t know when the episode will be out, so do make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can hear it first and obviously I’ll also share the link here too.

Paying subscribers, the rest of the interview with Tiffany will be landing in your inboxes shortly!

Have a good week, everyone.

Nicola

Twitter: @Nicola_Slawson | Instagram: @Nicola_Slawson

Things you should check out

• The One Where I Talk To BBC Radio London Presenter, Jo Good – Spinsterhood Reimagined podcast – This is a new podcast about being single that I’m going to be a guest on soon. This is a good episode.

• The 3 reasons why we choose to stay single – “Being in a couple can be hard work, and older singletons may have enough previous experience to be extra careful before they enter into another relationship.”

• Young, fun and... alone? The problems with the ‘single positivity movement’ – Interesting article with lots of great points but the writer and I fundamentally disagree on what single positivity actually means (to me it’s about making the most of our lives right now rather than feeling like we’re incomplete).

• How a new wave of literature is reclaiming spinsterhood – Another interesting article from Emma John reviewing some recent books (including Unattached which my essay features in.

• Life doesn’t stop at 30, just ask Berliners – Yes to this article! “I’ve noticed many of my friends back home in the UK talk about their 30s as though they’re about to collect their pension and move into a retirement home.”

• What I Lost & Found When I Froze My Eggs – “With each perfectly-calibrated hormone shot, I released myself from the pressure and the outcome of what would happen next.”

• Once I Stopped Drinking, I Started To Love Dating – “I dated the way I drank. In binges, marked by regret and heartbreak. Never knowing when to stop.”

• The best feminist TV shows to empower, educate and inspire you – a great list if you’re looking for something to watch!

• Why am I so floored by the death of my first, long ago, love? – The person writing in is married but the question is interesting and the response may help others struggling to get over things that happened in the past.

• Farrah Storr: How I Learned To Dress For My New Life – “Midway through Covid I realised I had outgrown the person I had worked hard to become.” (not about being single but I enjoyed reading it nonetheless)

• Going places: 10 inspirational female adventurers – also not about being single but a good read!

• ‘Friendship triangle’: why 3-person bonds can be the ultimate supportive relationship and how to make it work – three is not always a crowd.

• Swipe right – find misery and heartbreak. The law must get tough on online dating scams – Fraudsters are deceiving and manipulating people who yearn for love. These catfishers must be held accountable.

• I’ve put on weight since I last dated. How can I build my confidence and establish a new dating life? – Good advice: “Don’t see yourself as a rigid object, like a cutout in a museum being evaluated by people with tape measures. Imagine yourself instead as what you are – a person, with stories and laughs and the ability to invite someone else into your world. “

• Have you joined the Facebook group? If not, click here.

• Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram, where I spend most of my time!

About me

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A post shared by Nicola Slawson (@nicola_slawson)

For those who don’t know, I’m Nicola Slawson, a freelance journalist who lives in Shropshire, UK. If you particularly liked this edition, you can buy me a coffee, here’s the link to my Ko-Fi page. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter.

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