This time last year I was sitting and writing about how I’d just left a graduate scheme, had been travelling, cried in a National Express office, and was three weeks away from moving to Cardiff for a master’s which I wasn’t entirely sure I’d survive. Somehow I did.

I now have a master’s (results pending… so let’s hold fire on that), a year of living alone under my belt, a slightly concerning amount of knowledge about Cardiff bars and clubs, and absolutely no idea of what happens next. Which feels appropriate for 23.

So here’s the follow-up: slightly wiser, considerably worse hangovers, still single, and somehow with even more questions than I started with.

Let’s get into it.

1. Finishing your master’s isn’t the finish line you thought it would be

You spend a year telling yourself, once I have this, everything will click. Once I get this degree, I’ll know what I’m doing (finally). Once I finish the course, I’ll get a job. Then you hand in your final project and… nothing. No dramatic fanfare, no light shining down from the heavens, no sudden understanding of what you’re supposed to do with your life. The hard part wasn’t the degree: it’s what comes now. I think I’m now finally learning there isn’t a moment when you are “sorted”. There’s just the next thing, and the next thing after that.

2. Moving to a new city is terrifying, and then it isn’t

When I moved to Cardiff, I didn’t know a single person, and I remember wondering whether I’d made a HUGE mistake. The first week involved a lot of pesto pasta, unpacking boxes, and pretending I was absolutely fine with having voluntarily moved somewhere where I knew nobody. And then, somehow, it became home. I had a favourite pub, a running route, places I knew I could go when I wanted to be around people without actually talking to anyone. I made friends, learned the best walks, and stopped using Apple Maps every time I left the house. Moving somewhere new taught me that you’re probably capable of far more than you give yourself credit for; you just have to survive the uncomfortable bit first.

3. Living on your own will ruin you for living with your parents again

There is something extremely liberating about being able to eat cereal for dinner without anyone asking what you’re doing. Want to go to bed at 8:30 pm? Fine. Want to spend an entire Sunday binge-watching Off Campus? Nobody cares. Want to leave a mug next to your bed for three days? That’s between you and the mug. I have developed a dangerous level of independence, and I fear coming home has been ridiculously difficult.

4. Moving home isn’t always a failure (but it is difficult)

I feel like everyone I know and love is in London, or Manchester, or touring the East Coast of Australia. Jammy bastards. I have had to remind myself that moving home isn’t a failure A LOT. There’s a weird pressure in your 20s to constantly be moving forward: new job, new city, great relationship, promotion, engagement, house, baby. And if you go backwards, or even sideways, it can feel like you have failed. But sometimes moving home is just plain practical: I need to save money, I’m figuring out my next move (aka applying to hundreds of jobs), and sometimes I need to see my dogs. That doesn’t erase everything I’ve already achieved.

5. Your career will not look how you thought it would

At 21, I thought I had my career figured out. At 22, I thought I had it figured out again. At 23, I have realised I know NOTHING, but I’m much more comfortable with that than I ever have been. This year involved a master’s, placements, freelance work, journalism, social media, content creation, applications, interviews, rejections, and quite a lot of wondering whether I’m doing any of it correctly. I used to see my career as a ladder (especially as an ex ‘gifted’ child). Now I see it more as a collection of experiences: some will lead somewhere, some won’t, some will teach me what I love, others will teach me what I definitely don’t want to do again, and that’s okay.

6. A rejection doesn’t mean you’re not good enough

This one is particularly difficult when you care a lot about what you’re doing - and is something I’m currently working through right now. You can be good at something and still not get the job, or have a great interview and still get rejected. And you can be qualified, enthusiastic, and genuinely suited to a role and still have someone else get it. I’m slowly learning not to turn every rejection into a referendum on whether I’m good enough. Sometimes it’s just a no, and then you have to keep going.

7. You have to make your own opportunities sometimes

One of the biggest things I’ve learnt this year is that waiting for someone to give you an opportunity is a very slow way of getting anywhere. Make the thing, start the newsletter, send the email, pitch the story, ask the person, apply for the job even if you don’t tick every single box, put your work online. I’ve realised that some of the best things that have happened to me have come from me thinking, well, I might as well just ask. The worst they can say is no, and as we’ve established, I’ve had plenty of experience with that.

8. Don’t be embarrassed by your ambitions

For a long time, I worried that talking about my passions and goals made me look annoying. Like saying I wanted a job, or wanted to be a journalist, or wanted to make this thing, and so on. It isn’t arrogant or annoying. You are allowed to want things, have ambitions, tell people what you are working toward, and be proud when something works out.

9. Your CV is not a measure of your worth

Your CV tells someone what you’ve done. It doesn’t tell them whether you’re funny, kind, resilient, interesting, or someone who makes other people feel good. It certainly doesn’t tell them what you’re capable of doing next. I think we put far too much weight on what our CVs look like in our twenties. You are not a list of bullet points. Instead, make a portfolio (if you really must).

10. Stop treating every job application like a verdict on your future

I have honestly become so numb to rejection emails. I applied. Didn’t get it. Big deal. Cry or moan about it for an appropriate amount of time, then apply for the next. One job is not your entire career, so don’t treat one rejection or bad interview like it is. YOU HAVE TIME.

11. Hinge is dead, and so is my patience for it

I have nothing further to add other than a link to this article:

I’m sick of dating apps

Annabelle

·

Jun 1

I am the last single friend

Read full story

12. Still being single does not mean you are behind

At some point, you realise everyone is doing life completely differently and at completely different paces. Some friends are moving in with their partners, some are studying, some are travelling, some are living at home, some are starting businesses, some are changing careers, some are absolutely winging it, and some are doing several of those things at once. There is no universal timeline. Being single at 23 isn’t a problem that needs solving. (Although I would still appreciate the occasional free drink from time to time)

13. You are allowed to cry after being rejected after 2 dates

I know. Embarrassing. Looooser alert. We literally spent about 12 hours together, and I cried for about 24. But feelings don’t become invalid just because you were never technically together. You can be upset, you can be disappointed, you can mourn your completely unrealistic expectations of what it would be. But under no circumstances must you send a 10-paragraph message begging for them back. That’s where I draw the line.

14. Don’t snog your friends.

Just don’t. Run away. Bad idea. No. Complicates everything.

15. Not every relationship needs a post-mortem

Friendships, boys, etc. Every relationship either works or doesn’t. If it doesn’t, there sometimes isn’t a hidden reason. Sometimes they liked you but didn’t like you enough; sometimes the timing was bad; sometimes they were emotionally unavailable; sometimes they were just a bit of an idiot. You don’t need to spend six weeks analysing their Spotify activity to figure out which one it was.

16. Stop stalking people on Instagram

It isn’t real life. I know this. You know this. And yet here we are. Someone’s Instagram is a carefully curated selection of approximately 0.5% of their actual life. Don’t compare your Tuesday afternoon to someone else’s holiday photo dump. And please stop checking who someone follows; it has never brought anyone peace.

17. Hangovers DO NOT get better with age

They get worse. At 18, I could go out until 3 am and be fine by lunchtime. Now I can have three drinks and wake up feeling like I’ve personally disappointed my ancestors. The recovery period is now approximately 72 hours.

18. Your friends don’t have to be in the same city to still be your people

You can go weeks without seeing someone and then immediately fall back into the same conversation. You can build a new life somewhere else without leaving your old one behind. And I think that’s one of the nicest things about getting older: your life gets bigger, but it doesn’t necessarily have to get smaller.

19. You have endometriosis

This year has taught me to listen to my body a lot more. For years, I treated feeling rubbish as something I just had to put up with. Now I’m trying to work out what actually makes me feel good, what works for my body, what doesn’t, when I need to rest, when I need to push myself, and when I need to stop pretending I’m fine.

20. Start a side project!!!

There will always be a reason not to: you don’t have enough time, it isn’t perfect, someone else is already doing it, you don’t know whether anyone will read, watch or listen to it. Do it anyway. The worst thing that happens is nobody cares. The best thing that happens is that it takes you somewhere you didn’t expect.

21. Be curious about everything

Ask questions, talk to people, read the article, go to the event, take the weird job, learn something you don’t understand, say yes to the conversation. You never know what will become useful later, and even if it doesn’t, you’re probably a more interesting person for having done it.

22. Journalling is genuinely the best thing ever

I started writing things down more this year, and it’s weirdly powerful to look back at something you wrote six months ago and realise how much has changed. You forget how stressed you were, how excited you were, what you were worried about, what you thought would happen. Writing it down gives you a record of the version of yourself that existed before you moved on with life. Keep a journal; future you will thank you - seriously.

23. You don’t need to have it figured out by 24 either

I think this is the lesson I need to hear most. This time last year, I thought I was about to start a master’s and then somehow emerge with a career, a plan and probably a husband. Instead, I have a master’s, several more questions, a questionable dating history, a growing list of career aspirations and absolutely no idea what I’m doing next.

Your twenties are not about getting everything right. They’re about trying things, changing your mind, getting rejected, making friends, losing friends, falling in love, getting your heart broken, moving somewhere new, moving home, starting things, stopping things, finding out what you like, finding out what you absolutely hate, and occasionally crying in public transport offices.

I’m still figuring it out. I suspect I will be for a while. But I’m much happier with the uncertainty than I was with pretending I had everything under control.

So here’s to 24. I have absolutely no idea what it’ll look like. And I’m quite excited about that.

Inside was a database of complaints about OnlyFans agencies: allegations from creators who claimed they had experienced exploitation, pressure and manipulation while working with management companies.

Curious, I opened it.

Immediately, I saw dozens of names of young men.

The same boys who sat next to us in classrooms, who some of us will remember going to parties with, and complaining about homework to.

Boys who, at the time, seemed no different to anyone else.

The complaints in the database were anonymous and unverified, and I want to be clear that this piece isn’t about accusing any specific individual, agency or business of anything. It’s about understanding a much bigger shift that is happening quietly in towns and cities across the UK: a generation of young men, many of them entirely ordinary before they got into this line of work, now managing the online sex work of women their own age.

It’s a story that will feel familiar to a lot of people. Almost everyone seems to know of somebody — a former classmate, a friend of a friend, a name that comes up in conversation — who’s now running, or working for, an OnlyFans agency.

They’re part of a new generation of entrepreneurs who have discovered, one, that sex sells, and, two, a business model where the entrance is easy, the potential earnings high, and success is characterised by luxury cars, designer clothes, and rented mansions for the weekend.

On social media, the image is carefully curated: pictures of sports cars parked outside village pubs, expensive watches, lavish holidays, and a caption usually promising that anyone can escape the traditional nine-to-five if they’re just willing to ‘hustle hard enough’.

You might picture them as Andrew Tate wannabes. And, in some cases, that comparison may feel pretty accurate.

But plenty of the young men who go down this path aren’t like that at all. Many were, by all appearances, entirely ordinary teenagers.

Which raises a more uncomfortable question: how did so many young men turn to this industry, and did we fail them before they got there?

The complaints

The anonymous database sent to me contained dozens of complaints from creators about agencies across the industry.

One creator, who said she worked with an agency between July and November 2025, alleged staff were “ignoring messages and not being available for meetings [they’d] booked.” She also claimed she was repeatedly pushed to create content she wasn’t comfortable making, saying:

“They were poor with communication. Constantly sent me content to make which was making my accounts on social media get flagged. Repeatedly asking for content I wasn’t comfortable with.”

What is an OFM?

In theory, it’s a fairly ordinary business model. Creators hire agencies or freelance managers to help run the business side of their OnlyFans account. That can include everything from editing content and scheduling posts, to negotiating deals, analysing subscriber data, and responding to messages from fans. In return, agencies typically take a percentage of the creator’s earnings.

Many creators say working with a manager allows them to treat their account as a full-time business rather than a one-person operation. As the platform has grown into a multi-billion-pound service, so has the ecosystem around it.

But there’s another side to the business.

Scroll through social media, and you’ll quickly find self-proclaimed “entrepreneurs” promising young men they can make five figures a month by starting or joining an OnlyFans agency. The pitch is almost always the same: you don’t need qualifications, you don’t need experience, and you get to operate a business from a nice little office without getting your hands dirty. The reality is more sinister: you are taught how to recruit women onto your “roster,” outsource conversations with subscribers to overseas “chatters,” and scale your agency as quickly as possible.

It’s sold as digital marketing. But it looks a lot more like online pimping.

The industry has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Former creators have alleged being locked into unfair contracts, pressured into producing content they were uncomfortable with, or discovering that strangers were impersonating them in private messages to maximise profits. Investigations have also raised questions about the widespread use of “chatters”: employees who pose as the creators while messaging subscribers, often without those subscribers’ knowledge or consent.

Of course, not every agency works this way. Some provide legitimate business support, and many creators actively seek them out. But as complaints about exploitative practices grow, so too have questions about an industry that has expanded far faster than the regulation surrounding it.

These weren’t “bad apples”

The easiest explanation is to write these boys off, and to assume they were always destined for something like this.

But these boys weren’t villains in waiting.

Most likely, they were normal, sometimes funny, and, like most teenagers, still figuring out who they were. Some were probably academically gifted, and others were naturally confident, persuasive, and good with people.

But these are the exact kind of qualities that the online economy rewards.

This new generation of OnlyFans managers isn’t typically handed a job advert saying “manage women’s sexual content.” Instead, they’re sold the idea of entrepreneurship, freedom, and financial independence. A way to make money without going into thousands of pounds of debt at university, without a traditional career path, and without waiting years to climb the corporate ladder. For young men leaving school in a world of a cost-of-living crisis and limited opportunities, that promise is extremely powerful.

The language surrounding the industry often borrows from the wider influencer economy: build a brand, scale a business, maximise revenue, create passive income. The women whose accounts they manage can, in typical patriarchal fashion, become framed as “assets”, or “clients”, or “income streams”, rather than people; a brutal reflection of the wider online culture where nearly everything and everyone can be turned into content and monetised.

I’m not necessarily asking why young men are attracted to money; that’s easy to understand.

I want to know what they were taught about the ethics behind that money.

Because while school taught us to analyse Shakespeare, solve equations, and pass exams, many young people left education with little understanding of pornography, online exploitation, consent in digital spaces, or the power dynamics when someone’s body becomes a business.

The rise of OFMs sits at the intersection of two worlds: a rapidly expanding online economy, and an education system that didn’t prepare future generations for it, and still hasn’t caught up.

The pipeline

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become an OFM. Young men get funnelled there by an ecosystem that has grown alongside the platform itself, and by a wider online culture that has quietly turned “hustling” into an identity.

Researchers describe this as the manosphere’s shift from grievance to a business model. An academic review published last year by The Conversation described how the manosphere has grown from a scattering of men’s rights forums into a widely mainstreamed and commercialised ecosystem, led by high-profile influencers. The same review notes that many of these influencers run subscription-based “academies,” promoted as an alternative to school or college and sometimes costing thousands of pounds to join.

That’s the world OFM recruitment pitches itself into. It often borrows the same vocabulary: build a brand, scale a business, escape the nine-to-five. It also promises that traditional routes into adulthood, like university, an apprenticeship, graduate schemes, are for people who haven’t figured out the real game yet.

There’s an uncomfortable irony sitting underneath some of this. Louis Theroux’s 2026 Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere drew attention to the fact that some manosphere-adjacent influencers publicly criticise women who use platforms like OnlyFans while privately profiting from managing their accounts.

What makes OFM recruitment so effective, according to researchers, is that it targets real anxieties rather than inventing them. The Conversation piece notes that manosphere content taps into boys’ concerns about looks, economic futures, and their ability to attract women, offering status and money as the fix. For any eighteen-year-old watching his options narrow - poor academic results, rising rents, fewer entry-level jobs - a pitch that says “you don’t need any of that, you just need to work harder than everyone else” hits home.

There’s also a numbers logic built into the OFM model, as the BBC’s recent investigation into the industry showed. The documentary OnlyFans: Inside the Machine, presented by Amber Haque, examined an industry that has grown up largely without oversight, expanding fast alongside the platform’s own commercial success. A manager doesn’t need one huge success story; they need a roster, so a handful of high earners can cover the ones who make very little. That roster logic may explain a lot of what turns up in complaints like these: the incentive isn’t a single creator’s long-term wellbeing, it’s growth.

Did schools do enough?

Here’s the part I keep coming back to.

I was at secondary school in England between 2014 and 2021. For almost all of that time, relationships and sex education wasn’t something that schools were legally required to teach at all. Before September 2020, secondary schools had a duty to cover only the “science” of sex, reproduction and puberty as part of the National Curriculum. Everything else, including anything on consent, healthy relationships, or online behaviour, was down to individual schools to decide. Provision was, by the government’s own later admission, patchy and inconsistent across the country.

That all only changed because of the Children and Social Work Act 2017, which made Relationships and Sex Education compulsory in all secondary schools in England from September 2020. The Department for Education published the statutory guidance behind that change in June 2019, and then the pandemic hit, meaning schools were permitted to delay teaching the new curriculum until as late as summer 2021, right as my year group was leaving.

In other words: for six of the seven years I was at school, there was no legal requirement for my generation to be taught anything about consent, healthy relationships or the online world. What we got depended entirely on the school we were at, and how seriously the school chose to take it. By the time RSE became a legal requirement for pupils, most of us had already left, knowing that consent was like a cup of tea, how to put a condom on a giant dildo, and not to get a payday loan.

Compare that with where the guidance is now. The Department for Education published revised RSHE statutory guidance in July 2025, which schools must adopt by September 2026. It goes considerably further than the version that arrived just as I was finishing school, requiring teaching on online behaviours including image and information sharing, sexual imagery and AI-generated deepfakes, alongside content on sexual abuse, harassment and exploitation. According to one governance body’s summary of the changes, it also introduces a much stronger focus on tackling misogyny and incel culture, and their influence on attitudes toward women and girls, as well as recognising how these issues can negatively affect boys and young men themselves.

So the gap isn’t really a mystery.

It’s a cohort of young people who left school in the years right before any of this became compulsory, stepping straight into an online economy that had already worked out how to monetise exactly the things they’d never been taught to think critically about: consent, power, image, money.

The guidance has since caught up, but that generation didn’t get the benefit of it.

And even the new guidance has a limit: it’s education about encountering pornography and online exploitation as a subject, not about the economics of producing or managing it. Nothing in what I could find addresses what a fair contract looks like, or what it means to control someone else’s account, image and income — which is exactly the territory OFMs operate in.

The women

I could easily write this whole piece about the men, because they’re the easier ones to write about from a distance. But they’re not the ones with the most at stake. The BBC’s investigation, which spoke to 60 UK-based creators, gives their side of the story far more weight than anything I could add.

Not every experience is negative. Managers market themselves as specialists who help creators grow their subscriber base and earnings, and plenty of arrangements work as advertised. But the investigation found that many contracts saw managers taking around 50 per cent of earnings, with some agreements reportedly reaching up to 70 per cent of creators’ earnings — on top of the roughly 20 per cent OnlyFans itself retains.

One creator who spoke to the BBC, identified only as Rebecca, said she signed with a management agency after being promised support and increased earnings. According to the BBC’s reporting, the relationship was fine before becoming controlling. She alleged managers criticised her appearance and grew hostile after she changed her account login details, and said she later received threatening messages she believed were connected to the dispute.

Rebecca wasn’t alone. Another creator told the BBC she received repeated warnings that she would “get what’s coming to you” after trying to renegotiate her earnings split — a level of intimidation that goes well beyond a bad business relationship.

Matt Jury, from the human rights law firm McCue Jury & Partners, said some creators appeared to have been placed in arrangements where agencies exercised significant control over their finances and professional activities. The UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, told the BBC that many of the allegations described recognised indicators of exploitation — coercion, financial pressure, and restrictions on a person’s ability to leave freely — and said the issue merited closer scrutiny from policymakers. Ofcom called the creators’ testimony “deeply concerning.”

OnlyFans says it does not endorse or hold formal relationships with third-party management agencies, and that it cannot influence contracts entered into outside the platform, though it says concerns about account control are investigated.

A generation, not a handful of names

Whoever these dozens of names in the database belong to, the chances are they sat through the same assemblies, the same PSHE lessons, the same sex education classes as everyone else their age. They learnt about contraception. They watched the “cup of tea” consent video every year like clockwork. They were told how to stay safe, but almost nothing about the online world they were about to inherit.

The easy response is to write these young men off as greedy or misogynistic, to pretend they simply made bad choices. Some undoubtedly have. And where creators have experienced exploitation, those responsible should be held accountable.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story.

I don’t think every young man running an OFM is a predator. I think many of them followed a path that was laid out for them, step by step, by an online culture that sold this work as entrepreneurship: smart, aspirational, even harmless. A culture that quietly converted young men’s economic anxiety into revenue, one “academy,” one Discord server, one creator roster at a time.

What strikes me most is how narrow the window was.

My generation was at school in the years before relationships and sex education became compulsory. We left just as it did. The revised RSHE guidance that schools must teach from September 2026 finally asks teenagers to think critically about online exploitation, AI-generated sexual imagery, misogyny, and the influence of incel culture on how boys see women.

It has taken until now for those conversations to become mandatory.

A decade ago, an entire generation sat in classrooms with no legal obligation on anyone to teach them any of it.

I don’t know whether those lessons would have stopped this generation of young men from becoming OnlyFans managers. Perhaps they wouldn’t have. But if an entire generation of young men can leave school believing this is simply another route into entrepreneurship, then that tells us something not only about them, but about what we chose not to teach them.

So, I thought I would share my thoughts on each of them.

I’ve already done a video on them - check it out here:

@annabellejosephjournoREADING IS COOL #booktok #books #reading #journalism #holiday @Lucy Blanc the goat

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

LONDON FALLING BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE

I would like to preface this glowing review by saying that I love anything that Patrick Radden Keefe writes. Literally, he could write a manual on how to remove an oven glove and I would probably buy it - hardback even.

So perhaps this review comes with a slight degree of bias. But even by his standards, London Falling is exceptional. It’s one of my favourite non-fiction books I’ve read this year.

The book opens with the death of nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell from a luxury apartment building into the River Thames in 2019. Trying to understand what happened to their son, his parents begin piecing together the final months of his life.

What they discover is almost impossible to believe: he has been pretending to be the son of a Russain oligarch.

I will leave it there becuse I genuinely have the worst habit of spoiling books, films and TV shows, and this story is far too good to ruin - even if it is a true story.

What Patrick Radden Keefe does so brilliantly is start with one person's story, then another, then another, before pulling at every loose thread until an entire hidden world begins to unravel. By the end of the book, you're no longer just reading about Zac: you're reading about, and understanding, London's relationship with dirty money, the invisible networks of power that exist in plain sight, and how a city can become a playground for people living multiple lives.

It’s investigative journalism at its finest.

The pacing is extraordinary: every chapter ends with you asking more questions, another revelation, and another reason to tell yourself ‘just one more chapter’…

However, beneath the mystery, there is a family trying to answer the most painful questions imaginable: who was our son and why did he die? That search gives the book its heart. It never feels sensational or exploitative. Instead, it's a portrait of grief, and of the lengths parents will go to in order to understand someone they've lost.

Patrick Radden Keefe doesn't just investigate events; he investigates people. Even when he's writing about billionaires, organised crime or geopolitical power, the stories are always rooted in ordinary human emotions: love, shame, ambition, fear and loss.

If you're looking for a fast-paced true story that reads like a thriller but leaves you with far more than a plot twist, I'd recommend London Falling without hesitation.

THIRST TRAP BY GRÁINNE O’HARE

Thirst Trap follows three friends, Harley, Maggie & Róise, who are reaching their late 20s and have the big 3 0 looming over them.

They used to have a fourth member of their friendship group, and now, one year on from her death, they are reevaluating their friendships, relationships, and goals.

It’s a really witty but also painful book - both funny and gut-wrenching - and sexy too. But overall it’s a brilliantly chaotic, painfully honest portrait of female friendship in your twenties

What makes this novel so special is how real the characters feel. They are messy, selfish, loving and flawed, the kind of people you recognise in real life too. O’Hare writes beautifully about the friendships that shape us, but also the ways those same friendships can become complicated when people are struggling to grow in different directions.

Beneath the tequila-soaked nights, bad decisions and questionable romantic choices is a much deeper story about grief, growing up and the impossible task of moving forward when part of you is still stuck in the past.

I loved it.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW BY GABRIELLE ZEVIN

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows Sam and Sadie, two childhood friends who reconnect years later and become creative partners in the world of video game design. Their collaboration transforms them into global successes, but fame, ambition, love, rivalry and tragedy begin to test the bond that has shaped their lives.

I will be honest, it took me a bit of hard graft to get into this book, but once I was in, I found one of the most beautiful explorations of friendship, creativity and human connection I’ve read in a while.

Like it says on the blurb, it really is a story about love (not to be confused with a romance). Sam and Sadie's friendship is messy, imperfect and sometimes painful, but it feels incredibly real. Read it guys.

PEOPLE IN LOVE BY CLAIRE DAVERLEY

People in Love follows Nora, who is happily settled with her long-term partner Robin after a decade of quiet routines, shared jokes and everyday intimacy. But when Bren, her childhood best friend and the person everyone once assumed she would end up with, unexpectedly returns after twelve years, Nora is forced to confront her upcoming wedding and the life she might have lived.

I went into this book thinking that I knew exactly where it was heading: the classic “childhood sweetheart returns” plot, where Nora was going to leave her fiance and run towards the one who got away.

But this book subverts that part of the romance genre.

People in Love is not interested in the idea that the biggest love is always the loudest one. It challenges the belief that romance has to be full of grand gestures, dramatic declarations and impossible chemistry.

Instead, Daverley explores a much quieter kind of love: the love that is steady, constant and built through years of small moments. Rather than a straightforward love triangle, this is a story about timing, regret and the different versions of ourselves that exist within different relationships. Bren represents nostalgia, possibility and the dangerous temptation of “what if?” because, let’s be honest, a love that never happened has a very unfair advantage.

Honestly, this book made me realise that perhaps I am just a hopeless romantic who has been dramatically overestimating the power of the one who got away. Because maybe the reason those loves feel so intense is because they remain untouched by reality. They exist in the perfect, impossible version of our imagination where nobody disappoints us.

AUNT BLANC COLUMN BY LUCY BLANC

“Your weight does not and never will dictate your worthiness of sex, intimacy or love. Once you love yourself, it’s much easier to receive love.” Aunt Blanc to her first customer.

Lucy Blanc’s new Aunt Blanc column has entered the agony aunt world with a first dilemma that felt suspiciously personal: “I feel like I can’t have sex until I lose weight.”

For a brief moment, I genuinely wondered if I’d somehow submitted a question in my sleep. But that’s the magic of Blanc’s writing: she has a rare ability to make you feel like she’s speaking to everyone and directly to you at the same time (a bit like convincing yourself Harry Styles is making eye contact during a concert).

Warm, funny and deeply reassuring, Aunt Blanc is a brilliant addition to the agony aunt space. I’m already looking forward to the next dilemma.

That’s all from me,

Consider this your weekly reminder that reading is cool.

If you have any recommendations - please let me know!

Annabelle x

She was confident, glamorous, and unapologetically herself.

When Naomi Osaka wears something unconventional, the conversation shifts. Instead focusing on her tennis, coverage frequently turns to her appearance, temperament, or whether she’s distracted by things beyond tennis.

And when Serena Williams returned to the French Open in 2018 wearing a black compression catsuit after a life-threatening childbirth, it didn’t just become a talking point.

It was banned.

Three women, one sport, three different reactions.

The obvious explanation is that simply people respond differently to different people - of course they do. Not every criticism is rooted in bias, and not every disagreement can be explained by discrimination. But when the same patterns emerge across sport, entertainment, politics, and reality TV, it becomes harder to dismiss them as coincidences.

We need to question whether women of colour are afforded the same freedom as everyone else. Time and time again, they appear to be judged against a different standard; one that asks them not just to succeed, but to succeed with grace. To be confident, but never indimidating. Opinionated, but never confrontational. In other words, they exist in very narrow boundaries.

The illusion of neutrality

Tennis is a sport built on discipline, etiquette, and tradition. Dress codes, quiet crowds, respect for the game.

But no space is neutral.

Sport often reflects the society around it. Historically, tennis has been associated with whiteness, wealth, and particular ideas of femininity. These ideas don’t just disappear simply because a sport becomes more diverse. They continue to shape how athletes are seen: who is elegant, who is emotional, who is professional, and who is difficult.

The same actions can be interpreted entirely differently depending on who’s doing it.

Confidence can translate into arrogance, power can become aggression, and emotion can become instability.

Not because the behaviour necessarily changes, but because the lens through which it’s viewed does.

Understanding misogynoir

To understand why athletes like Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka are discussed differently from their peers, we need language that goes beyond simply “racism” or “sexism”.

In 2010, scholar Moya Bailey coined the term misogynoir to describe the unique discrimination experienced by Black women, where racism and misogyny intersect to produce forms of prejudice that cannot be understood through either lens alone.

Misogynoir is not simply racism and sexism. It’s something entirely different.

Misogynoir helps explain why Black women are often perceived (wrongly) as more threatening, less feminine, more aggressive, or less deserving of empathy than others displaying the exact same behaviour.

It’s why stereotypes such as the “angry Black woman” remain so powerful, even when they’re unsupported by reality.

Naming misogynoir gives us a framework to address these issues.

Serena Williams and the politics of “respectability”

Few athletes have transformed their sport like Serena Williams.

Twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles. Four Olympic gold medals. A career that has redefined what dominance looks like in women’s sport.

Yet conversations about Serena have rarely stayed on the tennis court. Her body has become a topic of debate, her celebrations controversial, and her determination has been framed as aggression.

Repeatedly, her success has been filtered through stereotypes long linked to misogynoir. This was perhaps most clear in 2018.

After suffering life-threatening complications following childbirth, Williams returned to competition wearing a black compression catsuit. The outfit wasn't a fashion statement: it was designed to reduce the risk of dangerous blood clots.

Yet headlines focused less on her health than on what she was wearing.

Months later, the French Tennis Federation announced that outfits like the catsuit would no longer be permitted, saying players needed to show respect for “the game and the place.”

The criticism wasn’t just about clothing. It reflected a much older question: What kinds of bodies are considered acceptable in elite spaces, and who gets to redefine tradition?

When Serena challenged those expectations, intentionally or not, she wasn’t simply judged as an athlete. She became a symbol onto which wider anxieties about race, femininity and respectability were projected.

Naomi Osaka and the politics of “softness”

Naomi Osaka entered professional tennis in a different era to Serena Williams, and the conversations about her have often sounded different too.

Where Serena has historically been framed as too powerful, Osaka has frequently been portrayed as too fragile. Her mental health, her media appearances and even her fashion choices have often become stories in themselves, sometimes eclipsing her performances on court.

This isn't to say discussions about mental health or fashion are inappropriate. Osaka has spoken openly about both. But it's striking how often Black women are asked to explain themselves beyond their achievements.

They are expected to justify their emotions, appearance and ambition. They’re rarely allowed to simply exist as athletes.

It's another example of how women of colour are often afforded less complexity. Every decision becomes symbolic and every mistake becomes evidence. Their success comes with an expectation to remain humble, grateful and endlessly composed.

It’s not just tennis - look at Love Island

Misogynoir doesn’t just exist on the tennis court.

Every summer, Love Island becomes one of the biggest cultural talking points in Britain. Alongside conversations about who’s pulling who for chats, romance and entertainment, there comes familiar debates about race, desirability and the treatment of women of colour.

This year, much of that discussion has centred around Jasmine G. Müller.

Like every contestant, Jasmine has been criticised for her behaviour. That’s part of reality television. Contestants choose to put themselves in the public eye, and viewers will inevitably form opinions.

But Jasmine has also become the focus of another conversation.

As someone who has described herself as a feminist, she’s been criticised not only for what she’s done, but for failing to embody feminism perfectly.

And that’s where things become interesting.

Publicly identifying as a feminist can raise expectations of your behaviour. People are entitled to question whether someone’s actions align with the values they claim to hold.

But women who identify as feminists often seem to be expected to meet a standard of moral consistency that few others are. For women of colour, those expectations can become even higher.

One wrong move isn't simply seen as a mistake. It becomes a reflection of their character.

What is perfection, really?

This is where intersectionality helps us understand what is happening.

Intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. It describes how different systems of oppression overlap, and how people don’t experience race, gender or class in isolation. These identities overlap, shaping how someone is perceived and treated.

For women of colour, racialised gender stereotypes can shape how quickly they're labelled difficult, emotional or unlikeable. It doesn’t mean every criticism is racist, or sexist, or classist: it means we should be willing to ask whether our standards are truly consistent.

We should be willing to ask ourselves whether our standards are truly consistent: do we expect perfection from everyone, or just certain women?

Although uncomfortable, these questions are necessary.

From heroin chic to body positivity, it’s constantly evolving.

But there’s one question the industry seems reluctant to answer right now:

Why are they continuing to reward creators linked to misogyny?

This week, 424 opened its Paris Fashion Week show with Clavicular, also known as Braden Peters.

He’s made a career out of ‘looksmaxxing’ content: videos focusing on maximising male attractiveness through grooming, fitness and cosmetic procedures. But over time, he’s also become associated with racist and misogynistic livestreams, and previously appeared alongside Myron Gaines and Andrew Tate in a now infamous nightclub video (yes, that one where they sang ‘H**l H*tler*).

Earlier this year, Rolling Stone reported on court documents involving allegations made by a young woman who was 16 when she met Peters. She accused Peters of battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and fraud. She also alleged that he served her alcohol while she was underage, had unconsensual sex with her on at least two occasions while she was under the influence, and injected her face with unapproved substances while she was still a minor, meaning she could not legally consent.

Peters has denied any wrongdoing, and the allegations remain subject to legal proceedings.

But when you put the legal case aside for a second, the bigger question remains:

Why is someone with this public profile still being rewarded with one of fashion’s biggest stages?

The answer may be simpler than we’d like to admit: controversy works.

Brands understand the internet better than anyone. They know that outrage fuels engagement, engagement fuels headlines, and headlines fuel visibility.

Whether people are praising a campaign or condemning it, they’re still talking about it.

In an attention economy, being controversial can be commercially valuable.

That’s what makes these decisions so frustrating.

Because they’re rarely accidental.

Fashion houses have entire teams dedicated to communications, reputation management and brand partnerships. These collaborations are researched, approved and signed off. When someone with a controversial online presence is chosen, it’s difficult to argue that nobody knew.

The conversation often becomes about “cancel culture” or whether someone deserves a second chance.

But I don’t think that’s the most useful question.

A better question is why brands repeatedly decide that controversy is a worthwhile marketing strategy in the first place.

There are thousands of emerging models, creatives and influencers producing thoughtful, original work without building audiences through misogyny or extremist-adjacent content.

Yet time and again, brands seem willing to gamble on figures whose notoriety guarantees attention.

Maybe that’s because we’ve started confusing visibility with value.

The internet rewards whoever captures attention fastest, regardless of why they’re being discussed. Fashion increasingly seems to operate by the same logic.

The result is an industry that claims to care about inclusivity while continuing to amplify people whose online personas often undermine those very values.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether a campaign succeeded because it went viral.

It’s who benefited from that virality.

And who paid the price.

If someone kills a current or former partner in England and Wales, they could now face a minimum starting sentence of 25 years in prison, up from the previous 15-year starting point in many cases.

The change has been welcomed by campaigners as long-overdue recognition that domestic murder should never have been treated as less serious than other forms of homicide.

But it also raises a more uncomfortable question.

Are we getting better at preventing violence against women and girls, or are we simply getting tougher at punishing it after it’s already happened?

The sentencing gap

To understand why this change matters, you have to understand the law it replaces.

Previously, many murders involving current or former partners had a starting point of 15 years before aggravating or mitigating factors were considered.

However, murders where the offender had taken a weapon to the scene often started at 25 years.

On paper, that distinction might make sense. Premeditation has long been treated as making a crime more serious.

But domestic abuse campaigners argued it ignored the reality of how intimate partner killings actually happen. Most domestic murders don’t involve someone arriving armed. They happen inside homes.

Arguments escalate. Abuse intensifies. Household objects become weapons. The violence is often the final act in a pattern of coercive control rather than an isolated explosion of anger.

That meant two people could commit remarkably similar murders and receive different baseline sentences simply because one used a knife they had brought with them while the other used one already in the kitchen.

Campaigners called that distinction a sentencing gap.

Now, ministers have agreed.

Under the proposed reforms, killers of current or former partners will face a 25-year starting point regardless of whether they brought a weapon to the scene.

Victory built by grieving mothers

This change did not happen overnight.

It follows years of campaigning by families whose daughters, sisters and mothers were killed by partners or ex-partners.

Many became part of the Killed Women campaign, arguing that the criminal justice system failed to recognise the seriousness of domestic homicide.

For them, this is about more than numbers.

It’s an acknowledgment that domestic murder is not somehow a lesser category of killing simply because it happens behind closed doors.

The reform sends a symbolic message as well as a legal one: violence committed in the home deserves the same gravity as violence committed anywhere else.

But what can reforms achieve?

The annoucement reflects the government’s wider pledge to tackle violence against women and girls.

Yet it’s worth asking what sentencing reform can realistically achieve.

Longer prison terms may change how society perceives and condemns these crimes. They may provide some sense of justice for bereaved families too.

But they don’t intervene at the root of domestic violence.

They don’t prevent coercive behaviour from escalating.

They don’t guarantee police recognise warning signs.

They don’t ensure victims are believed, protected or safely able to leave abusive relationships.

And they don’t address the housing shortages, financial dependence, mental health pressures or overstretched support services that can trap people in dangerous situations.

Sentencing only begins once prevention has already failed.

The limits of punishment

This debate often leads to a concept known as carceral feminism.

The term describes an approach that relies heavily on criminal law, policing and imprisonment as the primary solutions to gender-based violence.

Supporters argue tougher laws demonstrate society takes violence against women seriously and can deter future offending.

Critics question whether punishment alone can solve a problem rooted in inequality, coercive control and systemic failures.

If our response is centred almost entirely on longer prison sentences, they argue, we risk overlooking the conditions that allow abuse to develop in the first place.

That doesn’t mean perpetrators shouldn’t be punished.

It means punishment and prevention aren’t the same thing.

A justice system can deliver harsher sentences while still failing to stop women being killed.

So what actually prevents abuse?

There is no single answer.

Researchers, campaigners and frontline organisations point instead to a combination of measures: earlier education about healthy relationships, better funding for domestic abuse services, stronger responses to coercive control, safer housing, effective perpetrator programmes and a criminal justice system that responds consistently before violence reaches a fatal point.

None of those solutions fit neatly into a headline.

They don’t generate the same political impact as announcing longer prison sentences.

But they may ultimately save more lives.

Justice shouldn’t begin with a dead woman

The new sentencing rules matter.

They close an inconsistency that many families have spent years fighting to change.

They acknowledge that domestic murder should never have carried a lower starting point simply because the weapon happened to be in the home.

That is meaningful.

But it’s also worth remembering that every sentencing reform starts where prevention has already ended.

The real measure of success won’t be whether more domestic killers receive longer prison terms.

It will be whether fewer women need those sentences to exist at all.

At first, I rolled my eyes. Modern dating already sounds like an episode of University Challenge. Situationships. Exclusive. Soft launching. Beige flags. How many more words can we invent before we simply admit that dating is, fundamentally, confusing?

But then I read the definition.

A maybelatership is when someone doesn’t reject you outright. They just postpone you.

“I really like you, I’m just not ready.”

“Maybe after this busy period.”

“I can see this working, just not right now.”

And I immediately thought: oh.

I think know I’ve been in one.

The thing about a maybelatership is that it’s built on potential rather than reality. Unlike heartbreak that arrives with a clean ending, this kind leaves the door slightly ajar. You don’t grieve what you had; you grieve what you were promised you might have.

It’s surprisingly difficult to walk away from someone who never actually said no. Because maybe they’re telling the truth. Maybe they are overwhelmed. Maybe they do have commitment issues. Maybe the timing genuinely is terrible.

But eventually, the reason stops mattering.

Because whether someone can’t choose you or won’t choose you, the outcome is often the same: you remain suspended in someone else’s uncertainty.

I think many of us stay longer than we should because hope feels romantic.

Films taught us that patience is proof of love. That waiting demonstrates loyalty. That if you just hold on a little longer, the grand gesture is coming.

In reality, waiting often looks much less cinematic.

It’s rereading old messages for clues. It’s turning down other opportunities because you don’t want to “mess up whatever this is.” It’s explaining their absence to your friends with an optimism you’re no longer sure you believe yourself. It’s shrinking your needs to fit someone else’s indecision.

Of course, relationships aren’t always straightforward. Timing does matter. People go through difficult periods. Life isn’t a perfectly planned rom-com.

But I think there’s a difference between someone saying, “I want this, and here’s how we’ll make it work,” and someone repeatedly asking you to place your life on hold while they figure themselves out.

One is a plan.

The other is a placeholder.

Maybe that’s why this particular dating term has gone viral. Not because Gen Z invented another ridiculous label, but because it gives language to an experience many of us have quietly lived through.

The almost-love.

The almost-relationship.

The person you could have built a future with, if only circumstances had aligned differently.

But perhaps we must accept that “maybe later” isn’t always a promise. It’s just a softer version of no.

And while that sounds bleak, I actually find it oddly comforting.

Because if someone is truly meant to be in your life, they don’t require you to pause your own.

You don’t have to earn certainty by becoming easier to love.

You don’t have to spend years proving you’re worth choosing.

You deserve someone who doesn’t just imagine a future with you in theory. You deserve someone who arrives in the present.

Maybe that’s the real lesson of the maybelatership.

Not that modern dating is doomed.

Just that “maybe” was never supposed to become your reality.

I’d just like to preface this by saying that I’m not a movie critic - and nor will I ever claim to be.

I don’t think the film was badly made, the performances were okay, and the premise was actually quite interesting.

However, I felt uncomfortable because I could see exactly what they were trying to do, and yet I could not laugh.

The film asks a familiar question: what if the tables were turned? What if women occupied positions of power that men have historically held? What if men were patrionised, objectified, sexualised, dismissed, and endangered in the ways women so often are? What if misogyny became misandry?

The film’s magical conceit sees Damien bump his head and wake up in a world reversed, women now on top and men struggling to keep up. Paul Smith is now Pauline, Harry Potter now Harriet, bras are for balls, Five Guys is Five Gals and Damien is now a sexually harassed and entirely underestimated smaller cog at the advertising agency where he was once a top dog. Pike’s put-upon single mother Alex has also gone from patronised to powerful as she swans her way to the very top of the corporate ladder (Pike is wasted but at least convincing as a ruthless exec). With help from Richard E Grant’s magical pigeon-strewn hobo, some humility and a penile implant, Damien has to take her on without the system on his side.

The Guardian

It’s the sort of concept that arrives pre-packaged with a label of ‘THIS IS SATIRE’ attached to it. It tells us to relax, it’s just a joke - it’s exposing sexism by flipping the script.

But satire only works if there is enough distance between reality and absurdity.

And I’m just not sure if we have that distance anymore.

When watching scenes that were clearly written to provoke a sense of ‘oh yes this is why feminism matters’, I felt like it undermined the work women have already been doing for centuries and continue to do.

It made it seem like the patriarchy would now only be solved because one man had spent a few days being oppressed by the system that women are born into, completely ignoring the progress campaigners and policy makers have made already.

I think this film would have done well in a pre-MeToo world. Maybe it would have even been hailed as progressive or won some awards?

The idea of forcing men to inhabit women’s experiences through comedy might have once felt genius, but in 2026, it just felt boring.

Women have spent decades explaining, documenting, protesting and legislating around sexism. We have written books about it, marched in our thousands, challenged employers, changed laws, and risked our lives by speaking publicly about what has happened to us.

And yet this film seems to suggest that the penny only truly drops when one mediocre man experiences it for himself. As if thousands of women saying ‘this is happening’ wasn’t enough. As if empathy only becomes possible when men are cast as the protagonists of something women are expected to just put up with.

Then there was the sex.

The scenes were meant to be uncomfortable, I know. But for me, they just weren’t necessary. They were icky. If the film wanted us to sit with the horror of objectification and coercion, why soften it with chemistry? Why package structural inequality inside a rom-com framework that ultimately asks us to root for the couple?

It left me wondering whether the film trusted its audience enough to confront misogyny without cushioning it with romance.

The parts that were meant to make us laugh only left me feeling unsteady as my thoughts turned to the headlines from the last few months: the Hampshire court cases, Bonnie Blue, the countless ‘think pieces’ about whether feminism has ‘gone too far’ while violence against women and girls remains stubbornly ordinary.

The joke relies on reversal, but reversal implies we have moved beyond the original world.

Maybe that’s why I struggled. For many women, sexism isn’t an outdated concept or abstract political idea to dissect over dinner: it’s the past, it’s the present, and it’s probably going to still be the future.

There is an assumption that women should enjoy this kind of satire because we're supposed to appreciate the cleverness of it. Look how ridiculous it all is. Look how unfair it sounds when men experience it.

Except women don’t have to imagine it.

We’ve all lived the punchline.

That doesn't mean the film shouldn't exist. Art shouldn't only comfort us. Some of the best films make us squirm. And perhaps the discomfort is exactly the point: to force audiences to confront how normalised misogyny still feels when transplanted into a supposedly absurd context.

But I keep returning to the same thought - I wish I could find it funny.

I wish I could leave the cinema debating the screenplay rather than wondering why stories about sexism continue to feel less like historical commentary and more like contemporary observation

I wish gender politics felt distant enough from my own life that I could admire the satire without instinctively measuring it against reality.

Either way, I didn’t laugh.

16 years ago, Andy Cato and Tom Findlay, also known as Groove Armada (arguably one of the best British exports), released the song ‘If Everybody Looked the Same’.

The music video shows a man walking through the streets after shaving off his beard, surrounded and stopped from entering different places by men who all have facial hair.

At the time, it played like a quirky visual metaphor. Now, it feels like a warning we didn’t listen to.

His lack of face fuzz is what makes him stand out. Other than it being a really good song, it makes me think: why are we all trying to look the same? What happened to individuality?

In 2026, we’re living in this strange cultural loop where individuality is celebrated but only if it fits in a certain mold: it works in theory, but is completely flattened in practice. Social media means that trends spread at the speed of a swipe, and before long, entire crowds of people begin to resemble each other: the same haircuts, the same clothes, and the same interests.

Scroll a few times as a gen Z girl and you will most likely reach the pits of hell, also known as ‘SkinnyTok’, where bodies are shrinking at lightening speed.

Add in the rise of skinny jabs, where weight loss is no longer a journey but a subscription, and suddenly the pressure to look like everyone else isn’t subtle: it’s glaringly obvious.

Scroll again and you land in looksmaxxing land, a world where self-improvement is just a polite rebrand of ‘fix your face’ (all in the name of the manosphere of course).

We’ve built an entire ecosystem that rewards sameness. The “perfect” jawline. The “perfect” waist. The “perfect” filler ratio. Even rebellion has a template now: the alt‑girl look is as mass‑produced as the clean‑girl one.

Individuality isn’t dead; it’s just been flattened into a preset.

What makes Groove Armada’s song and video so striking to me is how clearly it captures today’s pressure to conform. The man without a beard isn’t mocked for looking strange; he’s excluded for looking different. That distinction matters.

It mirrors a wider cultural shift where standing out feels risky, and blending in feels safe. We talk about authenticity constantly, but is it just another trend?

The song warned us: if everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other.

And honestly? We already are.

A few months ago, I realised I was the last single friend.

Not in the whole world, I’m not that dramatic. Just in my school friendship group.

My last comrade left me in the dating battlefield after meeting a guy on our night out for New Years Eve.

It feels like everyone has paired off like they got this batch email, and, instead, mine was sent to my junk folder by mistake.

Yesterday was Sunday, arguably the worst day to be single that is known to man. In my loneliness, I redownloaded Raya (which I am accepted on yes), stared at the £20 monthly fee, and then swiftly deleted it again.

When I went through my last breakup, aged 20, I remember being sat in my uni house living room, about a month after, when my girlfriends suggested that I should download Hinge.

Freshly-single me, unaware of the perils of online dating, happily obliged: what was the worst that could happen?

After picking my six best pictures, a carefully orchestrated blend of both group pictures, candids and hot selfies, and filling out some prompts, I launched my profile.

The thing is with dating apps is that they lure you in by showing you some of the best looking men you have ever seen in your life within the first 10 profiles. I swiftly used up all my likes for that day within 4 minutes and started chatting to a few guys.

It felt fun, innocent, and exciting.

My last (and only) relationship had started very traditionally in today’s standards. I replied to his Instagram story, and he asked me out for dinner a few days later. Fast forward four weeks, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. So this new dating tactic felt very unfamiliar.

I’ve now been single for nearly four years. I’m officially sick of dating apps, here’s why.

It’s endless admin

Sometimes it feels like dating apps are a part-time job, without the salary. Other times, it feels like charity work.

A profile can often feel like a CV: there’s prompts to fill out, photos to perfectly curate, and messaging that can honestly feel taxing. You need to be witty, but not try too hard, interested but not too interested.

The worst part is when you actually (FINALLY) secure a date, they often love bomb you and leave you crawling back to the dreaded apps, and back to the guys who think liking the ‘F1 and a roast’ is equal to having a personality.

There’s an illusion of choice

Dating apps make you feel like there’s thousands of options. And, yes, there are.

But also it is the same 25 guys rotating on repeat: the guy who “loves to travel”, the guy who somehow managed to fish for a metre long trout and take a semi-decent picture, the guy who loves Hyrox a bit too much, and the dreaded guy who’s only response to prompts is “.” - seriously, what is it with that? Why deprive us of your personality babes?

It is like being stuck in a recurring nightmare, or trying to buy a meal deal: technically you could just wake up, or make a choice, but you’re always stuck with the same BLT, salt and vinegar crisps, and diet coke combo.

I’d rather never speak again than start small talk

There’s a specific kind of dating-app conversation that seems to exist nowhere else on the planet. Scientists should honestly study it.

It goes (ahem):

“Heyy”

“Hi, how are you?”

“Yeah good thanks! You?”

“Yeah not bad”

And then you both die of boredom and you start looking on Gumtree for a cat to start your inevitable collection (because you are clearly going to die a spinster).

You can never be honest about what you really want

“What are you looking for?” is something that I dread being asked.

As a woman, if you say “something serious” you will most likely scare them off. If you say “nothing serious” you get someone who will consider you a placeholder. If you dare say “I don’t know” neither of you will ever get what you want.

I wish someone had just told me: “It’s a trick question! There’s no correct answer! This person is literally just delaying taking you out for a drink because they don’t really want to get to know you!”

To my core, I am a hopeless romantic

Sometimes I think I am more plain hopeless than a hopeless romantic, but dating apps are actually just self-inflicted emotional whiplash disguised as “self-improvement”.

One minute, I think I’ve found someone who actually gets me (and I hear wedding bells). The next, they disappear like they’ve been placed in witness protection and there is no way they can send you a message to explain how they are actually feeling.

I tend to swing between ‘this could be something’ to ‘I’m never speaking to another man again’ within a few messages.

You can also talk to someone for days, weeks, months even, and feel like you’re building something. Then you meet them and one of the following happens:

1. They have the personality of wet lettuce or;

2. A few dates go well, they have the same ideals and expectations as you, but they’re just not over their ex (they’ll never say this, but there will be signs). You are essentially love bombed and spend the weekend crying into ice cream over an embarrasingly short ‘relationship’ that didn’t actually exist or;

3. To be honest I’m yet to find out if there is another option. It seems like these are the only two I have experienced so far.

I’m tired

After four years of this cycle - download, delete, repeat - I am exhausted.

Not of dating, I love dating! I love meeting new people, and I LOVE love. I’m just tired of the process that my generation seems to have sleep-walked into.

I find myself swiping, scrolling, constantly performing for someone that probably isn’t going to be my person. It’s not fun anymore, it’s not even a confidence boost. I’m tired of feeling like I’m shopping for the perfect foundation shade when what I really want is to be loved and wanted and understood.

So where does that leave me?

Right now, I obviously still have Hinge downloaded. I broke up with Tinder a while ago.

The apps can be fun, but that doesn’t outweigh my disdain of them. Dating feels dead.

I know the right person is out there. I’ve managed to narrow the potential candidates down by being on this “journey” (ew I hate that I just called it that). I know my timeline isn’t wrong or that I’ve missed my chance. I’m not behind, even if it feels like I am sometimes.

In these 4 years, I have got my degree, been travelling around the world, started my masters and am pursuing my career in journalism (as the 2000s rom coms taught me).

But I also know that if my soulmate is on the apps, he better hurry up because I’m one Hyrox or fishing picture away from throwing my phone into a bin, Serena van der Woodsen style.

In the same timeframe, 400 female screenwriters sent an open letter to the BBC objecting the decision to commission a male writer to create a new drama about the Sarah Everard case.

And in Manchester, Reform UK by-election candidate Robert Kenyon has faced criticism over alleged misogynistic comments, which resurfaced during his political campaign.

On the surface, these are three very different stories: criminal justice, culture, and politics.

But in all three, the experiences of women have been reframed, debated, or minimised in ways that shift attention away from the harm itself and towards its impact on men, institutions, or reputations.

It’s a pattern British women are increasingly familiar with.

Hampshire: is it radical to think all rapists should go to jail?

The rape of two teenage girls in Hampshire should be understood first and foremost as an act of profound harm and violence. Instead, public conversation seems to be focused on sentencing guidelines, rehabilitation, and developmental assessments of the perpetrators.

The judge’s decision to impose youth rehabilitation orders, influcenced by age and psychological evaluations, has sparked anger from most of the nation. And honestly, rightly so.

But beneath the legal debate sits a quieter, more uncomfortable truth: the girls’ lives were pushed aside so the boys’ futures could take centre stage.

As someone with PTSD, I understand the deep and lasting impact trauma can have on your developmental years. It can swallow years of your life if you don’t get the right support.

So the question I keep asking is: ‘Why was their potential overlooked by the potential of three convicted rapists?’

This isn’t an anomaly. In cases of sexual violence, unfortunately, the centre of gravity almost always shifts from the victims towards the men who harmed them: their prospects, their potential, and their punishment.

The result is a conversation that happens around victims, rather than about them.

And yes, I’m glad the UK is angry about this. But I’m also exhausted. How many more times does it have to happen before people understand that victims of sexual violence are also people with hopes and dreams? With futures? With lives that matter?

Women and girls up and down the country are told their whole lives to not walk home alone at night, to make sure people know where they are at all times, to clutch their keys, to stay alert. The police get a call about domestic violence every 60 seconds in the UK.

So why aren’t we more angry? Is it so bad to think all rapists should go to jail? Is that an outdated concept?

Sarah Everard: who gets to tell women’s stories?

While I do not entirely agree with its creation, the BBC’s planned drama about Sarah Everard has reopened a deeper cultural question: who is trusted to tell women’s experiences of fear, violence and misogyny?

Hundreds of female screenwriters have argued that commissioning a male writer for a story rooted in gendered violence is not simply a creative choice: it’s a structural one. Their concern is not that men should never tell women’s stories, but that in cases where gendered experience is central, authorship shapes interpretation.

Supporters of the BBC’s decision say empathy and research can bridge lived experience. Critics argue that when institutions default to male storytellers, women’s perspectives are filtered, softened, or reframed before they ever reach the screen.

We will never know Sarah’s experience, or how she felt, but I can guarantee that a man may only be able to capture 1% of that fear.

Not because I think all men must be incapable of empathy, but because because they simply do not live in the same reality women do: the reality where walking home alone is a risk, not a commute.

Robert Kenyon: misogyny isn’t ‘cool’ anymore…

In Manchester, allegations of misogynistic comments by Reform UK candidate Robert Kenyon triggered the now‑familiar cycle: criticism, defence, contextualisation.

Reform supporters framed the remarks as jokes, old posts, or misinterpretations. The debate quickly shifted from the substance of the comments to their intent, their tone, and whether they should affect political credibility.

In that shift, the original issue, attitudes towards women, becomes secondary to a broader argument about fairness, reputation, and proportionality.

This is how misogyny often gets diluted: not through denial, but through reframing intentions.

But despite its intentions, a spade is still a spade. Kenyon would, if elected, be representing women, who he seemingly can’t take seriously.

And despite its ‘context’, these comments, and the acceptance of them, allow the cycle of violence seen in the Fordingbridge and Everard cases to continue. They all tie into each other.

If your instinct is to defend misogyny rather than confront it, you’re part of the reason women still don’t feel safe: not just on the streets, but in the systems meant to represent them.

Across crime, culture, and politics, the same structure repeats.

• Harm happens.

• Women speak up.

• The focus shifts away.

What these headlines reveal about being a woman in Britain is not that misogyny is rare, or hidden, or misunderstood. It’s that even when it’s right in front of us, even when it’s undeniable, even when it’s in the courts, on the screen, or on the campaign trail: the conversation still drifts away from our control.

Being a woman in Britain means knowing that your safety, your fear, your trauma, your perspective can be acknowledged, but not necessarily centred.

It means knowing that harm against women is often treated as a footnote to someone else’s narrative: a judge’s reasoning, a broadcaster’s decision, a politician’s reputation.

And it means knowing that until that changes, the headlines will keep repeating themselves.

Somewhere inside it said that worries are like tomatoes: the more thought you water them with, the bigger they grow.

Looking back, I was probably far too stressed for a child who had a good life, a good school, and good friends. Yet I always carried this quiet certainty that the worst day of my life was waiting just around the corner, ready to ambush me.

Five years later, it did.

I was fourteen when I saw my friend die.

It was a warm July morning, two weeks before the summer holidays. I remember the small details: my new Topshop jeans, the white top I’d stolen from my sister’s wardrobe, the embarrassment of walking to school with my mum because she worked there and I had to catch the early bus. I worried about what the cool sixth formers might think of me.

The bus was meant to arrive around seven-thirty. It didn’t come until nearly an hour later.

She died at nine.

She didn’t see it coming. Neither did I. In a handful of seconds, her life ended, and mine changed shape entirely.

Almost nine years on, I can say, with some disbelief, that although I wish that day had never happened, I love the life I’ve lived since. Growing up, I realised most people’s first experience of death is losing someone older, not someone their own age. My experience forced me to understand, far earlier than most, just how fragile life is.

That fragility has changed the way I pay attention. I notice things others might have rushed to miss: the way my friends laugh with their whole bodies, the warmth of a seat after someone leaves, the conversations of passers-by in a busy city. The tiny, ordinary moments that make a day feel lived rather than had. I don’t take any of it for granted, because I know how suddenly it can disappear.

It also taught me courage. I didn’t realise it for a long time. For years, I thought confidence and bravery were loud things. Now, I understand it as choosing to keep moving, even when fear sits heavy in your throat. Loving life after the worst day of your life isn’t a simple, triumphant thing: I’m not a success story. It’s just a daily decision to remain open to joy, even when you know it can be taken away.

It’s made me more human, not less. It has given me a deeper capacity for empathy, a sharper sense of what matters, and a gentler way of holding the people I care about, and letting go of those that don’t add value. When you’ve seen how abruptly life can end, you become less willing to live it half-heartedly. I wouldn’t have chosen the lesson, but I can recognise the gift.

In the years after she died, I was told about hundreds of grief and trauma analogies. I know it never moves in a straight line, it loops back in on itself, arriving in quiet and unexpected moments: the smell of summer air, the sight of a school bus, the sound of someone laughing like she did. For a long time, I thought these moments meant I was failing to move on.

I see it differently now. They’re a reminder that every life leaves a trace.

Sometimes I think the only reason I’ve been able to enjoy my twenties is because I’m convinced the worst day of my life has already happened. It’s a strange kind of freedom. Heartbreak doesn’t scare me in the way it seems to scare other people my age. I know what real loss feels like, and it isn’t someone not texting back or a situationship dissolving on a Sunday night. That doesn’t mean those things don’t hurt — they do — but the pain feels survivable. Familiar, even.

It’s made me braver in ways I didn’t expect. I’ve travelled alone, booked flights I couldn’t quite afford, ran until my lungs burned, kissed strangers in cities where I didn’t speak the language. I’ve said yes to things simply because they made me feel alive, because I understood that life isn’t a rehearsal for some future moment when everything finally makes sense. It’s happening now, in the missed trains and the cheap hostels and the late-night conversations with people I’ll never see again.

And maybe that’s what I love most about the life I have: the randomness of it. The way joy can appear in places you never thought to look. The way grief can sit quietly beside it without ruining the moment. The way being a twenty‑something girl means holding all of it at once: the heartbreaks, the impulsive decisions, the friendships that feel like lifelines, the mistakes you laugh about months later.

I don’t love that I lost her. I never will. But I do love the person I’ve become because I had to learn, far too early, that nothing is guaranteed and everything is precious.

Vogue declaring that women were rejecting a heterosexual fantasy felt both liberating… and odd. For someone who has been single most of her adult life, I couldn’t help but think: am I liberated, or just left behind?

For the majority of the time, I love being single. I love my own company, the peace of knowing my plans are mine, not having to compromise on where to eat, and the freedom of making weekend trips without having to send a single “just so you know” text.

But let’s not romanticise being single too much. Dating in 2025 is, quite frankly, the trenches. Men seem to be doing Benson Boone somersaults around commitment, auditioning multiple women at the same time like it’s some sort of Love Island Spreadsheet. Meanwhile, a woman so much as entertains the same roster, or dates with similar enthusiasm, she’s branded as “promiscuous”, or worse, “emotionally unavailable”.

The double standard is exhausting. However, I fully understand Joseph’s point. Women are breaking free from the blind pursuit of relationships that can drain us. We are learning to choose peace and privacy over a performative partnership. But here’s my truth: even with all that empowerment, being single can still feel embarrassing.

It’s a strange kind of invisibility while also feeling like a spotlight. Family asking if there’s any men in your life before asking how your job is going, or people insisting they have to meet their other single friend just because he is A. over 21, and B. heterosexual.

I’m not even sure if I want a relationship right now, but with British Vogue saying the one thing that I have missing is ‘embarrassing’, I, and other singles, are very confused.

What is more confusing is that the article seems to push women out of either category. Apparently being single is radical and empowering, but having a boyfriend is somehow humiliating. Yet the women Joseph references - the supposed poster-girls for solo liberation - all seem to have partners in private: they’re just not posting about it. So which is it? Is romantic love now cringe? Or are we all just pretending it is to seem cool and detached?

Even as we rewrite the script, the cultural shift still isn’t catching up. A man who spends his 20s and 30s finding himself is romantic, a woman doing the same is ‘wasting precious time’ and should ‘really settle down’. We all tell ourselves that solitude is strength, and it is, but for singles, we’re either expected to be desperately searching or defiantly independent, with no space for the reality: being content, but sometimes still holding out hope.

Maybe that is the real truth of modern singlehood: it’s both empowering and lonely, liberating and limiting, all at once. You can be confident in yourself but crave intimacy; you can love your autonomy and still long to share it - hopefully without being called ‘embarrassing’ in the process.

So no, I don’t need a man to validate me. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t want the safety of having a person. Wanting love, or having it, is not shameful. You do you.

The past few weeks have been a huge life change.

In case you missed it (I am pretending that people actually read this), I moved to a brand new city to start a masters in Broadcast Journalism.

Which feels weird to write because this time last year, things were very different. And not in a good way. I won’t go into the details, but I was not in a good place (and no, I am not blaming Birmingham: I will have no Birmingham slander here).

Subscribe now

Now, for the first time in ages, it actually feels like I’m where I’m meant to be. Which is kind of scary in its own way.

The course is full-on. My head hurts a lot of the time. The first few weeks have been difficult: lots of new information, new people, and a constant juggle between socialising, working, studying, and actually taking time to eat, sleep and breathe. Oh and let’s not forget trying to remember to wash my hair more than once a week.

But weirdly, I wouldn't change much.

The people on my course are really lovely. We’re a chaotic, loud bunch. Everyone wants to be heard, which makes seminars feel like 100 TED Talks on full volume all playing at once. The content is genuinely interesting too - for the first time in forever, I actually want to do the reading. Okay, maybe that one is a lie, we all know I always want to do the reading.

I will be honest though: I have had a few wobbles. I’ve never really had imposter syndrome, but last week it did hit me like a tonne of bricks. A proper “should I even be here?” moment. It was literally over something so minor as well - I can barely remember what triggered it.

The main worry was that I am not doing the right thing, yet again, and that I am going to have to drop out, yet again, and start over, yet again. Classic me.

A few chats with my therapist, my parents, and best friends, helped me snap out of it. I realised I was terrified because I want this so badly, and, actually, I’m doing better than I thought.

In other news: I have been attempting to get back into the dating scene. Emphasis on attempting.

After a few days scrolling on the hell-hole that is Hinge, I matched with a guy who seemed normal (very rare), and he suggested that we go for a few drinks. I thought the date was great: lots of laughing, flirting (sorry mum) and let me tell you, he had the BLUEST eyes I have ever seen.

However, like most things, he was too good to be true, and swiftly ghosted me, only to hit me with a ‘what you doing tonight?’ text at 3am a few weeks later.

Classic.

Since said man, I have mostly been approached by 20 and 21-year-olds. As a 23-year-old, this isn’t the most ideal situation in the world. I am seriously going to have to consider ID-ing the next person that swears they were born in 2003. One guy swore he was 22, only to be ratted out by a friend as a December 2004 baby. No words.

So, the love life? Still in progress.

Other than dating (very little) and studying (too much), I’ve been seeing friends, going to pubs, and exploring the city. I went to London to visit some home friends and to watch the Women’s Rugby World Cup Final with my dad. Oh my God, it was insane, one of those days that you are going to talk and talk and talk about forever. I am one of the luckiest girls in the world to have a dad that has always encouraged my sister and I to love sport without ever making it feel like it ‘wasn’t for us’.

And then, today, I left a job that I actually loved.

For the past few months, I’ve been working part-time as a social media assistant for Everyone’s Invited, a charity that I’ve embarrassingly fangirled over for a while. The work felt so meaningful, and extremely rewarding. And yeah, the pay was great, but it wasn’t really about the money.

I felt like I was actually doing something that mattered. I got to work on something that had real-world impact. There were hate comments (shoutout to the guy who called me a ‘childless 20 year old with no brain cells’), but I genuinely loved it, and I’ll really miss the team.

I know that with my future career I will be able to report on similar instances of rape culture and misogyny, so I am really grateful to have built the foundations with such a great mentor.

But still… endings are hard. Even the good ones.

So that’s where I’m at: a job I didn’t really want to leave, new city, new course, new friends, old habits of self-doubt, and men with gorgeous eyes but the emotional availability of rocks.

But still, I’m here and trying.

(Also still here and trying to hold out for a man born before 2002.)

Until next time,

Annabelle

Subscribe now

To view their Instagram: click here

To view their TikTok: click here

Everyone’s Invited is a charity dedicated to exposing and eradicating rape culture with empathy, compassion and understanding.

As their Social Media Assistant, I have generated videos and carousel posts that bring awareness to rape culture and foster change.

You can find out more about their mission here.

Everyone's Invited Instagram

Everyone's Invited TikTok

Videos for Everyone’ Invited

View on TikTok: click here

View on TikTok: click here

View on TikTok: click here

View on TikTok: click here

View on TikTok: click here

View on TikTok: click here

I was expecting a chill day: window shopping, maybe a coffee, a casual glance at some tops or jeans. But as we hunted through racks after racks, something very weird started happening…

We kept grabbing the same exact clothes.

I’m not talking about similar vibes here. I mean the same striped tops, the same suede jackets. At one point, we both reached for the exact same off-the-shoulder jumper. Cue some awkward giggles and a very serious pact not to wear them at the same time (because, really, who needs a mother-daughter fashion showdown?).

That’s when it hit me: Am I starting to dress like my mum? Or has she been taking style notes from me this whole time?

There was a time when style was a generational war zone. Your mum wore Boden and Marks & Spencer like a uniform, and you vowed never to dress like her.

But now? Thanks to social media’s never-ending influence, trend cycles collapsing faster than you can say Zara, and celebrities in their 60s and 70s going viral for looking like they might be 25 (Kris Jenner, I’m looking at you), those style borders have blurred. The age gap in fashion? It’s shrinking, visually, if not physically.

In our family, we call this ‘The Mounjaro Effect.’ It’s a nod to the weight-loss drug that’s given my mum a new spring in her step, and honestly, she looks amazing. But it’s also kind of a perfect metaphor for our obsession with youth, optimisation, and hitting the reset button on the body and wardrobe alike.

Just like Mounjaro promises to rewind your body to 17, wardrobes everywhere seem to be on a similar time machine.

But here’s the thing: Is this style rewind actually a bad thing? Honestly, I don’t think so.

Neither of us is trying to impersonate the other. I’m not trying to look like a woman in her 50s, and I’d hope my mum isn’t sneaking out to parties dressed like a 22-year-old. We just want to look good. And apparently, Levi’s bootcut jeans and a brown trench coat are the universal love language.

It’s less about stealing style and more about sharing it. Maybe even rewriting what style means for women as they age—less “I could never wear this anymore” and more “still got it.”

Still, I won’t lie: it’s a little disorienting. I used to shop to stand out. Now I’m wondering if we’re just becoming fashion twins, or if the algorithm is the real stylist here, making sure we’re both stuck in the same style loop.

If this weekend taught me anything, it’s this: next time it happens, don’t freak out.

Take it as a compliment.

You’ve hit the style sweet spot: not too trendy, not too old: just cool enough that even your mum wants in.

Or maybe, she got there first. And you’re just finally catching up.

I’m living on my own for the first time ever in my life, and while I shouldn’t really divulge that information on the internet, what with all the ‘crazy people’ out there, I need tell someone it’s odd. Not in a ‘I think I’m going mad’ way, but in a ‘why is the fridge suddenly the loudest thing in my life?’ kind of way.

For clarification, my studio is really nice. Pretty high ceilings, spacious enough, cosy. and decent furniture. So there’s no complaints there, especially since I have decorated it now.

The main problem is my lack of social interaction.

I’ve spoken to exactly one person today. Two if you count the barista who only grunted as he passed me my tea. The other was a cashier called Elaine who asked if I wanted a bag (I didn't , I’d actually been really prepared with a bag for life).

And yeah, I know: it’s literally only night two. nobody expects to have a thriving social life by now. Except me apparently.

I moved here not knowing anyone, apart from two boys from home who are now going into first year and definitely wouldn’t want to cramp their style with a 22 year old like me. I have no contacts here, but still felt slightly offended every time I saw a group of twenty-somethings walking around today, like they had personally excluded me from their plans.

I had to remind myself, ‘babes, you don’t even know them,’ about ten times today, at least.

Maybe it’s social media. Maybe it’s muscle memory from undergrad, gagging for a drink and a dance on a Friday night. Maybe it’s because when I moved to Exeter, my social circle was formed on day one, and stayed neatly intact for nearly three years. Friendship has always just been there.

People have always said that I’m quite good at adapting. I moved schools more than the average person. Moved cities. Moved jobs. Travelled solo for three months. Made friends fast in all of these places. But there’s something about being an adult in a brand-new place that makes you feel like the last person picked in PE, just with less cystic acne and no braces.

So, here I am. Writing it all out at 10pm on a Friday night, in my dressing gown, trying to sleep.

It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ve got time. And a really great few cushions and lamps if all else fails.

Currently reading: So Thrilled For You by Holly Bourne

Ugh!!! This book. Just so amazing. It’s from the perspectives of 4 different women who became friends at university, and follows their reunion at one of the women’s baby shower. Focuses on themes like motherhood, friendship, sex, and how people’s lives change in their 30s.

• Caroline O’Donoghue: The Rachel Incident and Promising Young Women

  Both of these books are really good. Probably not wise to attempt if you’re in a reading slump, but I think you’d like it if you’ve read anything like Cleopatra and Frankenstein or My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

• Any Carley Fortune book

  So so good for summer. Love a good romance.

  

• Any Elsie Silver book

  My friend called her books wattpad on steroids but honestly, I don’t care. I love reading about hot cowboys.

• Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

  Let me sum it up: you know how Ted Bundy killed sorority girls? This is from the perspectives of women who knew the victims and their battle for justice. I loved this book, but had to take a few breaks as it was quite intense at times.

• Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

  No words. INSANE.

  

• Summer in the City by Alex Aster

  The perfect book to get you out of a slump.