This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much,

much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk.

Hello, we were planning a dinner party.

Well, we'll need to find someone for Charlotte.

Is she still single?

Yeah, oh yes, she's very, very single.

How old is she now exactly?

Oh, she's going on for 40, I say, 40-ish.

And she still doesn't have a regular partner?

Well, she says she doesn't need one, says she enjoys being single,

actually wants to be single.

Sounds a teeny bit as though she's making the best of things.

Well yes that's rather what I thought.

Well I have to plead guilty to participating in a number of conversations much along those lines.

Conversations in which the single person, and that's nearly always the single woman, is reluctantly

allowed to have some degree of autonomy over their single status, but is in the end regarded as a figure deserving

of some sympathy, if not pity. But such brutish condescension towards the singles in our society is hardly an option if you're in the business. condesc too surprising to find that one of the more sensitive recent analyses of the state of singleness

should appear in the Journal of Marketing Management.

It's entitled the Abject Single exploring the gendered experiences of singleness in Britain.

And I'm now joined in the studio by one of its co-authors, Eiling Lay, who's a lecturer in marketing at the University of Lesv.

Let me begin. Tell me how did you define

being single? I mean who took part in this survey that you did?

...