4.8 • 725 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2025
⏱️ 65 minutes
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I recently broke up with my boyfriend. Though extremely painful, I knew it was the correct decision - but I also wondered in my lower moments if, at 31, I was “too old” to start over again. I’ve never looked or felt better, but there’s cultural shame surrounding not having a partner after a certain age. A massive amount of power and freedom of choice comes with being single, and many solo people in their 30s and 40s are NOT miserable. We just don’t hear about it. Let’s change that.
This week’s anonymous confessors are straight, gay, bi, and gender nonconforming men and women residing in New York, LA, London, New Zealand, & Paris. They’re between the ages of 31 and 54 and either are currently single, or found their partner “later in life.” On the coupled side, we hear from two women who met their husbands in their 40s after 20+ years (!) of being unpartnered, and a 39 year old former party princess who met her husband on Raya at 36.
On the single side, both halves of a straight couple that broke up after nearly a decade together dish on the novelty of riding solo for the first time at 30; a queer man explains why straight people need to stop obsessing over monogamy; an American in Europe enjoys her freedom to take road trips with hot strangers she meets at parties; a non-binary contributor in their 40s feels this is the first time they can be their authentic self on dating apps; and a 35 year old escort wonders if earning her own “fuck you” money has made her too comfortable with independence.
Our contributors all acknowledge that a ‘single person bias’ is built into Western society: life is marketed to seem ‘impossible’ to navigate alone. But the sense of self-worth, knowledge of personal boundaries, sex, money, and total freedom that come from being single “later in life” prove that’s not actually true.
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Tales of Taboo is produced and narrated by Ali Weiss. Share your own confession - or love letters and hate mail - at [email protected]. Follow Ali on Instagram & TikTok @aliweissworld. Audio production by Chris Stathopolous and WTF Media. Theme song by Chris Stathopolous. Cover photo by Erika Flynn. Cover art by Kristen Montenegro. If you love the show, please take a moment to leave a rating and review - it's immensely helpful for expanding our network of anonymous confessors around the world. Thank you!
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0:00.0 | I'm Ali Weiss and I'm obsessed with the people, ideas, and experiences that break the rules, beat the odds, or are considered |
0:22.9 | socially unacceptable. Welcome to Season 6 of Tales of Taboo. Here's how this works. Each week, |
0:31.0 | I gather anonymous confessions from my listeners around the world, who've existed in elusive |
0:36.6 | subcultures, ventured down the road less |
0:39.2 | traveled, made serious mistakes, and taken extraordinary chances. Some of them call my hotline, |
0:46.5 | and others submit written confessions for me to read. These stories are raw, they're honest, |
0:52.3 | they're even downright shocking sometimes, and you might not always agree with what you hear. But they deliver the most incredible life lessons and ask us to consider why we're all so afraid to be different. My hope is that by creating conversations around forbidden subjects, I can help remove the shame that surrounds them, |
1:13.3 | and ideally encourage a more individualistic and less judgmental world. |
1:18.9 | And maybe, one day, we won't even want to be anonymous. |
1:24.4 | I very recently ended a year and a half long relationship with an amazing man. |
1:32.0 | My ex was the true definition of a gentleman. |
1:36.0 | He raised the bar for what it means to be a man who supports women. |
1:41.2 | He was kind, caring, loyal, handsome, fun. He took me for exactly what I am, all of my |
1:51.2 | colors and personalities, and he loved me for me. Out of the four serious boyfriends I've had this |
1:58.0 | far in my life, this is the only one that I have nothing bad to say about. |
2:04.6 | But something was missing. It was difficult to put my finger on exactly what, but I came to realize that I had reached the end of the line for where our relationship could go. |
2:20.5 | After the initial heartbreak and immense sadness of realizing that I'd have to say goodbye, |
2:27.9 | the next emotion I felt was fear. |
2:31.8 | I'm 31 years old and many people around me are engaged or married, have children |
2:38.3 | or are gearing up to have children, and have entered into the realm of traditional adulthood with |
2:43.6 | a partner by their side for support. And here I was, about to call it quits, with someone who, by all accounts, would be a fantastic |
2:53.4 | person to do life with in favor of starting over on my own. |
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