As I walked past a charity shop one hot day recently, a rack stuffed with slightly shabby, yellowing wedding dresses caught my eye.

Something made me venture inside. Rummaging through the gowns, I saw one that still had mud stains on its hem, and I imagined the happy bride posing for her wedding photos in a garden as she and her beloved swept through what they thought would be the happiest day of their lives.

Why had this dress, and so many others, been exiled here to a little shop in a minor High Street, already stuffed full of broken dreams?

For that’s what these dresses represented. No woman who is still happily married dumps her wedding dress in a charity shop. This collection, as the woman behind the counter confirmed, represented the spoils of middle-aged divorce. As she put it: ‘Who needs a reminder of happier times when your husband has run off with a blonde ten years younger than you?’

Amanda Platell offers a brave and moving confession about living alone after her last relationship ended two years ago

My own wedding dress, in case you were wondering, remains stuffed in a suitcase in the attic, where it has been hidden out of sight for almost 30 years since my own divorce. The only reason I haven’t taken it to a charity shop is that I wouldn’t want to pass on my bad luck to anyone else.

The woman in the shop wasn’t wrong in her observation. There are now eight million people living alone in this country — the largest ever number, as revealed last week by the Office for National Statistics.

Family lawyers put this down to the rising number of couples deciding to divorce in older age — the ‘silver splitters’.

While, overall, the divorce rate is falling, among over-55s the number of people ending their marriage has more than doubled.

Every year, this group bolsters the ‘single’ statistics by 290,000 people. That’s almost the entire population of Northumberland.

There are about 50 million adults in the UK and nearly a fifth of us live alone. Myself included.

It’s an astonishing statistic that conceals a reservoir of heartbreak.

There are many good reasons why you might choose to live alone, and not all who do regret their solitary state.

The actress Kathy Burke, who is single, said on Woman’s Hour that: ‘I don’t feel loneliness . . . I feel like I’m constantly meditating.’

But a substantial number of those people living alone will have ended up isolated through the death of a partner, divorce or separation. This report represents a sharp reminder of how lonely so many of us have become.

There. I’ve said it. Many of us living alone are lonely — not always, but often. There is no way to describe fully the emptiness you feel as you wake each morning reaching out for another human being but finding only rumpled sheets.

You can plan your day carefully and fill it with work and friends. But each night, as the lights go out, you are home alone. And yes, you do wonder, is this really as good as it gets?

I am writing about this because I feel there is an unspoken pressure on us singletons to be upbeat — the life and soul of the party.

Don’t get me wrong. I am one of life’s lucky ones. Brought up in a loving family, I’ve had a long, joyous career that surprises even me. I can support myself doing a job I love.

Like many of my fellow eight million singletons, I have what appears to be an enviable life. Many of us have one income, no dependants except maybe the cat or dog, and no nagging other half driving us bonkers. We have no obligation to please anyone except ourselves.

If we are lucky — as I truly am —we will have great friends, a fabulous social life and the freedom to travel wherever and whenever we please. It’s a life that works happily for plenty of people. For years, it did for me.

There is an awful lot to be said for being single in your 30s and 40s, a notoriously difficult stage of life for those who are married, often with young children and possibly ailing parents.

What single woman hasn’t observed, with subdued satisfaction, the wan, exhausted faces of friends who haven’t slept properly in their own beds for years? Those whose sex lives have all the spark of a soggy firework? The ones trying to summon up excitement for a holiday (if there is any money left over for such luxuries after childcare) at Disneyland Paris or a static caravan under a slate-grey English sky, while singletons are packing for St Lucia?

Exhausted couples who yawn at 9pm and consider a 10.30pm bedtime pure decadence, while you still have the energy to dance the night away. Women whose pregnancy-ravaged bodies remain shrouded in lumpy grey tracksuit bottoms, while yours fizzes and glows after a session with a personal trainer, the perfect preparation for slipping into a beautiful designer dress?

Observe all this as a 30 or 40-year-old singleton whose life still feels very much ahead of her, and you feel you were dealt the better hand.

Then comes the reckoning. As you slip into your 50s and 60s, and married friends relax into companionable middle age with their children grown and flown, you wonder if you were quite so lucky after all.

There are now eight million people living alone in this country — the largest ever number, as revealed last week by the Office for National Statistics (stock photo of a woman sitting alone on a beach)

I must confess that when my last relationship ended two years ago I did feel a sense of liberation, even elation. No more having to listen to his moans about work, troubles with his kids, picking his dirty clothes off the floor, fights about money and who did the most housework that week.

Suddenly I could sleep anywhere I liked on the bed, not be scrunched in the corner fighting over the duvet. No more earplugs to drown out his snoring.

But, I discovered as time wore on, there is no sadder thing than trying to change a duvet cover on your own. Nor the thought that you are making a double bed for one.

Forever in the back of my mind is A.A. Milne’s poem Us Two, and the words of Pooh to Christopher Robin: ‘It isn’t much fun for One, but Two can stick together.’

Where’s the fun in taking your iPad to the cafe on a Saturday morning to read the papers, alone? With whom can you debate the intricacies of Brexit or laugh about the latest Paul Hollywood love scandal? There is no one to squabble with over life’s great banalities, like whose turn it is to take the bins out, wash the damned car or do the grocery shopping. There is no one to blame for forgetting to buy milk.

When you live alone, in short, there is no one with whom to share the load — even if it’s just dirty clothes for the washing machine. Marks & Spencer can be a sad place when your basket is always full of meals for one.

As you get older, too, you will find that those in couples start to avoid you like the plague. They don’t want to hang out with their lonely friends. It’s as if they fear it might be catching.

And in some ways it may be. A ten-year study in the U.S. showed how loneliness spreads in social networks: those close to someone experiencing loneliness were 52 per cent more likely to become lonely as well.

And that can have a wide range of side-effects, including an increased risk of depression, suicide, cardiovascular disease and strokes. Alcohol and drug abuse are alarmingly prevalent, as are the threat of Alzheimer’s, and obesity.

The complacency of the coupled-up among us was brought home to me when news of the ‘eight million single’ statistics broke. I was sitting with a group of what Bridget Jones would have called ‘smug marrieds’, the only singleton there. Reflexively, all their heads swivelled towards me.

I received the usual benign platitudes and comments of ‘how great to be able to do what you want’, ‘no more cleaning up after him’ and, ‘you don’t know how lucky you are’.

There is no way fully to describe the emptiness you feel as you wake each morning reaching out for another human being but finding only crumpled sheets.

To which I replied: ‘You have no idea what it’s like to be sad and lonely.’ No one to come to the rescue when you drop the spag bol on the floor, no one to console you after a bad day, no one to go and watch the new Lion King with and fight over the popcorn, no one to share life’s joys. No hugs, no fights — nothing much, actually.

Who is there to decide at 3am that your fever will pass and is not sepsis or meningitis? How long would you lie dead in your bed before anyone noticed you weren’t around?

You may think I’m being needlessly depressing, but in the end there is one simple biological reason why we are not meant to be alone — survival.

The sad and beautiful truth is that we are hardwired to live in couples. We were not meant to walk this earth alone.

It’s a simple fact of human existence. A life shared is a life doubled, even tripled if you meet the right person. Think of the great works of human literature — Romeo And Juliet, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina to name but a few. All the protagonists are searching for love and an end to loneliness.

Perhaps I’m biased, as my lesson for a life of companionship and love was my parents, who almost reached their 70th wedding anniversary.

As regular Mail readers may already know, the real meaning of loneliness was brought home to me on the afternoon of the first Sunday in January this year. I received a text message telling me that both Mum and Dad had died the night before in Australia, just days after I had left them.

Of course, friends rushed round to my home armed with wine and sympathy. They could not have been kinder or more attentive on that day and the even darker days that followed.

But there was no one to hold me in the black depths of the night. No shoulder to cry on. A tear-stained pillow is no substitute for a real human being.

They say that when your parents die there is nothing between you and the stars, just emptiness. I now know that to be true.

And also that staring at those stars in the depths of darkness, alone, is the loneliest experience I’ve ever known.

Sorry, but I’d rather live alone than settle for Mr Second Best

by Andrea Busfield

The first time I encountered him, I was transfixed. Rugged and brooding, he showed me how all- consuming love could be.

I was only nine when Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff ruined me for all normal men. Lying on the sofa with a fever, I’d watched the film portrayal with Timothy Dalton. When I read the novel a few years later, I knew that if I was going to lose my heart to someone, this was how it would be.

Andrea Busfield (pictured) says she'd rather live alone than settle for Mr Second Best

Heathcliff’s love was bitter, greedy and eternal. I had no sympathy for his inamorata, Catherine, when she died. She settled for less by choosing a more conventional partner, and got what she deserved. I’d have waited for Heathcliff.

In fact, I’ve spent a lifetime waiting for him. But while, at 49, I’m alone, childless and possibly destined to remain that way, I’d far rather be single than settle.

Because while, four decades on, I recognise that Heathcliff is not the greatest ambassador for love, I can’t relinquish the ‘all-or-nothing’ ideal he represents. After Heathcliff came Mr Rochester, Mr Darcy, Rhett Butler and Ragnar Lothbrok from Vikings. In short, I yearn for strong, silent and fearless.

Occasionally, I have even come across it. I have been in love several times, once deeply, yet it has never been quite enough.

Should I settle for less, rather than end up on my own?

Never. You see, it’s the less that scares me, not the being alone. After all, according to the experts, unmarried and childless women are the happiest sub-group in the population. And that’s because our happiness depends pretty much on us alone. We don’t battle the same constraints as mothers and married women. And we don’t have to deal with the disappointment of living with the wrong man.

In his book Happy Ever After, Paul Dolan, a professor at the London School of Economics, looked at evidence offered by the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which compared levels of pleasure and misery in unmarried, married, divorced, separated and widowed individuals.

While men largely benefited from marriage, middle-aged married women were at higher risk of physical and mental illness than their single counterparts. Yet the belief that unmarried, childless women are to be pitied persists. Although I can’t say I feel stigmatised, I have come across people who find my single state hard to understand or accept.

I was once pursued via online messages by a former schoolfriend who seemed to think we would be ‘good together’ by virtue of us both liking to write. We hadn’t set eyes on each other for nearly 20 years. I tried to let him down gently, only to receive the plaintive cry, ‘Why are you scared of love?’

What to say? I’m not scared of love — in fact, quite the contrary. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Not a pale imitation I’ve plumped for out of desperation.

My first love was a man called Jimmy. He was older than me, worldly-wise and kind of brooding. But I was only 16, and in the end he seemed to prefer his women a little less naive.

Next came John. He was also tall, dark and handsome — and he came from the North. Bonus. But after four or five months of dating, my belief in the eternity of love was somewhat shattered by John’s reluctance to settle down. He was only 24, who could blame him? I dried my tears and decided to move on.

Shortly afterwards I found a new love — my career. There followed brief love affairs as I chased my professional goals.

It wasn’t until I was 37 that my priorities changed. I met my most recent partner while working in Afghanistan as a journalist. He was an Austrian soldier, and in his spare time he rescued people from the Alps. He was — no doubt still is — a strong, handsome, intelligent and remarkable man, and at no point did I have cause to doubt his love for me.

But five or six years into the relationship I knew I wasn’t happy. I had moved to Austria to be with him and I began to grow restless. Whatever we had was no longer working.

Children weren’t the issue, nor the usual irritations that come with being a couple. My disquiet came from somewhere deeper. Although there was love, it didn’t feel fierce enough. So I left Austria and, after a period of grieving, also left this strange state of half-happiness.

From what I hear, my ex-partner is now loved up with an Austrian woman. I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt, but in a way it justifies my decision to leave.

When Heathcliff returned to the Yorkshire Moors to find Catherine had married Edgar Linton, he didn’t shrug his shoulders and move on with his life. No, he married Edgar’s sister and made everyone’s life a misery until Catherine died.

Admittedly I’m being flippant here, but I do get the sentiment. True love doesn’t move on; it conquers or destroys.

I’m sure many will believe that I’m a childish idealist. But, having worked as a war reporter and investigative journalist for many years, I’m no stranger to reality — and that’s why I won’t barter with it in my personal life. There can be no compromise. It’s the real deal or no deal.

I look at my parents’ marriage and envy their devotion. They found each other early and I’m sure when they met, they didn’t expect too much from each other, which gave their relationship breathing space to grow.

In contrast, I probably expect too much. But no one has to wrestle with these expectations except me. And I’m fine with ‘just me’ if Heathcliff never materialises.