Late on a spring evening, at a friend’s place in Beijing, he asked, “do you ever wonder where all the good ones are?” We’d been talking about the joys of being single and, inevitably, moved on to the disappointments.

Through a series of confessions and wafting self-analysis, we’d thwarted the notion that our singleness had anything to do with us.  “It’s not that I’m not willing to compromise,” he said, “It’s just that I haven’t found anyone I’m willing to compromise for.” The same, I added, goes for commitment.

If I had a dollar for every time someone accused me of that wretched social construct, commitment-phobia, I would be sunning myself on a private island in the Mediterranean now. As I’m single in Hong Kong, the explanation lies either with that horrid phrase, or an even worse one, “man-eater”.

I am not a (sigh) man-eater. And I don’t have commitment-phobia… I may have racked up some impressive hours on my teenage feminist high horse, and I may have burned through my early twenties (all four of them) as an unassailable independent woman, but I believe in relationships. I even believe in marriage. I’m still on the fence about children, but I’ll fall to one side eventually.

“You don’t want to fall in love” is a ludicrous charge to levy at someone, a bit like assuming England doesn’t want to win the World Cup (which we really very badly do. Come on, boys!) Who would choose to live a life without commitment?  Snatches, even stretches, of time- sure, but a whole life? Not me.

As for the problem of where all the good people are, I could only reply, “We’re good ones and we’re single”.

Photography: Alexandra Leese