I am Khloe Kardashian. Not in the big lips tight dress unapologetically glam-tacky social media worshipping money obsessed reality TV show way. I’m Khloe Kardashian when she broke up with Lamar and started hanging out on vacation with Kim and Kanye.

My sister and I always, wherever humanly possible, whether living in the same country or on opposite sides of the world, spend our Christmas holidays together. For this year’s spectacular we delighted ourselves by settling on a no-present, cocktail fringed Asian beach paradise theme. Visions of our non-working, rampant wares buying tropical selves were cemented. Then, somewhere between nailing our destination and booking our flights, a surprise loved and welcomed new player going by the name of Serious Boyfriend washed up with a new tide and Bali became three. For us, an unbalanced human holiday count of this nature was not in question. For some people though, uneven numbers can seem odd.

On Tuesday night I went out for dinner with a female relative; we live in the same neighbourhood now.  There is a significant age gap between us and, irrespective of the amount of time I’ve spent with her during my adult years, she has always been an important and present figure in my family and life.

She’s fun, intelligent, sophisticated and painfully stylish. She orchestrated a long and accomplished career in the corporate arm of the creative arts industry among others and successfully managed to find and fall madly in love with the man she went on to marry. Generally speaking, one of those women you want to be when you grow up.

While we were lounging in her apartment having a few glasses of pre-restaurant wine with smoked salmon canapés, I commented on her black flats: Fendi she said. Of course they were.

Shoe compliments aside, our conversation soon turned to the current state of play that was our mutual Single Lives. We took turns plucking out idiosyncrasies associated with everyday life without a significant other: we can’t be bothered cooking anymore because you have to buy too many ingredients and then eat the same thing for too many days in a row; spontaneous lunches that morph into all night escapades are long gone as fellow-lunchees have to get home to husband and kids; the annoyance of missing a good bar opening you hear of that morning because wing-women these days are generally not readily available impromptu on a Wednesday night.

We came up with our fair share of similarities, but there is one big difference in our single lives: I’m on the way to meet my other and she’s already said goodbye to hers. In her own words, she knew one day she’d pay the price for falling in love with a man who was sixteen years her senior (after a battle with cancer several years ago, her life as a widow goes on today). I wasn’t, however, expecting to hear what she told me next, and when the case in point happened to her at the time, neither had she.

When her husband died, lots of her friends stopped inviting her places. The regular dinner parties and social gatherings that she and her husband had spent with their network of coupled friends over many many years were, apparently, no longer open for her to join. Why do you think that is I asked her? In short summary, it seemed her female friends didn’t want an available woman hanging around at that point in their lives. The fact that this particular available woman was a package of interesting, cool and attractive clearly didn’t help matters.

A single woman in a couples’ world: threatening, uncomfortable, or maybe just the displeasure for setting an uneven number of settings at a table, whatever it is, on a human level it seems a pretty poor state of affairs.

A little while back I started to think about a phase in life where I could have been better to a particular friend in this respect. At the time, I was in a whirlwind relationship while she was experiencing the good, along with the not so good aspects of being single. I remember other friends sharing their man torment and how badly they wished they would meet someone. I listened to what they were saying and talked and sympathised with them but the fact was, I really had no concept of how they felt. I’d met my boyfriend at nineteen and the relationship stretched on for a lot of years. Up until the point we broke up, I hadn’t experienced adult life without a boyfriend or what it meant to feel alone without one.

This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learnt from Single Life. When things become difficult, it is a lot more difficult dealing with it on your own, without a partner to back you up, help you solve the problem, even just momentarily distract you. Life is easier with someone by your side. This isn’t about being an independent or dependent person, its basic human nature.

Going through a period of being by yourself, whether short or long lived, makes you understand and appreciate what it means and all it encompasses. It’s something I am conscious of and will continue to be conscious of through my next relationship and any others that might follow.

The dinner parties Ms Khloe and I throw will always be open to odd numbers.

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