Marianne Power: how to build a happy single life

The Shift with Sam Baker

My guest today knows a thing or two about being single, and she’s hear to tell you that there’s more than one way to live an emotionally fulfilling life.

Marianne Power is a journalist who made a perfectly decent living testing things so you didn’t have to - mascara, spa retreats, you get the gist - until the decision to spend a year testing self help books changed her life in ways she’d never expected.

The resulting book, Help me! Has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies, been translated into 25 languages and been optioned for TV. Clearly something about her funny, candid, vulnerable approach struck a chord.

But as she turned 40, Marianne still had questions. Namely, why were all her friends merrily ticking boxes on the life to-do list and she wasn’t… love eluded her, so she decided to try the same approach.

In Love me! She looks at society’s obsession with marriage, kids and domesticity and whether you can love and be loved without them.

I met Marianne in London to talk about rewriting the stories we tell ourselves about love and sex and why there’s more than one soulmate for everyone (and, no,) they don’t have to be sexual. We also talked anxiety, growing up ginger, being childfree by choice, tantra and, the kicker, why sex is not a reward for being young and hot.

Find out more about Jan Day's tantra workshops at https://www.janday.com/

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Love Me! by Marianne Power and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

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