“My dream is to be by myself for two days,” she said. “And I don’t want to go to the south of France. Give me a roadie, a country pub, a book, an open fire and not having to talk to anyone else, and I’m as happy as a clam.”

I’ve spoken to countless women who’ve come to cherish their time alone. They say what was initially thrust upon them – empty nesting, relationships breaking down – and felt like a yawning gap is now a canvas for new possibilities of what they want to do, rather than what they have to.

It’s what I found when Chris and I rented a flat in Melbourne last year as a city bolthole. I was 56, and it was the first time in my life I’d had somewhere to go where there were no parents, siblings, husbands, babies, pets, plants.

It sounds dramatic, but without the constant hum of other people, I heard my own voice more clearly.

Late last year I interviewed Dr Julie Hannan, a UK chartered psychologist and psychotherapist, for my book. Her own, The Midlife Crisis Handbook, has since been ranked number six in a list of the seven best midlife crisis books of all time.

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“Solitude is so important,” Julie told me.

In her 50s, she values freedom, choice and autonomy. To honour those, before she married her second husband they negotiated they would do what’s called “living apart together”, or LAT. It relates to couples in committed relationships who live separately.

Julie and her husband live close to each other and spend between three and five evenings a week together: “There’s no one I’d rather spend time with. Other than myself.”

My delight in being alone doesn’t stretch to trying LAT – yet – but the beach house stint proved the value of giving energy back to myself instead of others. I loved the silence, where I controlled the noise, the pace, the atmosphere.

In that quiet, I felt myself again. Not someone’s wife, mother, employee, but a woman fully in control of her own narrative.

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.

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