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I am crouching with a tall paper bag over my head, with holes cut out for eyes, nose and mouth, while sniffing a stranger’s hairy armpit. All the faces around me are equally obscured by paper bags, and each is inhaling the scent of underarms; we look for all the world like a very niche branch of the Ku Klux Klan.
This is not a gathering of white supremacists or strange fetishists, but an ultra–modern speed-dating night called Romancing the Armpit, and I am here to find love. Aged 35, never married, and alone for nearly two years, I am far from an anomaly: there are now more single British women than ever before. The official figures show that 43 per cent of women under the age of 50 have never been married, more than twice the proportion a generation ago, and there are more women living alone now in their thirties than in any previous era.
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