If this was your last year of single, what would you do? If you knew in 12 months, that you would never be single again, how would you spend your time?
Lets redefine what it means to be single. We’re making a list of all the last things we would do in our last year of true freedom, and we’re going to do everything on that list. Host, and seven-year single, Bree Steele also wants to make the day-to-day of single living easier. Bree will talk to experts who will help us fix the worst parts of being single: fear, loneliness, money, sex and more.
Welcome to The Last Year of Single. Coming to you live from India.
Follow Bree Steele on Instagram: @breesteele.mp3
Share your experiences, thoughts, feeling and ideas: lastyearofsingle@gmail.com
Host: Bree Steele
Executive Producer: Bree Steele
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
How to enjoy doing things alone - solo concerts, talking to strangers & why relationship expectations impact single life enjoyment
There is a specific kind of freedom in doing something entirely alone: no one else's mood to manage, no one else's idea of you to perform for, total control over how the night goes. Bree talks to Dr. Kris Marsh and Tayler Wells about how to enjoy doing things alone and how our expectations of romantic relationships impact our ability to enjoy singledom.
Kris opens with the story that anchors the episode: going to 26 Kendrick Lamar and SZA tour shows alone, across multiple countries, and the overwhelmingly supportive, admiring reaction from everyone who found out. From there, the conversation digs into why solo concerts strip away other people's preconceived ideas of who you are, why being alone forces (and rewards) actually talking to strangers, and how to handle the comedown when a euphoric night ends and there's no one next to you to decompress with.
Then the research: why people with high intimacy expectations of romantic relationships tend to enjoy being single less, why negative relationship expectations don't carry nearly the same weight, and why people with negative relationship expectations are more likely to be single — without necessarily being any happier for it. Bree, Kris and Tayler make the case that once you learn to actually enjoy your own company, you become genuinely unstoppable — because you stop needing someone else there for the night to count.
Dr Kris Marsh - https://drkrismarsh.com/
Tayler Wells - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/01461672261438616
Substack memoir — last year of single in real time: breesteele.substack.com
Instagram: @breesteele.mp3 @lastyearofsingle
Join the Last Year of Single Facebook community - https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1BthE53uod/?mibextid=wwXIfr (https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1BthE53uod/?mibextid=wwXIfr)
lastyearofsingle@gmail.com
Host and Executive Producer: Bree Steele
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
4 Aug 2026
Rom-Coms Raised Us. Are They Why We're Still Single?
Rom-coms, Disney princesses, and why we still expect love to look like the movies. I've always watched movies, TV shows, and read books as a way to understand myself and to work out what to expect from life, and this episode asks what happens when "what to expect" came from a childhood of Disney princesses and rom-coms.
Millennial women are the first generation raised with on-demand access to film and TV; meaning we absorbed the golden era of Disney princess movies and the golden age of the rom-com more completely than any generation before us.
Bree talks to Dr. Veronica Hefner, associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Dominican University of California, whose research examines exactly how romantic films and Disney princess movies shape real beliefs about love, dating, and relationships.
In this episode you'll learn:
What "happily ever after" actually trains us to expect from love and a partner
Why we keep attracting the wrong people, and how rom-com idealism can prime us for emotionally unavailable men
How childhood media exposure connects to anxious attachment and avoidant attachment patterns later in life
Whether it's still okay to watch these films, knowing what we now know
How to untangle what we actually want from what we were taught to want
Why we expect real life to imitate art in the first place
The genuine, researched benefits of rom-com watching, and how to actually be happy alone instead of waiting for a movie ending
We reference Sex and the City, Eat Pray Love, Bridget Jones's Diary, (500) Days of Summer, Serendipity, Notting Hill, and Sleepless in Seattle throughout.
If you've ever caught yourself measuring your single life against a movie you watched twenty years ago, this episode is for you.
Dr. Veronica Hefner: hefner.faculty.ucdavis.edu
Substack memoir — last year of single in real time: breesteele.substack.com
Instagram: @lastyearofsingle @breesteele.mp3
Join the Last Year of Single Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1BthE53uod/?mibextid=wwXIfr (https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1BthE53uod/?mibextid=wwXIfr)
Listen to the full series (best in order)
Host and Executive Producer: Bree Steele
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
28 Jul 2026
Friends are more important than partners - the importance of chosen families & how to create one
Close communities and chosen families are important for everyone. The queer and trans community has always understood this. For LGBTQIA+ communities, chosen family has never been a metaphor, it's been survival. When biological family rejects or excludes you, you build one.
Bree talks to Dr. Shanna Kattari, an associate professor at the University of Michigan and one of the leading researchers on chosen family in queer and trans communities, about where the concept came from, why it's been central to queer life for generations, and why every single person, queer or not, might need to start building one too.
Bree and Dr. Kattari dig into why queer and trans people often seem to be better at friendship than everyone else, and what the rest of us have been missing. They cover the real, researched benefits of chosen family, how to actually create one (it's a practice, not something that just happens), and the specific conversations required with people who've never been taught to prioritise friendship - especially coupled-up friends and parents.
Bree also makes the case that single women are quietly trailblazing this entire cultural shift, and talks through what it would take to bring the rest of the culture along.
This episode also covers what healthy expectations of a chosen family member actually look like, and why accepting that different people in your life play different roles — rather than expecting one person to be everything — might be the most underrated relationship skill nobody teaches us.
Best listened to as part of the full Last Year of Single series.
Dr. Shanna Kattari: shannakattari.wordpress.com
Follow Dr. Kattari: @DrShannaK
Substack memoir — last year of single in real time: breesteele.substack.com
Instagram: @breesteele.mp3
Email: lastyearofsingle@gmail.com
Host and Executive Producer: Bree Steele
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
Reach and audience
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Apple Podcasts (US)
4.9 / 5
8 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 36 / 100
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Quality
60
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
32
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