LIFE imitates pop art.

It's why otherwise sane and successful women look to Cheryl Cole as a best friend and read Heat magazine as though it's a diary of peers: their shenanigans make our shenanigans OK.

Life is like a choppy sea: you need crew to navigate and sometimes that crew comes in the form of fictional characters. But for the single woman a decent fictional role model is hard to find. Bridget Jones, I'm pointing at you.

Helen Fielding, Bridget's creator, announced this week the lady will be back for a third instalment. You can't help but like Bridget but you wouldn't want to be like her. Sadly, this distinction never entered the popular consciousness in the way the character did and lo, the cliche of the Bridget-like singleton was born.

Fielding, speaking this week on Women's Hour on Radio 4, said her character will still be quitting drinking and smoking and "still be on a diet". Apparently she will be facing the trials of a modern woman. I imagine Bridget's distress as she Tweets the wrong follower and her tears as her blog is trolled. Will she be divorcing or trawling for a sperm donor or spending her days on Mumsnet perusing the advice boards? The mind boggles.

Fielding made a solid point during her interview. She said we have become "branded creatures" desperate for perfection in a way Bridget is not. Bridget is full of flaws, and Fielding intends to show "it's all right just to be all right". This is absolutely as it should be, except Bridget can only be all right with a man showing interest.

I enjoy the humour in Bridget but I always quietly hated her insipid hunt for a man, the way her happiness depended on having a bloke interested in her despite the men being the cheating, patronising Daniel Cleaver or the emotionally stunted, dull Mark Darcy.

Then, clipping along behind Bridget in a pair of frightening heels, came Carrie Bradshaw, another character spawned from a newspaper column. Life looked nice when Carrie did it, swinging through the New York sunshine with inappropriate men, smoking and brunching. Suddenly we all ate vanilla cupcakes and drank Cosmopolitans.

And now we have Girls, the HBO series, also written to feature a single-girl role model in Hannah. But Hannah, while sharper and brighter, still approaches life in Bridgetesque fashion, muddling around in middle-class privilege and hoping for a boyfriend.

Bridget, Carrie, Hannah: the single-girl zeitgeist changes face without changing character. Where do they get their money from, I want to know? Swanning about big cities with champagne lifestyles but never struggling.

There's a gap in the market for a single woman who buys her furniture from bargain corner at Ikea and assembles it herself, who takes the bus, is grimly sick after a night of cheap gin and has to stay in because the restaurant is too expensive. There's a gap for a woman who doesn't own scales and shops in Primark. Most importantly, there's a gap in the market for a single woman who couldn't give two hoots about whether she finds a man or not.

Life's a little easier when someone on screen validates your choices but I'm hoping the next single-woman role model is inspirational, not aspirational.