People often ask me if I get lonely when I travel on my own, and it’s a fair question. But after more than 40 solo trips, I’ve stopped believing that being alone and being lonely have much to do with each other at all.

Last weekend I was in London, mostly running errands, a teeth cleaning, a chiropractor, and then having a afternoon tea with one of my sisters. None of that is the part that stayed with me. The part that stayed with me was the Saturday night, when I took myself to see The Devil Wears Prada, the musical, on my own.

I wasn’t even sure it was a good idea. I’m not into fashion or stories about awful bosses, and the one time I’d tried to watch the film at home, I fell asleep. I went anyway. I had empty seats to either side me, a very tall woman directly in front of me, and a small voice asking what I’d signed myself up for. And then the lights went down, and the evening got better.

In this episode:

• The empty seats beside me
• Taking up space on your own
• Taking a book to dinner
• Alone vs lonely
• Onward

“Being around people doesn’t cure loneliness, and being on your own doesn’t cause it.”

Damianne

What are we actually afraid of when we say we’ll be lonely?

Here is what I notice. Most of us who say we’d be too lonely to travel alone aren’t actually afraid of being alone. We do alone all the time. We eat alone at home, we drive alone, we spend whole evenings by ourselves and think nothing of it. What we’re afraid of is being alone where other people can see us, e.g. the table for one, the empty seat to your right and your left, and the sense that the whole room can tell you came by yourself.

A lot of us were trained into this, especially women of my generation. We were taught in a thousand small ways not to take up too much space, not to be the woman sitting alone at the nice restaurant looking like she has nowhere to be. So we shrink, or we only go places when we have a reason that justifies the table. And then we call the result “loneliness,” when really it’s the discomfort of taking up space on our own, in public, without apology.

A subscriber named Irene wrote to me about this. After she was widowed, she took herself to a movie and then to a nice restaurant, and the dinner made her self-conscious, so she brought a book. The book gave her something to hold. And here is the key: she said she found later it was easy to go to dinners alone. If the table for one is the thing that stops you, I went deep on that exact fear in I Don’t Want to Eat Alone.

What is the difference between being alone and being lonely?

Alone is just a fact. It’s how many people are in the room. Lonely is a feeling, about whether you’re connected, whether you’re seen, whether you belong. And the reason that matters is that you can feel deeply lonely in a full life. You can be lonely in a marriage, in a group of friends you’ve outgrown, in the same loop of the same week you’ve been living for years. Being around people doesn’t cure loneliness, and being on your own doesn’t cause it.

It turns out psychologists separate these two things too. They talk about loneliness as the painful feeling of being disconnected, and solitude as simply time on your own. And the research, a lot of it from Thuy-vy Nguyen, suggests solitude can be one of the most restorative things we do. It calms us. It turns the volume down on our high-strung feelings. But this generally only happens when we’ve chosen it. The difference between solitude that drains you and solitude that restores you is, in large part, whether you’re alone on purpose or alone and dreading it.

I’ve watched this play out in my own life. When people ask if I get lonely traveling, I’ve realised that a lot of the time what they’re really telling me is that they would be lonely. I remember a neighbour in Japan years ago who lived alone like me and was lonely in it, always wanting to come over. I liked him, but I was enjoying my solitude and I wanted my own time. Same circumstance, completely different experience of it. One of us was lonely, and one of us was in (enjoyable) solitude.

How do you build the capacity to be alone?

There’s an older idea I love even more, from a psychologist called Donald Winnicott, who wrote about what he called the capacity to be alone. His whole point is that it’s a capacity, not a fixed trait. It isn’t something some women have and the rest of us don’t. It’s something we build. And he said the first way we learn to be alone is by being alone in the presence of someone, the way a small child plays happily on the floor while her mother is just there in the room, not hovering but present.

That’s exactly what Saturday night was. I was alone in my row, with two empty seats, but I was in the presence of people. The couple beside me, the tall woman in front, a whole theatre of strangers in the dark. I was alone in company, and that is a gentle way to practise. It’s different than a table for one in an empty room, but a seat of your own in a full one.

The gentleman next to me, a man from California now living in Houston, leaned over to say he’d just learned it was a musical and only come for Vanessa Williams. We had a lovely conversation. And when the show won me over, during a silly, joyful number, what I felt was pure delight. Just simple delight, on my own.

This is also how the evidence builds. Every time you take yourself somewhere and have a good time, you put down a piece of proof that your own company is enough. Every time you defer because no one could come, you put down the opposite. I’ve said before that the decisions that build a solo traveler aren’t the big ones, and this is one of them.

What actually changed for me after 40?

I would have gone to that show on my own years ago too. I’ve been to plenty of shows in London by myself. So this isn’t a story about me finally becoming brave. What’s different now is that it feels lighter. The what isn’t so different, but the how is. A few years ago I’d have braced myself, stayed in my head, spent the interval on my phone so I didn’t look like I was on my own. This time I leaned to see around the tall woman without resenting her. I talked to the man from Houston instead of sealing myself off. I stayed in my seat at the interval and just looked around, and it was one of my favourite parts of the night.

If I’m honest, what changed has a lot to do with caring less about what other people think, with stopping people-pleasing. At some point, I realised I can’t blame anyone else for my experience, because I’m an adult. When I was a child and pushed back on a no, my parents would tell me I could make my own choices once I was out of the house. I’ve been out of the house for a very long time. So what was I waiting for? I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t even think about it for a long time. That lightness is really about being present, about being in the experience instead of managing how it looks.

A small invitation

If something here landed, take yourself somewhere this week that you’d normally only do with someone else. A concert, a gallery, a show. Buy the ticket, put it on the calendar with a date on it, and when you get there, look for a few minutes when you can put the phone down and just be in it. Notice whether you feel alone or lonely. They are not the same thing.

The Solo Fit Quiz

And if you’re not sure where you are with solo travel yet, I made a short quiz to help you find your starting point.

Take the Solo Travel Fit Quiz: freedomlookslikethis.com/solo-trip-fit