On travelling alone

Travel has never quite known what to do with a woman on her own. The double room comes with its single supplement, which is essentially a fine for arriving unaccompanied, the best table is being held for a couple who booked after you did, and the brochures are wall-to-wall pairs laughing on beaches. Somewhere in all of it sits a quiet assumption that a woman alone is a woman waiting for someone to turn up.

If you are solo in life, whether by choice, by chance or through one of those reroutings life makes without consulting anyone, none of this will be news. You already navigate a world of plus-ones, even-numbered dinner tables and invitations that assume a guest. Travel doesn't invent the assumption; it just prints it on the invoice.

Small wonder so many women quietly file the whole idea away under someday. It is rarely a lack of wanting, the wanting is usually there, and has been for years, but the picture of a holiday tends to arrive with two people already in it, and stepping into it alone can feel like turning up at a party where everyone else knows the steps.

The fear deserves an honest hearing, because it exists and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Some of it is practical, the sensible caution any woman carries about unfamiliar streets after dark, and that part deserves proper planning rather than a pep talk. The rest is mostly about other people: what the couples at the next table will think, whether the waiter will pity you, whether being alone in a beautiful place announces that something has gone wrong in your life. Sit with it a little longer and you find the last layer, which is the fear of your own company, of whether you will be enough for yourself for a whole week, with nobody to perform for. That one, as it turns out, is the best reason of all to go.

What actually happens is far more ordinary, and far better. You order what you actually want rather than the sensible option, and you eat it slowly while the square fills up in the evening light, with nobody across the table getting bored or eyeing the bill. You see more, too without conversation to hold up, the place itself comes forward, the light and the half-understood language and the small dramas of other people's mornings, and you notice you are paying a quality of attention that company rarely leaves room for. Your days answer entirely to your own judgement, stay another hour or move on, the museum or the market, this train or the later one, and although that sounds like nothing, it has probably been years since a whole day answered to nobody but you. Deciding turns out to be a muscle: it aches at first, then it strengthens, and the strength comes home in your suitcase.

None of it needs doing in one heroic leap, either. There is a middle ground now that barely existed a generation ago: small-group tours full of other people travelling alone, where dinner is shared but the room is your own; home swaps through the likes of Kindred, which land you in a real neighbourhood rather than a resort designed around couples; walking holidays, retreats, or simply a night in a city two hours away. Equally, you can skip the scaffolding altogether and take the plunge. The format matters far less than knowing the options exist and require nobody's sign-off but your own.

This is not, for the record, an Eat Pray Love situation. Nobody is required to find themselves, come home transformed, or fall in love with someone picturesque in a vineyard. Some evenings will be lonely, the second night often dips, and it helps to know that in advance, the way you would pack for weather, but you can be lonely for an hour and still be exactly where you want to be. The two feelings sit together abroad much as they do at home, and there is a certain relief in a version of solo life that admits as much.

Courage for this sort of thing tends to be borrowed before it is owned, which is where we come in. The friend who went to Lisbon by herself and came back lit up, the woman who mentions in passing the walking trip she takes alone every autumn as though it were the most natural thing in the world; every one of those stories makes the next woman's booking a little easier. If you have travelled alone, say so, and tell the true version, awkward first dinner included. You will not know who was listening, or what she went on to book because of you.

Somewhere out there is a table for one with your name on it, and the view from it is considerably better than anyone lets on.