Solo Travel

and the fear of loneliness

Behold the empowering nature of Solo Travel! Read the Top Ten Destination for Solo Travelers lists. The Solo Traveler’s Guide to Puerto Rico. To Europe. To the Equator. How to Solo Travel Like a Boss. Welcome to the Year Of the Solo Traveler. Solo Travel in Style!

We’re talking about women, of course. Women are solo travelers. Men who travel by themselves are enigmatic lone wolves. Intrepid, Odysseus-like heroes. Men swing from vines. Men wear carabiners hooked to their belt loops. Men carry knives to skin their own squirrels.

I take no issue with solo travel (it describes most of the traveling I’ve done), just with the verbiage and its subtext. The gender-based assumptions. The condescension. The sterilizing of the dangers women face in the world. The alleged reclaiming of loneliness, as if parties of one have taken back the night.

Anything advertised to women makes me squint in suspicion; some motive, something sinister, is hiding beneath the bed. (Speaking of which, a flight attendant on TikTok recently urged solo travelers to, upon entering a hotel room, toss a water bottle under the bed, making sure it comes out the other side, lest someone is stowed away under there.)

What I’m doing, at the risk of sounding like a Tin Foil Hatter, is calling solo travel an industry plot: Airlines, cruise lines, resorts, etc. aim to assuage women’s fears of traveling alone because, once pacified, we’ll buy the Solo Traveler package at that hotel; we’ll book a Solomoon; we’ll take a Solo Traveler cruise. We’re not singles, that humiliating moniker of old. We’ll solo-travel you all night long. We’ll eat-pray-love in a solo-traveler conga line. We’ll solo travel ‘til we drop.

Solo is, of course, more dignified than alone. Alone is a desperate howl: alooooone. Solo invokes performing an aria. Soaring above the clouds sans co-pilot. If you’re flying solo, you’ll never be alone, or alone’s intolerable cousin, lonely.

Sure, the phrasing—solo traveler—hides the wires: You won’t be lonely, you’ll be empowered! On Instagram! Be empowered while sitting alone (I mean, solo) on the beach in a floppy hat, gazing contemplatively at the ocean. Be empowered on a wooden swing tied to a tree branch. Be empowered in the rain forest. In a foreign cityscape. On a boat. You are an independent woman in a bikini that rides up your ass crack. And sure, predators prey on unaccompanied women, but shhhh….look over there—it’s the nectar of the gods, a pink cocktail!

Not saying I’m above it…

The tourism industry moves in lockstep with the beauty industry: As solo travelers, we must buy products and doll ourselves up. After all, Solo Traveler, you never know: Out on the road, you could meet your soulmate. At the very least, he’s watching your Instagram stories.

Perhaps my skepticism about advertising to women has its roots in WOW! chips, which we were promised in the late ‘90s would make us thin. We bought bag after bag, crunching our way to hotness. I remember with precision the excruciating pain in my gut, as if a psychopathic potato-chip peddler was stabbing me from inside.

What on earth was in those things? Something called Olestra, discovered and manufactured by Procter & Gamble, FDA-approved in 1996 (the fuck, FDA?), still legal in our great nation, but banned in Canada and much of Europe because it’s, you know, poison.

Anyway.

The first time I traveled alone, I was 20. I was studying in Jerusalem that semester, and I spent my spring-break week making my way through Israel by bus. Most of what I recall is relentless harassment. At that age, no matter where a woman goes, what she does, what she wears, she will be encroached on by, terrorized by men. Every woman I know who traveled in her early 20s has a horror story or 50. One night, staying in an outdoor hostel my guidebook recommended (was it a hostel? I was sleeping on the ground), I woke to the owner stroking my face. One day while hiking, a man followed me, even after I told him several times to go away. When he fell in step beside me, I growled at him. It was so primal, shocking us both, rushing from my lungs like dragon fire.

I don’t have a target on my back the way I did then. I no longer look lost (even though, to be honest, I’m usually lost). I also no longer look 20. But plenty of 20-year-old women are ingesting the message that solo travel equals automatic empowerment and interesting strangers and tiny paper umbrellas and pictures of their bare feet (pedicured, obviously) backdropped by the shoreline.

It can mean those things! But it doesn’t only mean those things. Traveling alone, if you’re a woman who can travel alone (you can afford it, and you either don’t have kids or have grown kids), is inevitably dangerous sometimes. And it’s inevitably lonely sometimes. You will cry in your hotel room. You will wish someone was with you, watching those spider monkeys in the trees.

My friends who have kids talk wistfully about solo travel—how beautiful it would be to feel free, just for a few days, eating alone in restaurants, going to bed when they want to, waking up when they want to, exploring without involving humans dressed as Disney characters. What bliss it would be to have no one touching them, no one asking anything of them. They have a solo-travel fantasy. But no one advertises solo travel to mothers. Mothers’ targeted travel ads center “family fun.” In other words, no one’s getting what they want, just palatable language for what’s available: The lonely get solo travel. The sucked-dry get sucked-dryness repackaged.

As the therapists say, as the Buddhists say, loneliness isn’t the problem. Loneliness is the human condition. Loneliness is normal. Loneliness is neutral. The problem is how we react to it; the problem is our inability to “sit with it.” Maybe.

A year ago, I was on assignment in Nashville, alone, and my hotel room had a claw-foot bathtub. I’m no fan of baths. In every bath I’ve ever taken, I’ve wished that the tub was padded. What’s relaxing about lying in scalding water, bone to enameled steel? But still, I always imagine myself blissed-out in the bath. I’ve been primed by rom-coms, most of which include a bathtub scene—the protagonist submerged in bubbles, beautiful with her hair in a messy bun, drinking a glass of wine that somehow maintains its proper temperature. A bath, we’re meant to see, is the height of indulgence. Men don’t take baths, at least not in the movies. Baths are for girls. So I took a bath. Well, first I took a shower because what is grosser than being dirty in the bath? The title of my bath was Hot and Squirmy in Tennessee.

Nashville

A week and a half earlier, I’d met the man who is now my boyfriend. We’d gone on three dates in quick succession. Maybe it’s weird to call a man you just met from the bathtub, but that’s what I did. I called him up and we talked and laughed for an hour. At some point, I got out of the bath and put on the hotel robe. (God, I love a hotel robe. I should write an essay about hotel robes.) I lay on the soft bed, too big for me, letting a pleasant drowsiness settle on my scalp, my pruny fingers, my eyelids.

Much is made of the idea that traveling is meaningless if “no one is there to share it” with you, but like the myth of solo travel, that’s cheesy and unimaginative. Traveling alone, like traveling with someone, has both its pleasures and its pitfalls. I love traveling by myself. But I also love knowing that someone’s back home, waiting to hear my stories.

Love,

Diana

P.S. A prompt: Write about the most impactful thing that’s happened to you while traveling by yourself.

P.P.S. Do you prefer to travel alone or accompanied? Let me know in the comments!