Look, I’m not going to lie to you: the first holiday I took by myself wasn’t great. It was 2016, I was 24 and had a spare week between jobs so I thought it’d be fun to treat myself to four days in Valencia. Left to my own miserly devices, I booked some cheap but inconvenient flights, and a room in the single cheapest hotel I could find. I also decided not to make any plans beforehand, and see where the wind would take me.
All of those turned out to be mistakes. Arriving at the airport bleary-eyed and lightly cranky is, as it turns out, more tolerable if you have company. You can sit down, have a meal or a drink, and revel in the sort of sleepy silence that only feels comfortable with people you’re close to. Getting to Stansted for 7am by yourself is just miserable. There are no ifs or buts here: it’s dreadful. There’s no one to cheer you up, and no one you can cheer up to distract yourself.
Similarly, a grim bedroom can become a conversation piece when you share it with someone, and it’s more likely that you’ll end up spending little time there anyway. Finding suspicious items under the bed when there’s no one to show them to is, believe me, considerably less fun. Similarly, something I’d not quite taken in at the time was that a solo jaunt abroad needed a tad more planning.
You’re the only person there, meaning that no one else will have ideas and inputs on what to do next, and there will be no lightbulb moment triggered by a seemingly random conversation. In short: my days in Valencia ended up being very, very long. I remember them as decades, unfolding maddeningly slowly as I kept running out of things to do.
This long weekend taught me an awful lot, though. Just under a decade has passed since then, and I’ve now become a champion of one-person jaunts. After Valencia I went to Venice and Bologna; I went to Genoa after that, and to Barcelona, Tangier, New York and Vienna. In fact, the vast majority of my holidays have been spent entirely by myself, and mostly by choice. I just love going away alone.
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I’m even quite militant about it, which is why I was shocked to see research by travel company Jules Verne showing that 70% of their solo bookings were made by women, and only 30% by men. Why is so much of the male population missing out in this way? Trying to figure out why men are less likely than women to go on holiday by themselves is some way above my pay grade, but I would like to offer some encouragement.
Maybe that’s what’s been missing: someone singing the praises of those solitary breaks. I’d be more than happy to help. I’ve been practising for some time now, to the point that I went on holiday with company over the summer and found it deeply odd. Did you know you could go abroad with someone else? I honestly think I’d forgotten.
Why do I like those trips so much, then? Easy! I get to do whatever I want. I spend the rest of my life, as we all do, having to consider the demands of work and my loved ones. It’s entirely bearable, but listen: being able to only care about what you want and fancy doing is heavenly. You can eat what you want, when you want and go for a walk if you want to and stay at the beach for hours if you want to or just have a massive lie-in if you want to.
You don’t need to negotiate with anyone, and if you suddenly decide that whatever plans you made before leaving no longer suit you then you can… change your mind. It’s fine. It’s allowed. No one is relying on you. Have ice cream for dinner if it’s what your heart desires. Try out the local McDonald’s even if you’re in a place with a terrific local cuisine. Walk into a museum then leave after having seen seven paintings because that felt like enough art for the day.
You are, in short, entirely in control. As mentioned earlier, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any drawbacks – make sure to bring enough books to read is a piece of advice I had to learn the hard way – but they’re all pretty minor. Most importantly, going somewhere by yourself will make you realise just how little you really see and experience when you travel with people.
Being on holiday abroad alone means noticing so much more about the place you’re in; listening to the language and looking at the people and spotting a million and one details which you would have missed if busy chatting to your spouse or friends. Travelling with people you know means never really leaving your bubble, and believe me, nothing will make you feel more alive than truly stepping out of your life, even for a handful of days.
