It takes a surprising amount of energy to walk up to a restaurant in a foreign city and ask for a table for one. Would the staff question my aloneness, I’d wonder? Would they feel I was taking up space? As I wandered the streets of Lisbon, I’d find myself mentally logging the location of any restaurant that looked like a good candidate: nice, but not too nice; busy, but not so busy the staff might resent me.
Often – too often – I’d make the wrong choice; find myself somewhere disappointing, in sight of better options, or suspecting the waiter was under orders to get my table back as soon as physically possible. “I do have friends,” I’d want to shout, when faced by a pitying look that existed entirely in my head. “I have a surprisingly vibrant social life! I have even, as inconceivable as it may seem right now, been loved!” I didn’t do any of that, obviously. I just ordered a meal in a weirdly broken English intended, on some level, to compensate for my complete and total lack of Portuguese.
All this, of course, is mad. People travel solo all the time – for work, for pleasure, for the joy of a moment’s space away from someone they love. There was no reason anyone watching would not assume I fell into one of those categories; there was, in any case, nobody watching at all. But having spent the vast majority of my adult life as one half of a couple, I have rarely holidayed alone: I barely know how, and was only doing so because of bereavement and circumstance. At times I felt the self-consciousness of the teenager who worries that everyone’s talking about them – when the truth, more depressing yet more comforting all at once, is that no one has noticed them at all.
This is all, I’m aware, making a lovely trip sound several hundred per cent bleaker than it actually was. Lisbon is a beautiful city, both physically and culturally – I imagine it’s how Barcelona felt, before the entire world noticed it and buggered up its housing market. And there are joys to be found, too, in travelling alone. Foremost among them is the fact that, with no work, no deadlines and no other humans to answer to, you are completely in control of your own destiny. Alone, there is no one to judge how much or how little you eat, or to complain that they aren’t hungry when you are. Want to see the sights, but prefer a leisurely walk to messing around with public transport? You can do that. Want to ignore the city entirely, and read by a pool for eight hours instead? You can do that too. The joy of being alone is that no one is going to question your choices – even if they do mean you end up the exact same colours as a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream.
There’s a joy, too, in the spontaneity that’s only possible when there’s no one to stop you changing plans on a whim. Sat in a park on my way to a gallery, I found myself wishing I could stay longer, then realised that I could and bought a pastry. On another, more energetic day, I took a train to Sintra and climbed towards a ruined castle on a hill, at every natural stopping point deciding to push on just a little further. The view from the top, a whole skyscraper above my starting point, was all the more incredible for the knowledge I had climbed there myself, and that I would not have done so had I not been on my own. (This is from some perspectives stupid because there were definitely moments when I lost the path, and this would have been an incredibly embarrassing way to die. But I didn’t.)
And yet. There was still an unshakeable feeling, when searching for places to eat, or when occupying a lone sun lounger at times when others went without, of taking up space that was not rightfully mine. The things that happen inside one’s head are no less real for that. And that view would have been prettier if there’d been someone there to share it with. Time alone can be one of life’s great pleasures; but it’s hard to fully enjoy anything one is forced to do by circumstance. Perhaps it wasn’t the imagined judgement of waiters that made me nervous. Perhaps it was the empty chair opposite.
[See also: Why the Canary Islands revolted against British tourists]
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