I'm Married. I Still Travel Alone.

The question arrives at dinner parties, usually about forty minutes in, usually from someone who has had enough wine to ask it plainly: Is everything all right with you and Chase?

Because I travel alone. Not always — we crossed the Atlantic together in January, and there are trips I wouldn’t want without him. But a good share of the travel that shaped how I think about this work, I did by myself. Sixteen days through the Panama Canal. A week on the Danube in the dark, cold, lit-up part of November. A long stretch of California walked north on my own feet.

And the answer is yes, everything is fine, thank you — and also, I think that’s the wrong question.

The right one is: what are you going alone to do?

The genre has been overselling the wrong thing

I want to be honest before I make my case, because solo travel has been marketed badly enough that a lot of thoughtful people have stopped believing anything said in its favor.

You know the pitch. You go somewhere far away by yourself, you are frightened for a day and a half, and then something cracks open and you come home a different person. It’s a conversion narrative with a boarding pass. Almost the entire published literature of solo travel is written to someone who hasn’t gone yet — the fear, the permission, the leap, the transformation — and then it stops. Nobody writes for the person on their eighth trip.

The transformation claim also doesn’t survive contact with the research. There’s a well-known finding that solitude has a deactivation effect: left alone, people’s high-arousal feelings settle downward, and not just the bad ones. The sharp lows soften, and inconveniently for the brochure, the sharp highs go with them.

That would seem to settle it against me. Except it isn’t the whole finding, and the rest of it is the most useful thing I know about traveling by yourself.

In the same work, the flattening did not happen when people directed their own attention — when they chose what to think about, or chose to be alone in the first place. Chosen, directed solitude didn’t dull the highs. Undirected solitude did.

So the variable isn’t company. The variable is whether you’re driving.

That distinction is the entire difference between a wonderful week alone and a long, gray one, and almost nobody planning a solo trip is told about it. It’s also why I’m suspicious of the advice to just go and see what happens. Seeing what happens is precisely the condition under which the volume drops.

I’ll concede the smaller point gladly. There’s good evidence that experiencing something at the same moment as another person intensifies it — the study everyone cites had people rating the same chocolate as more delicious when someone beside them was tasting it too. Though it’s worth knowing that the effect ran both ways: when the chocolate was unpleasantly bitter, sharing it made that worse. Amplification is not a synonym for improvement.

In April of 2024, from the deck of a Princess ship in the Pacific, I watched a total solar eclipse. The light goes wrong sideways. The temperature drops. A promenade deck full of grown adults makes a sound I have never heard grown adults make. I watched it alone.

It would have been bigger with my husband beside me. I believe that without reservation — it’s the one place the research and my own memory agree without argument.

I also would not trade having seen it for anything.

Both of those are true at once, and the second doesn’t cancel the first. That’s the honest shape of going alone, and any case for it that skips the first half is selling you something.

So here’s mine.

What going alone is actually for

Traveling alone is the only reliable instrument I know for finding out what you genuinely like, as opposed to what you’ve agreed to like.

Every trip with another person is a negotiated document. That’s not a complaint — negotiation is most of what love looks like in practice, and I’ve built a career on helping couples negotiate well. But a negotiated trip can’t tell you much about your own appetite, because your appetite was one of two inputs and it got averaged.

Go alone and the averaging stops. You find out that you actually want to spend two and a half hours in one room of a museum and skip the other nine. That you are a person who eats dinner at 9:30 or a person who eats at 6. That you like a hard walk in the morning and nothing at all after four. That the cathedral bored you and the market didn’t, and no amount of guidebook consensus is going to change that.

This is not self-discovery in the incense-and-journaling sense. It’s closer to calibration. You come back knowing your own settings, and every trip after that — including the ones you take with the person you love — gets better, because you finally know what you’re negotiating for.

That’s the love letter. Not that going alone will remake you. That it will inform you.

The hour nobody warns you about

Here is the thing the fear-removal essays get wrong. The problem is not the airport. It’s not the arrival, or the language, or the first meal, or the vast existential wilderness of a Tuesday in a foreign city.

The problem is six o’clock.

The day is fine. The day has structure — a walk, a room, a market, a purpose. Then you’ve done the last thing, and it’s early evening, and there are five hours in front of you with no shape at all. Read the honest accounts of solo travelers and you’ll find that same hour over and over, described in almost identical language. It isn’t loneliness exactly. It’s an unstructured evening arriving faster than you were ready for it.

Look at it next to the research and it stops being a mood and starts being a mechanism. The unshaped evening is undirected solitude — the exact condition under which the volume goes down. Your day was chosen. Your evening wasn’t. That’s the whole difference, and it means the fix is structural rather than emotional.

Which is good news, because structural problems can be solved in advance by a person with a calendar.

You can solve it by reservation: something on the books most evenings — a concert, a table you booked six weeks ago, a walking tour that runs at dusk, a cooking class, a bathhouse. Not every night. Enough that the empty ones feel chosen, because a chosen empty evening is a completely different animal from an unchosen one.

Or you can solve it structurally — by choosing a trip form where the evening happens whether or not you organized it. Which brings me to the part of this I have real professional opinions about.

Solo travel is a skill, not a healing journey

Nobody is naturally good at this. I wasn’t. The people who make it look effortless have simply done it eight times and quietly fixed the things that went wrong the first five. Here’s what I’d hand you.

Build an arrival ritual and never skip it. The first three hours set the tone for everything. Mine is fixed: drop the bag, shower, walk a deliberate loop of the immediate neighborhood without a destination, buy one thing — water, fruit, a paper — and find the nearest place I could get a decent coffee tomorrow morning. That’s it. It converts a strange place into a place where I know four things, and four things is enough to sleep on.

Pre-decide, or decision fatigue will eat the trip. Alone, every choice a companion would have split now lands entirely on you, all day, and by day four you’ll be spending more time on maps and reviews than on the city. Fix breakfast in advance. Fix the coffee place. Fix two dinners a week out. Ruthlessly reduce the number of live decisions per day and you free up the attention you came here to spend.

One anchor a day. One thing that must happen. Everything else is optional and everything else is gravy. Two anchors is how you end up executing an itinerary instead of being somewhere.

Book the room for a person who will be in it. This is where I earn my keep, and it’s the most underrated variable in solo travel. Alone, you spend far more waking time in your room than a couple does — so the cheapest room is almost always the wrong room. What you want is a real chair, not a desk stool. A good reading lamp. Off the ground floor. Not the room at the end of the corridor by the service lift. Ideally a bathtub. A window that shows you something. Those specifics cost very little and they’re the difference between a room you retreat to and a room you flee.

Choose a form that does some of the work. Some trip shapes solve the six o’clock problem structurally rather than emotionally. A river ship or a small ocean ship is the clearest example: dinner happens at a fixed hour, the room follows you so you unpack once, the logistics are handled, and — this is the part that matters — the social contract is bounded. There is a table you may join and also leave, without explanation, on a boat where you’ll see those people again tomorrow and nothing is riding on it.

The good operators now design for this deliberately rather than leaving it to chance. On AmaWaterways, whose ships I know best, solo guests get their own orientation tour at the start of the week, and some dining tables are set for five rather than the usual even numbers — a small, quietly brilliant piece of furniture logic, because a table for five has no odd seat. That is a remarkably humane arrangement for a person traveling alone, and it’s why I keep sending solo travelers to river cruising when they arrive expecting me to suggest a city.

Let yourself go home early. Rarely necessary. Enormously freeing to know it’s permitted.

The places where I gave myself the time

I’ve been asked more than once whether I like my own company. I do — but not because of anything intrinsic. It’s because I’ve given myself the time, repeatedly and on purpose, and that’s a practice rather than a personality. Here’s where the practice happened.

California, on foot. The Pacific Crest Trail is the least glamorous entry on this list and by far the most instructive. Days of walking north alone, where the structure is total — you walk, you eat, you filter water, you sleep — and the six o’clock problem simply doesn’t exist because the evening has a job. It taught me the thing this whole piece is built on: that solitude with a shape is a pleasure, and solitude without one is an endurance test. Nothing I’ve done since has been harder, and nothing has made me better at being alone in a hotel room in a city I don’t know.

Panama, sixteen days through the canal. I have family ties to Panama, which is part of why I went, and I went by myself. A canal transit is a strange and wonderful thing to watch alone — hours of it, engineering as theater — and a long voyage is the most forgiving format there is for a first solo trip, because the ship removes almost every decision that makes going alone hard. It’s also the sailing that put me under the eclipse, which is the argument for long voyages in a sentence: you are simply out there for long enough that the extraordinary has room to happen to you. The full account is here.

Colombia. The one I recommend most often and the one people are most surprised by. Medellín and Cartagena are two entirely different arguments for the same country — one a city of engineering and reinvention set in a valley, the other Caribbean, walled, and hot in a way that slows you down whether you agreed to it or not. Colombians are, in my direct experience, unusually good to a person traveling alone: you are read as a guest rather than as a curiosity. It is also the destination on this list where the value-per-dollar is so far out of line with the perception that I sometimes hesitate to say it out loud.

Costa Rica and Mexico. Both are easy places to be by yourself, for the plain reason that both are full of other people doing the same thing, and infrastructure follows demand. Mexico City in particular rewards a solo traveler more than almost any capital in the hemisphere — eat at the counter, walk until your feet complain, and never once be the only person dining alone in the room.

London, Chicago, New York. The great anonymous cities, where being alone isn’t a status anyone notices. This is an underrated category. A first solo trip does not have to be a pilgrimage to somewhere difficult; there is a lot to be said for a city that speaks your language, has a bar with a good counter, and lets you be unremarkable while you learn the skill.

A European river, in the shoulder or the cold. My own Danube week ran late November — Budapest up through Vienna, Melk, Passau, Regensburg, into Nuremberg — and it remains the trip I recommend most often to people going alone. The ship dissolves both hard problems at once: the evenings have a shape, and the sociability is optional and low-stakes. The Continent in winter light, markets at night, and a bed that moves with you.

The Rhineland — the middle Rhine, Rheinland-Pfalz. I spent grade-school years on bases at Bad Kreuznach and Dexheim, which means this valley isn’t research for me. It’s a superb solo region and badly under-written: the trains are frequent and boring in the best sense, the towns are small enough to walk out in an afternoon, and the wine is Riesling poured in family tasting rooms where a solo drinker is completely unremarkable. Castles above, river below, and none of the performance of the great capitals.

And an honorable mention to Las Vegas and Palm Springs, where I’ve spent a fair amount of time by myself and where the desert does something to the evenings that I have never fully been able to explain.

And two I’d send you to that I haven’t done alone

I’d rather tell you where the line is than pretend it isn’t there.

Portugal — Lisbon, then up to the Douro. The strongest solo-dining culture in Western Europe, by every account I trust from people I’ve sent. A person eating alone in a Portuguese dining room is a person eating, not a spectacle, and that single social fact removes the most commonly cited misery of solo travel. Lisbon rewards aimless walking better than almost any city its size, and the Douro gives you the quiet second act.

One Italian city, for a week, without moving. The instinct alone is to over-map — three cities in nine days, prove the trip was worth it. Resist it. Take Florence or Bologna or Venice in the off-season and stay put for six nights. You’ll be a regular at a bar by day three, which is the thing solo travelers actually want and rarely engineer. Motion is the enemy of belonging, and belonging is what you’re short of when you’re alone.

Notice what isn’t on either list: nowhere I’d send you primarily because it’s easy. Ease is a low bar. These are places where being alone gets you something a couple wouldn’t have gotten.

And the single supplement, briefly and honestly

You will be quoted well above the per-person rate a couple pays — often 1.5 to 2 times it — and it will feel like a penalty for your marital status. It isn’t, quite. Hotels and ships sell rooms, not headcounts, and the per-person fare in the advertisement was always a per-room fare wearing a disguise.

That’s the arithmetic. It’s not an argument that you should pay it.

The solo cabin as a category is about sixteen years old. Norwegian put the first staterooms actually designed and priced for one person on sale in January 2010 — 128 of them on Norwegian Epic, with their own lounge and no supplement attached — which is to say the industry discovered solo travelers at the bottom of a recession, when the alternative was sailing with empty rooms. It worked, and it spread.

Today the number is negotiable, seasonal, and wildly inconsistent between operators for identical products. As I write this in August 2026, AmaWaterways is waiving the single supplement outright on select 2027 Europe sailings — most stateroom categories, balconies included — and running a reduced 10% supplement on select Europe, Colombia and Asia departures. Both close to new bookings on September 30, 2026. Four of their European ships also carry purpose-built single staterooms with French balconies at the standard fare, no supplement at all.

I mention the specifics not because that particular offer is the point, but because it’s a fair illustration of the range: on the same river, in the same season, the difference between the right sailing and the wrong one can be the entire supplement. That spread is not published anywhere a traveler would think to look.

What I’d actually watch for is not the supplement but the two things underneath it: the operator who takes your premium and hands you the smallest, worst-sited room in the building, and the excursion or experience that carries a two-person minimum and quietly locks you out. Those are the real insults. The supplement is just math.

This is a genuinely good use of an advisor, and I’d say so even if it weren’t my job — knowing which sailing waived it, which operator’s “solo-friendly” badge is real, and which room number is the one you want, is exactly the kind of thing that isn’t on a website.

The last thing

I’m not going to tell you that you’ll find yourself. You’re not lost, and the airport isn’t a confessional.

What I’ll tell you is that going alone is the most direct way to learn your own preferences. That it’s a practiced skill rather than a personality trait. That the hard part is one specific hour, and that the research and my own experience agree on why: an evening you didn’t choose is the one that goes gray. Choose it, shape it, or book a form that shapes it for you, and the whole problem dissolves.

And I’ll tell you the part the genre keeps quiet about, because it happens to be true: the trip you take alone makes the trips you take with the people you love better. You come back knowing what you want. That turns out to be a very good thing to bring home to a marriage.

I like my own company. I didn’t start out that way. I gave myself the time.

And then there’s the returning, which is the part I didn’t expect to love most: taking Chase somewhere I first walked by myself, already knowing which side of the river to be on at six, which room to ask for, which morning to give up entirely. He gets the place with the guesswork taken out. I get to watch him see it new — which turns out to be its own kind of first time, and a bigger one than the first.

He’s never complained about the trips I take without him. He gets the finished version.

If you’re thinking about going alone and want a second opinion on where, when, and in what form — that’s a conversation I like having.