I'm Ready to Become Part of the Emerging Trend of Females Leaving Their Loved Ones – and Traveling Solo

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email about a media tour I would never consider. It was long haul and it was about fitness, so it would have entailed a lot of exercise and early bedtimes. Although I liked those things, I wouldn't have been eager to spend a week with other people who liked them. But even as I was deleting it, I started to wonder what that would actually be like: being somewhere new, without anyone to please except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Clearly, it would be incredible. So I said “yes” and it emerged they meant the different Zoe Williams, the one who is a physician and used to be a TV Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been clear all along.

So, without meaning to and without going anywhere, I've arrived in the most rapidly expanding travel group: the woman traveling alone, between 45 to 60. One tour operator reported that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people travelling alone, and 70% of those are women. They have households, they have busy social lives, they have partners, their world is absolutely lousy with people they could go on holiday with – and that’s why they (we) need a holiday on their own.

The more daring the travel, the more people are doing it alone. People are big into trekking, biking, kayaking, all the things that couples are least likely to be aligned on in their interest. If anyone is also tired of dragging teenagers to the world's marvels, just to watch them be on their phones and field questions such as “how much longer do we have to be here?”, they are too tactful to mention it.

The real mystery is why it’s taken so long to get here. My stepmother, who is completely modern in every way, would get arrested before she’d go into a European restaurant on her own, and even though I tease her for this constantly, I must have had a vestige of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.