One year in London: Embracing the art of being alone

“I was embarrassingly hysterical,” a girl behind me shouts as she explains the story of why she broke up with her ex to her two heavily invested friends. “He didn’t even ask how my trip was. And he’s my boyfriend? My friends at work were happier for me to be back than him.”

As the girl behind me continues to describe her breakup in intriguing detail, ranging from their lack of sexual chemistry to her ex-boyfriend’s failure to introduce her to his father, I can’t help but think how thankful I am to be single.

And by single, I mean truly single. I’m not anticipating anyone’s text message. I’m not desperately waiting for a reply on Hinge. I don’t meticulously look through who is viewing my Instagram story.

Being single is nothing new to me. However, the past year taught me the beauty of being alone.

In 2022, I started my first proper foray into the dating world. A few months after graduating from university, I moved back home and worked a full-time remote job as an Associate Writer for CNET while living in my childhood bedroom. I graduated from school a full year earlier than all my friends, so the only people I had around me to socialize with were my parents and my great-aunt, who had dementia. Not the most ideal of situations.

That’s when I re-downloaded Hinge and matched with Hayden, an exchange student at Stony Brook University, a college only 15 minutes away from my house. I’ve seen nearly everyone from my town on Hinge in the past couple of years, so finding someone new, nonetheless someone from London, was exhilarating. We hit it off right away, so I offered to be his tour guide, my way of asking him out on a date. Looking back, maybe I should have just left him on read.

Unfortunately, hindsight is 20/20, so instead of ignoring him, I picked him up, and we went out to get pizza that September evening. What followed was three months full of Target runs, Noah Kahan singalongs, and New York food tours. We went to a Panic at the Disco concert at Madison Square Garden for our fourth date, the same night we had our first kiss. He was my plus one at a press event at a NYC jazz club for the launch of a Ghostbusters game, a night we both got too drunk and told everyone we met while in Switzerland training for the Olympics.

For my 21st birthday in November, he spent the weekend with me and went to a tailgate for a New York Giants game I hosted with my whole family and closest friends. He told me he would do anything to make me happy and never felt like he did with me with anyone else. We talked about what we would do together when I visited his hometown. He said he told his mom about me and spent nights opening up to me about his relationship with his father.

Then, three months after we first started seeing each other, he broke up with me. It came out of nowhere. I met him at his dorm building as he told me he wasn’t ready for a relationship…classic.

Exactly one week later, he texted me, saying he missed me and regretted what he did. Two weeks later, he told me he was repeatedly listening to “our songs” and strung together an incoherent sentence about how I was unlike anyone he had ever met. Of course, I fell for that. We continued to talk for the next six months and hung out (semi-platonically) four more times.

By the time he left in May to return to England, I had already committed to the University of the Arts London for my Master’s program, which would begin that September. As I dropped him off at the train station to head to the airport, he hugged me goodbye and said maybe we could give it a shot when I moved to London. That hope was enough to keep me going until I found out he basically had a girlfriend back at home.

Long story short, I dm’d the girl, Maisy, to chat about her relationship with him and clear up any misconceptions. During our four-hour FaceTime call, I found out Hayden told all of his friends that I was irrelevant to him, and he claimed to have only talked to me out of pity. Maisy said he told her that I was the one desperate to speak after the break-up and that he never cared about me.

That fucking sucked to hear.

I’ve spent the past year trying to process how I feel about the whole situation. When I first moved to London in September 2023, it was hard to resist the temptation to reach out to him. I hated being alone. All I could think about was him — how I wasn’t enough for him, how he made me look and feel so incredibly stupid and naive. I hated thinking that he was out there being happy, that maybe he and Maisy were still together, that there was a life he was living where he probably wasn’t thinking about me.

The first few months after moving to London were the loneliest I’ve ever been. To stop myself from thinking about the whole situation, I threw myself into dating.

In October, I went on three dates with a bartender named Matt. Honestly, he didn’t have much of a future ahead of him. He just got his first part-time job at 23, a fun fact I found extremely unattractive and lazy. He hardly asked me a real question about myself. On the third date, he came back to my place. We planned a fourth date when he left, but I never heard from him again.

After that experience, I decided it was time to enter what I call my “straight-man era.” Rather than investing myself into dates, I would use my Hinge matches to occupy my weekends and get free dinners, drinks, and coffee. I began using the dates as a sociological experiment to satisfy my inner investigative journalist.

My findings:

• Every girl in the United States thinks English men are so much better. They’re not; don’t let the accent fool you
• English guys are better at politely hiding what they want, whereas American men say what they want without actually meaning to say it
• English guys think American girls are easy (thanks, ‘Love, Actually’), any guy who just talks about the differences between the US and the UK only wants to sleep with you
• Saying that you’ve watched and enjoyed The Inbetweeners is an instant turn-on
• Pick a football (soccer) team and stick with it; if it’s a rival of their team, then it wasn’t meant to be
• If you want to start some controversy, tell them that the term soccer actually came from the English

Dating around was fun for a little while, I liked meeting new people and hearing their stories. There was the sexy military man stopping by London before he headed to Norway for training. And an Irish friend of my friend’s boyfriend who was visiting for the weekend but planning on backpacking Thailand in the summer. With every good date, I felt myself slowly starting to move on and have renewed hope for the future.

That hope quickly died, spurring my existential crisis, in January when I began seeing a guy who I absolutely couldn’t stand. Whenever I left his place, I felt worse about myself. Out of loneliness, however, I continued to see him for a couple more weeks before he left the country.

The last time I saw him, I knew it was time to re-evaluate my life. I realized I was seeing him because it was easier to see someone I slightly disliked, so I knew there was no way I’d develop any real feelings for him. Deep down, I felt it was better to be with someone I hated than to be all alone.

It was winter in London. I didn’t have any real friends. I didn’t have any roommates to come home to. All I had was the fading memory of someone I briefly saw over a year ago.

That night, I decided to focus on embracing my time alone. I had to stop thinking about the past and make my own community in London. If I’m going to be single, I need to embrace it — not just in a “playing the field” sort of way, but in a much more meaningful, more fulfilling way that didn’t center men in my life.

In one of her dating advice columns for the Times, author Dolly Alderton wrote, “‘You will have another relationship. Because nearly everyone does.’ The likelihood is, at some point in your life, you’ll be with someone again. And it will be lovely at times and it will be hard at times. And when it’s hard, do you know what you’ll feel nostalgic for? The moment you’re in right this very second. So stop overthinking it. Your singledom is not your entire identity.”

She’s right. Why was I spending so much of my time with men who could care less about me? I never needed this validation before, so why was I wasting my time chasing it now? Instead of viewing being single as a burden, I should view it as a privilege. It was time I took this time to build myself back up and explore new interests or hobbies.

I became more active in a Facebook group called the London Lonely Girl’s Club. I began attending brunches and workout classes; I even went to a twerking class. I reached out to other members with whom I got coffee and cocktails. Every Wednesday night, I saw a movie alone.

I went to a Hozier concert in Scotland alone. I took day trips out of London all by myself. I began journaling again; this time, it wasn’t about a man occupying my mind but about my career goals, my friends, and family. I joined ClassPass and began taking a variety of classes across the city. I asked my UAL classmates if they wanted to hang out and went out of my way to bring together a group of us for nights out.

Learning to enjoy time alone is the most daunting yet rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Joining new clubs and group events brought me back to my early days at college, where I nervously went to extracurriculars alone. However, now I’m not surrounded by thousands of peers my age.

I still have a long way to go when it comes to working on my trust in relationships, but I no longer feel uncomfortable with myself. I no longer feel the urgent need to occupy my time with people I don’t like and activities I don’t care about. I’ll go home alone and probably spend the next two days alone before seeing my friends this weekend. But that doesn’t scare me anymore. While I still prefer being with friends over the quietness of my alone time, I’m not eagerly hopping on a dating app and going out with the first person I match with as a way to occupy my time.

It’s now September 18, exactly one year after I moved to London.

I’m alone at WatchHouse Coffee, having just finished a book I’ve been procrastinating on and eavesdropping on those around me. As I continue to listen to the heartbroken girl behind me rant about her awful relationship, I thank god I no longer feel that way.