I love to eat alone. I particularly enjoy just hanging out in my room or outside on a nice warm day in complete solitude. Maybe I’m just an introverted person, but I can appreciate being social while also appreciating times when I’m not social. I’ve come to the point where I don’t get worried about not having seen any friends in a day or a weekend. When people don’t answer my calls, more often I decide to just grab my phone, listen to some good music (shout out to Beyonce’s newest drop, LEMONADE), and take a walk all by myself. We’re adults, we’re in college, we can do things by ourselves, right?
Recently, as the weather has shaped up, I’ve taken to one of my favorite casual hobbies: people watching. But it seems that, when you’re a college student eating lunch outside by yourself, you’re doing less of the watching and more of the being watched. For whatever reason, eating alone on a college campus has become a bit of a spectacle. What could be weirder than someone eating alone? By choice?! Evidently, a lot of things.
But it would always get me thinking why college students always feel compelled to flock to the dining hall with their entire floor and will skip dinner if they aren’t accompanied by their regular crew. Because, you know, the need for the social capital of having a large friend group is more important than actually nourishing a basic need for survival.
Just a quick Google Image search of the word alone yields results you would expect: a lot of black and white silhouettes, people clutching their heads in shame or sadness… Seems like we have a positive collective perception of being alone, right?
I’m not researcher or scholar, but this poses a lot of questions about our generation. Are young adults afraid of the judgement of others? Or are they just afraid of being alone with themselves? When was the last time you actually treated yourself and yourself alone? When the last time you did something just by yourself because you wanted to do it? You’re not always going to have your posse to hang out with. At the end of the day, you are the only person who will be in your life from the beginning to the end. You should be taking time to get to know yourself. There is no sense in stressing over who is or who is not your friend. That was high school. I’d like to think we’ve all collectively moved on from that.
It seems like some divine contradiction, no one wants to be tied down to someone else for a large period of time, but people aren’t comfortable with being by themselves. If you want to contribute something to a relationship, whether it be a friendship or a romantic relationship, you need to know what you actually have to give. If you waste your time jumping from group to group, with no time in between to learn who you are as a person - as an individual undefined by any other person - then how can you expect any of those relationships to be fulfilling? Can you really be shocked when they don’t work out? Fear of being alone isn’t healthy because there are times when you’re going to have to be alone. Friends flake out, relationships end, and it isn’t always sunny enough to go on a hike with your bestie. When things don’t work out, it isn’t mentally sustainable to just bottle it up or to seek refuge in other people.
So take yourself on a date: get dinner alone, see that movie that you secretly want to see but none of your friends think is cool. Lay out in the sun with some good music and a nice iced coffee and just allow yourself to think. Figure out what you were, what you aspire to be, and what you are now. Relationships become all that more beautiful when you have two real human beings coming together as equals. If we just change the way we collectively look at “being alone” as this nightmarish, void existence, we aren’t just doing a service to ourselves, but to all those people who struggle with feelings of isolation.
Getting dinner by yourself doesn’t make you a “loser” (and why that word even exists or what it even means is a whole other article). Once you figure out that being alone is positive, that you deserve to be a full and three-dimensional human being, loneliness is anything but lonely.
