Soical by choice, Alone by Preference

I noticed her the way you notice someone who isn't waiting for anybody, which is a particular kind of ease that's hard to fake. She wasn't glued to her phone, wasn't glancing at the door, wasn't performing being fine with it. She was just there, out on her own, on purpose, the way I used to go out for years.

We started talking, and I don't know exactly when it turned from the polite version into the real one, but it did. Somewhere in there we stopped being two people passing time next to each other and became two people in an actual conversation. By the end of the night I wasn't thinking of her as a stranger I'd talked to. I was thinking of her as a friend I'd met. That feeling was real and it caught me a little off guard, because it's a feeling I hadn't had in a while and I'd forgotten how much I liked it.

Mostly, though, she reminded me of something I know about myself and hadn't said out loud in a long time.

There's a picture people carry around of the person who goes out alone, and it's usually a sad one. Somebody canceled. Somebody moved away. They're making the best of it. But I did it for years, and it was never that. I like people. I like the middle of a conversation, the part where someone stops giving you the headline and starts telling you the actual story. I like walking into a place where I know nobody and finding out who's there. And then I like going home to a quiet house with nobody in it, not as recovery from the evening, not as the price I pay for it, but in exactly the same way I liked the room I'd just left. Completely, and on purpose. Those two things have never once felt like a contradiction to me. They're two rooms in the same house, and I'm at home in both.

What I'd forgotten, and what watching her reminded me of, is why the stranger part of it works so well. Talking to someone you've never met may be the safest kind of connection there is. There's no history in it & a validation that you are heard. That you mean somthing. Nobody at that bar has been keeping score of my choices, and nobody has a version of me from ten years ago that they're quietly measuring me against. There's no future in it either, and that isn't a loss, it's the whole mechanism. Nobody has to check in afterward. Nobody's obligated to remember. It's a real exchange with a clean edge on both ends, and because of that, people tell you things. Fast, too, and unedited: the move that didn't work, the business they're two months into, the year they're still recovering from, the thing they're about to do that everyone in their life keeps telling them not to.

The part I've come to value most is that with a stranger, I get to be purely interested. When someone you love makes a decision, you have a stake in it. You want it to go well for them, you've watched them try this before, and underneath the listening there's always a little assessing happening whether you mean it or not. All of that falls away with someone you've just met. I have no opinion on their marriage. I don't need them to take my advice. I have no plan for how their life ought to go. What's left is curiosity, which turns out to be the best possible thing to bring to another person. So I ask, and then I mostly listen, and I've learned more about what a career change actually feels like, or what it takes to start over somewhere new, or how a person gets through a bad year, from conversations like that than from any book on the subject. People will hand you their entire hard-won education if you're interested enough to ask and quiet enough to let them finish. Virginia did just that. With smiles and positivity. Such a joyful soul.

I don't take it home as advice. I take it home as evidence. Evidence that lives run in a hundred directions and most of them work out into something.

That's what tonight gave me, and she didn't have to do anything for me to get it except be willing to talk. No one owed anyone a follow-up. Nobody had to become a project. And still, somehow, a genuine thing happened between people who walked in as strangers, which is supposedly not how friendships get made past a certain age.

So if you've been meaning to go out on your own and haven't yet, go. Sit where the conversations are instead of off in a corner. Leave your phone face down, because the phone is a door you can close on the whole evening without noticing you closed it. Ask one real question and then get out of the way. And give yourself permission to leave the second you're finished, which is a freedom you never quite get on a group night out.

You'll go home alone afterward, and that will be good too. But you may find, like she did tonight and like I did for years, that you were never really out there by yourself at all.

Dawn - Life Life Enrichment Coach

Master Certified Life Transition Coach

Learn more or book a session at LLECoach.com — and come say hello on Facebook, where I share reflections like this one.