The Distance That Holds Us

Enjoying solo travel in Positano, Italy

Even in love, I’ve never stopped needing to be my own person first. And I think that is why I have struggled to understand how to share my life with someone without losing parts of myself in the process. 

At a cellular level, I have always felt that my sense of self expands to variety and newness. So, in the time that I chose to be single, it was nothing for me to travel to another city, state or country if the whim struck me. Because when you are unattached, you are never leaving anything behind, and I relished in what that type of freedom afforded me. 

But even as self-reliant as I am, I was just as vulnerable to the age-old paradox of longing for independence while still craving the intimacy that only exists within a relationship. When I did finally meet someone now four years ago, I surrendered to the partnership. Over time, the edges of myself started to blur into him, as often happens in the daily routine of togetherness. 

When I left my job last summer and took six months off, I knew that part of what I needed to do was rediscover who I was—not just as someone supporting another person at work, and not just in relation to my partner, but as myself, even while still being in that relationship. I knew this trip would be different though, because I would be leaving someone I loved behind. But sometimes the most intimate thing you can do is let each other go—temporarily, intentionally. 

So, I left home for 32 days and traveled—alone. 

For some people, the idea of traveling without your partner seems indulgent, even selfish. There is a belief that the center cannot hold in the space between two people if they are apart for too long. I do not subscribe to that theory, and I always knew I would need the type of love that autonomy could exist inside of. 

Leaving wasn’t about running away or chasing something greater—it was about returning to myself and stepping fully into my life, instead of living on the periphery. People often assume that the desire to travel alone is about the other person, but it was about searching for what it meant to be me. Because we’re all looking for answers—and sometimes, the only way to hear them is in the silence of our solitude.

For those 32 days my time was my own to do what I pleased. ​I wandered around museums for longer than most would want to. I satisfied my interests in literary history and landmarks that I realize few would care about.​ I thought deeply about my experiences and took time to write about them. It was the exact trip I wanted, and the only responsibility I had was to myself. 

I never found the act of traveling alone to be particularly extraordinary—but the number of comments and questions I received from complete strangers told me otherwise. It revealed just how deeply we still confine ourselves to boxes of right and wrong, of how things should be—measured against standards that were never clearly defined in the first place.

There’s still a discomfort when a woman goes off script. A sense that we’re too fragile to exist in the world on our own. 

But relationships can exist in many forms—they don’t have to live within the rigidness of others’ beliefs. They’re more elastic than we think. Sometimes we need distance, but we can always return to each other. 

Everything doesn’t have to be binary. It isn’t either/or—it’s and. There will be trips I take with others, and there will always be space for cherished solo travel, where I can return to myself. The world insists we belong to others, but sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is belong to ourselves.