I Like Solo Dining. Do You?

Do you enjoy eating a meal on your own? Perhaps devouring a plate of pasta while reading a novel or catching up on a TV show? Or are you more likely to seek company when you sit down for breakfast, lunch or dinner?

Last month, the research firm Gallup published its World Happiness Report, a hulking 260-page document that aims to shed light on just how happy people around the planet are; and what sparks joy and what doesn’t. 

As I trawled the findings, one thing that struck me was that, whether we eat alone or with others, can be a powerful determinant of happiness—and more so for women than for men. 

Gallup found that sharing meals appears to be just as important for men as for women in terms of how they evaluate their lives and how often they experience positive emotions. But when it comes to experiencing negative emotions while dining, women and men are not aligned. The researchers found that “sharing meals appears to be more closely related to negative emotions for women than for men.” In other words, “women who spend more time dining alone report much higher levels of negative affect than women who spend more time dining with others.”

Gallup drew no solid conclusions as to why this might be the case, and my own research yielded nothing conclusive either. But as I dug, I was heartened to learn that no, I’m not the only woman who seems to buck the apparent trend of feeling more glum when I eat alone. In fact, the writer Emma Gannon recently wrote an entire novel about a woman rekindling her relationship with herself after a breakup by, in part, dining alone. 

And Gannon herself, writing for The Guardian, extols the pleasure of eating solo. She also cites data from OpenTable showing that solo dining in restaurants in the U.S. has actually risen by an impressive 64% since 2019. So tell us what you think. Do you delight in taking yourself out on a solo dinner date? Or would you much prefer a table for (at least) two? Email The Persistent and let us know!