My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
I’m 32 and Just Learned How to Date Myself
By Maya, 32 — Austin, TX
I have a confession that sounds stranger than it is: until six months ago, I had never spent a Friday night alone on purpose. Not once. Not in college, not in my twenties, not during the three back-to-back relationships that carried me from twenty-two to thirty-one like a conveyor belt I never asked to step onto. There was always someone across the table, someone texting me back, someone whose Netflix queue I was folding my evenings into. I thought that was just how life worked. You find someone. You fill your time with them. You call it love.
Then last October, after my most recent breakup — not dramatic, just tired — I moved into a one-bedroom apartment off South Lamar with nothing but a mattress on the floor, a drafting table, and a very judgmental rescue cat named Otis. My friend Priya dropped off a housewarming basket: candles, a bottle of wine, bath salts, and a handwritten note that said, “Learn to be your own favorite company.” I stuck it on the fridge and rolled my eyes. I’m a designer. I know when something is a Pinterest quote.
But the apartment was quiet. Really quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you hear your own breathing and wonder if you’ve always breathed that loudly. The first Friday I spent alone, I ordered pad thai, sat on the floor, and cried into it. Not because I missed my ex. Because I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Not for dinner. Not for the evening. Not in any larger sense. I had spent a decade shaping myself around other people’s preferences and I couldn’t name a single thing that was just mine.
The First Date
It started as a joke. My therapist — bless her and her overpriced candles — suggested I take myself on a date. A real one. Not just eating alone at a restaurant while scrolling my phone, but actually planning an evening for myself the way I would for someone I was trying to impress. I laughed. She didn’t.
So the following Saturday, I did it. I showered like I was going somewhere. I put on the linen dress I’d been saving for some unspecified occasion. I walked to the little Japanese place on East Sixth where you sit at a counter and watch the chef work, and I ate omakase alone. Seven courses. No phone. Just me and the texture of yellowtail on rice and the quiet hum of the kitchen and the condensation sliding down my glass of cold sake.
Halfway through, something shifted. Not a lightning bolt. More like a knot loosening somewhere behind my sternum. I realized no one was going to ask me if I liked it. No one was going to interpret my silence or fill it. The meal was just for me, and I was allowed to feel whatever I felt about it without translating that feeling for anyone else.
I walked home slowly. The air smelled like rain and grilled corn from a street cart. I took the long way, past the mural on the side of the laundromat that I always meant to stop and look at. I stopped. I looked at it. It was beautiful. Nobody knew I was there.
Learning the Language
After that, the dates became a weekly thing. Tuesday evenings at the ceramics studio where I made truly terrible bowls. Sunday mornings at Barton Springs, floating on my back with my ears underwater so the world sounded like the inside of a seashell. I started cooking for one without feeling sorry about it — a single pork chop, half a bundle of asparagus, one glass of wine poured slowly.
But the harder work happened at home, in the quieter hours. I started paying attention to my body in a way I never had. Not in a gym-mirror way. In a softer way. What did comfort actually feel like? What did tension feel like, and where did I hold it? I’d spent years performing relaxation — face masks, bubble baths, the whole Instagram self-care aesthetic — without ever actually arriving in my own skin.
One night after a long project deadline, I ran a bath, turned off every light in the apartment, and just lay there in the dark. No podcast. No music. Just warm water and my own hands on my own shoulders, my own collarbones, the knots along my neck I hadn’t realized were there. I cried a little, not from sadness but from something closer to recognition. Like meeting someone you forgot you knew.
Around that time, a package arrived that I’d ordered weeks earlier during one of those late-night browsing sessions where you’re half-asleep and half-curious. A small wellness device from HiMoment, sleek and quiet, the kind of thing I never would have bought for myself a year ago because I would have been embarrassed, or because I would have thought it meant something was missing. But nothing was missing. I was just finally paying attention. I used it one evening after my bath ritual, alone in my bedroom with the windows cracked and the sounds of the street below, and it was — I don’t know how to say this without it sounding like more than it was — it was like the last piece of a conversation I’d been having with myself for months. Not electric. Not dramatic. Just clear. Like I finally understood what I’d been asking for.
Something Shifted
Here’s what nobody tells you about learning to be alone: it makes you better at being honest. Not in a confrontational way. In a quiet, grounded way. When you stop outsourcing your comfort to other people, you start knowing things about yourself that used to be blurry. What you want. What you don’t. Where your edges are.
I went on a date in January — a real one, with another human, a guy named Sam who builds furniture and has a dog named Hank. We went to a bar with low lighting and good mezcal and he asked me what I was looking for. I said, “Someone who doesn’t need me to be smaller than I am.” It came out without thinking, the way true things do. He smiled. He said, “I like that you know.”
I liked that I knew, too. That was new.
We’ve been seeing each other since, loosely, easily. But what I’m most proud of is that the Friday nights alone didn’t stop. I still take myself to dinner. I still float at Barton Springs with my ears underwater. I still light the candle on the bathroom shelf and turn the lights off and just exist in the warm dark. Sam knows about all of it. He thinks it’s attractive, which is nice, but that’s not why I do it. I do it because I spent ten years waiting for someone else to make me feel known, and it turns out I was the only one who could do that.
What I Know Now
I used to think “dating yourself” was a cope. Something people said when they were between relationships and trying to put a positive spin on loneliness. I get why it sounds that way. The phrase has been diluted by a thousand Instagram captions over a photo of someone eating cake in a bathrobe.
But the real version is quieter and harder than that. It’s sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what you want and deciding to find out anyway. It’s cooking a meal for one and setting the table properly, not because you’re performing self-love but because you deserve a clean plate. It’s learning what your body responds to without someone else’s expectations in the room. It’s walking home slowly and noticing the mural.
I’m thirty-two. I have a cat who tolerates me, a drafting table covered in half-finished sketches, and a Friday-night reservation for one at the Japanese place on East Sixth. The chef knows my name now. He sets aside the good yellowtail.
I used to think being alone meant something was wrong. Now I think it might be the most honest relationship I’ve ever been in.
The other night, Sam asked me what my favorite part of the week was. I thought about it. I said Tuesday evenings, when I make terrible ceramics and no one watches. He laughed. He didn’t take it personally. That’s how I knew he was worth the second date.
Otis, for the record, still judges me. But I think he’s coming around.
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