escort diary® of Jolie: On taking myself out
I love take myself on dates.
Not occasionally, not as a consolation for a cancelled plan or a night where nobody called, but deliberately, with intention, with a dress I chose carefully and makeup I applied slowly and the particular energy of a woman who is not filling time but spending it, on purpose, on herself, and who does not consider this a compromise.
I get ready the way I would get ready for anyone.
This is important.
This is actually the whole point.
I choose what to wear based not on who will see it but on how I want to feel inside it, which is a distinction that sounds small and is actually the entire difference between dressing for an audience and dressing for a life. I put on something that makes me feel like the version of myself I like most, the version that walks into a room with good posture and a point of view and the quiet certainty that she belongs at whatever table she's about to sit down at.
And then I go.
Alone.
With a book.
I know that solo dining is having a cultural moment, that there are articles about it now, and social media posts about the bravery of eating alone, and people treating it like a wellness practice or a radical act of self-love, and I find all of this mildly exhausting because the French have been eating alone in restaurants since restaurants were invented and we never needed an Instagram movement to give us permission.
We just went.
We sat down.
We ordered.
We ate.
We did not require a hashtag or a therapist's endorsement or a table in the corner where nobody could see us. We sat wherever there was a good table and we took up the space that a person eating a meal is entitled to take up, which is exactly as much space as a person eating a meal with another person, because the number of people at the table does not determine the quality of the experience.
But I understand why it frightens people, and I think the fear is worth looking at, because it tells you something important about what we've been taught to believe about aloneness and worth.
The fear of eating alone in a restaurant is not really about the food. Nobody is afraid of the risotto. The fear is about being seen being alone, about the imagined judgement of strangers who will look at your table for one and construct a narrative about why you are there without company: she was stood up, she has no friends, she is lonely, something is wrong.
The empty chair across from you becomes a piece of evidence in a case you didn't know was being tried, and the verdict, in your imagination, is always she is here because nobody wanted to be here with her.
This is, of course, complete rubbish.
But it is powerful rubbish, because it taps into something very old and very deep about our need to be chosen, to be visibly, publicly, demonstrably wanted by another person as proof that we are worth wanting. A woman alone at a table disrupts this narrative.
I examined it, years ago, when I realised I was only going out when a man asked me, which made my French ancestors roll in their graves a little.
I start with oysters, always. This is not a preference, it is a constitutional requirement.
Oysters, natural, with nothing on them. No lemon, no mignonette, no Tabasco, no vinegar. Nothing.
The oyster, the shell, the seawater it arrived in, and my mouth. That's it. Six usually, twelve if I'm decadent that night.
And then the wine: a Chablis or a German Riesling (Bruno by Karthaeuserhof). Always one of the two, never anything else. I am aware that this makes me sound inflexible and I am entirely comfortable with that because I have spent enough evenings with enough wine to know exactly what I like, and what I like is a white that is dangerously fresh or sweet.
When you eat alone, there is nobody to talk to, no conversation to manage, no other person's experience to monitor, no social performance to maintain, no awareness of how you look eating or how long you're taking or whether the silence has gone on too long.
There is just you, and the food, and the wine, and the book you brought, or the people watching you do, or the many friends I've made with the staff, and the extraordinary luxury of having nowhere to put your attention except on the thing in front of you.
The book.
I always bring a book. I read between courses, sometimes I read during courses if the passage is good enough and the dish can survive divided attention, which is a judgement call I make on a case-by-case basis with the seriousness it deserves.
I read slowly when I eat alone, I eat slowly, I drink slowly. Everything is slow because nothing is being rushed by the presence of another person's rhythm, or by a notification in my phone that someone needs me immediately to put a fire out.
This is the secret, I think. Not that eating alone is brave or radical or an act of self-love or whatever the articles want to call it.
It's that eating alone is slow. And slowness, real slowness, the kind where you actually experience each minute rather than managing it, is so rare in most people's lives that the first time they encounter it they mistake it for loneliness because they have no other framework for being alone with themselves and not doing anything productive.
It isn't loneliness.
It is the experience of being sufficient, of discovering that your own company, your own attention, your own ability to taste and read and observe and think is enough to fill an evening. Not with noise, not with activity, but with the quiet, specific, irreplaceable pleasure of being a person who is paying attention to her own life.
I watch people.
I can't help this: between pages, between bites, I watch the room.
I watch couples on first dates performing the careful choreography of early attraction.
I watch friends who have known each other so long their silences are as full as their conversation.
I watch the waitress who is having a bad shift and the man at the bar who is pretending to watch the game but is actually thinking about something else entirely.
I get the bill.
I pay, with minimum 25% tip, as any former hospitality worker should.
I leave.
I take an Uber home because I always wear heels.
And I feel full, not from the food but from slowing down enough, with myself, after I put on a dress and went out and ate oysters and drank wine and read a book and watched the room. The evening was mine, entirely mine, from the first oyster to the last page, and I did not need anyone else to make it real because I was already real enough on my own.
This is why I do it.
Not because I don't enjoy company, I love company, it is literally my profession, and I adore dinner with my friends. But because the woman who is good at company needs to also be good at solitude, and solitude is a skill like any other: it atrophies if you don't use it.
If you ever see a woman alone at a restaurant in Sydney, dressed well, reading a book, with a glass of something pale and a plate of oysters in front of her and an expression that suggests she is not missing anything at all, it might be me.
