The Man Who Ate Alone on Purpose

There was a man, otherwise ordinary, who decided — for reasons he could not fully articulate to his friends — to eat dinner alone in a restaurant every Wednesday for a year. He was not lonely. He had, if anything, too many social engagements. He was not researching a book. He simply had a suspicion that adult life had become, in his particular case, a series of rooms full of other people's voices, and that he had lost track of the sound of his own thinking somewhere between the office and the group chat.

The first Wednesday was excruciating. He asked, more than once, whether he could take the table by the window; the window, he had convinced himself, would supply the necessary alibi of scenery. He brought a book. He brought his phone. He brought a notebook, in case he had a business idea. He read four pages, checked his phone eleven times, wrote nothing in the notebook, and left the restaurant feeling as if he had failed a small examination.

The second Wednesday was worse. He forgot the book. He was left, for approximately forty-five minutes between order and pudding, with only himself for company, which turned out to be a person he had not been formally introduced to in years. The person had a lot to say. Most of it was about work. Some of it was about things he had told nobody, including himself, since roughly 2019.

By the seventh Wednesday he had stopped bringing anything to the table but his own mind. By the twelfth he had, without noticing, started to look forward to the evening. His friends assumed he was seeing someone. Technically he was; he was seeing, for the first time in a long time, himself. He had things to say to the man across the table. The man across the table, it turned out, had been waiting a long time to be spoken to.

Toward the end of the year, the waiter — who had come to regard him as a mild eccentric — asked whether the whole business had been worth it. The man considered. He said, in a tone that surprised them both, that he had spent most of his adult life being interesting to other people, and had used the year to become, at last, interesting to himself. The waiter nodded gravely and brought him the bill.

You do not need to eat alone for a year. You may not even need to eat alone at all. But you might, once in a while, do the small, faintly comic thing that removes every plausible distraction — the book, the phone, the friend, the podcast — and puts you across a small table from the one person you have been avoiding since your late twenties. He is, on the whole, quite good company. He has been waiting. Order the fish. Ask him how he has been.