Firstly, nobody ever talks about how expensive solo travel can be. Food and attractions may cost the same, but unless you’re staying in a hostel, the price of accommodation effectively doubles because double rooms are the basic building blocks of most hotels.

Even if you do manage to find a single room located close to town, it rarely costs much less than the double, leaving you slightly peeved at this tax on being forever alone.

The same goes for transport. Whether you’re renting a car or taking a tuk-tuk, it’s going to cost more for the lack of a companion to split the bill. Not a big problem if you’re in a city with metro services like Madrid, but good luck if you are in a developing country where public transport is still the title of a blueprint—last year in Sri Lanka, I blew S$400 (or nearly a third of my budget) just getting to point B.

However, cost is not what deters me from solo travel. What puts me off is the unpleasantness of the whole experience.

Every sermon on solo travel insists that the solitary wanderer is ‘alone, but never lonely’, a phrase that reeks of defiant self-delusion. In my experience, it is one of loneliest things that you can do, beating out even mid-afternoon binge-drinking in an empty pub or spending Christmas Eve in the library.

No matter how much you love art, the museum’s silence will start to stifle after 4 hours in the company of mute renaissance nudes. Nature-lovers might fare a little better, but what does one really do after the hike? While waiting for the bus, I find myself smoking one cigarette after another for the lack of something better to do.

My point being, no matter how well you pepper your itinerary with fun activities, there will always be gaps in-between when you ache for someone to talk to or just sit with in silent companionship.

This awkward loneliness reaches a fever pitch come dinner time, when you must make the most important choice of every solo traveller: Dine out or stay in. If you choose the former, prepare yourself for an uncomfortable ordeal where every iota of your body desires nothing better than to disappear or shrink from existence.

If you are Singaporean, you most likely travel to eat. This is a massive problem for those flying solo because there are few hawker centres abroad and formal restaurant dining is an inherently social activity. When you walk into a restaurant, ‘Table for one?’ always sounds like censure from the waiter’s lips. When you are seated, this awkwardness is amplified tenfold when you find yourself amongst a sea of contented couples or raucous families; you feel their judgment and curiosity burrowing into your skull by the time the waiter offers a menu to hide your face.

This is especially painful in countries where you are racially conspicuous. There is nothing more uncomfortable than walking alone into a restaurant and having half its clientele stare in interest while you try to attract the waiter’s attention to no avail.

More often than not, I avoid dining altogether in favour of room service or takeaway. I enjoy these takeout dinners, but it always feels like a cop out. After all, travel comes with a certain set of expectations, that you should experience new things, ideally in photogenic locations, and recorded in HD for the benefit of posterity.

Eating alone in your room and laughing at the absurdist drama of a foreign-language soap really fails these expectations on every count.