I hear that one a lot, along with its cousins: “I’ll do it when I retire,” and “I’m retired, but a little extra income to travel wouldn’t hurt.”

So I built something for all three. Carry-On Careers is a short, hand-checked list of remote jobs that travel as well as you do.

Every job is open to applicants anywhere, posted by a real company, and suited to a woman with experience behind her, rather than a computer-science degree in front of her. I open every listing before it makes the cut. If the pay is posted, you’ll see it. If there’s a catch, I’ll tell you. (This week, that means a travel site that pays its writers by page views.)

This week’s list is free for everyone. Starting next Tuesday the 10th, a fresh list goes out every week to paid subscribers.

This week’s list

Checked October 31, 2026

Junior Editor, TheTravel (Valnet) Freelance · pay not posted · open to all countries · apply by Dec. 7

A travel site with 8 million monthly readers wants an editor for its aviation coverage. If you know an A321neo from a 737 MAX and can fix a dangling modifier, this is your seat. Junior title, so expect junior pay—but no one’s asking for a graduation date. (They ban AI-written copy.)

One caution: TheTravel pays its writers by how many visits their articles get, not a set rate, so ask exactly how editors are paid before you sign on. Apply →

Air Travel News Writer, TheTravel (Valnet) Freelance · paid by article traffic, not a set rate · worldwide · posted Oct. 30

Same publication, different seat: breaking airline news, confirmed with the airlines themselves. They want three years of news reporting or a background in airline or airport operations, so if you used to work dispatch or run a gate, read this one twice.

The catch: you’re paid by how many visits your articles get, not per piece, so a slow news week is a slow pay week. Treat it as a byline with upside, not a paycheck you can budget around. Apply →

Happiness Engineer, Automattic Full-time · $40,000–$68,000 (one global range, paid in local currency) · fully remote

The company behind WordPress.com has been fully distributed for 20 years, so logging on from Porto won’t make anyone in HR break a sweat. About six self-scheduled hours a day of email and chat support. You’ll need hands-on WordPress experience and a real customer-service background. Apply →

Fractional Brand & Editorial Director, Vulcury Contract · about 5–8 hours a week · “modest” retainer · worldwide

An AI-focused venture studio wants a senior editor to own its voice so the founder can stop reviewing every post. Small hours, small money, 90-day trial: a good first client if you’re building a freelance business abroad. (The posting accidentally includes the founder’s internal hiring notes, which tells you how badly they need an editor.) Apply →

French Linguistic Expert, Mercor Part-time contract · $50/hour · worldwide · work on your own schedule

Grade and rewrite AI-generated French for an AI-training company. You’ll need native or near-native French plus some translation or editing background. The first interview is conducted by an AI, which feels about right. Apply →

The fine print on visas, taxes and why “remote” rarely means “from anywhere,” lives on the Carry-On Careers page. It stays free for everyone.

Every Tuesday starting 11/10

Paid subscribers get a new list each week, every job opened and checked that week.

Expect the same treatment as above: jobs picked for women with experience that travels, any catch spelled out before you apply, a note on how each one works from abroad, and leads fellow Legroomers send in that never hit a job board.

Carry-On Careers comes with everything paid already includes: every feature start to finish, first dibs on retreats (First Class members), and Connecting Flights, our board for finding a travel buddy.

Already a paid subscriber? You don’t need to do anything. Next week’s list will find you.

Upgrade to First Class ✈️

Steph 🥂

Traveling solo is wonderful. Eating dinner alone for the fourth night running is less wonderful.

Sometimes you want company. Not forever, and not a whole itinerary of compromises. Just someone who wants to see the same castle and doesn’t hum on trains.

On the Find My Seatmate form below, tell me where you want to go, when, and what you want the trip to do for you. It takes a few minutes.

Instructions to follow based on your answers. And there’s no commitment to partner up. Just have fun!

Find My Seatmate ✈️

Would you rather meet her in person?

Then come with us. We’re planning small-group retreats: a U.S. getaway in early 2027, with overseas trips to follow in summer and fall.

A small group, a beautiful place, and nobody else’s itinerary. Designed for solo travelers and childfree—or empty nest—women taking the road less married.

Join the waitlist and tell me which season and which destinations tempt you. Annual members book first, before seats open to everyone else.

Join the Retreat Waitlist ✈️

P.S. All the Legroom helps Legroomers find each other, but doesn’t make travel arrangements. Start with coffee.

It’s often the first question someone asks when I mention a trip. For some people, “me” lands like I’ve announced I’m rowing to Lisbon in a bathtub. (Great contest idea, btw.)

If you hate traveling alone, or you’ve considered it but you’ve watched Cast Away too many times, you’re a big reason All the Legroom exists—to give you plenty of runway and support from air traffic control.

My first solo trip to France was terrifying. The first few weeks, I bumbled around like a Monty Python character. But when you’re asked to go topless on your first solo excursion, and eventually oblige, you develop a thick mortification barrier.

These days, when one solo trip ends, I’m planning another.

I’ve made lots of stupid mistakes, and I’ll make more. Good. That way you don’t have to.

Also, going alone doesn’t mean going unprepared. If anything, I prepare more, because there’s no one in the next seat to remember what I forgot.

Over the years—in Turkey, the Caribbean, Jordan, most of Israel, a summer on a dig in Syria, a train that never made it to Florence—I’ve settled into a routine. Ten things I do before I click book, plus a bonus I picked up at a French car rental counter.

Not one of them is “find someone to come with me.” But I’m delighted when I do have company. As long as they don’t make me follow a schedule.

1. I decide what the trip is supposed to do for me

Not where. What. Rest? Adventure? A reset after a hard year? A test run for living somewhere else? A trip has a job, and when I skip this step I come home with a camera roll, a flattened wallet, and little else.

So before I say yes to a trip, I finish one sentence: I’ll know this trip worked if…

Try it. Whatever comes after the ellipsis is your real itinerary.

2. I consider what kind of traveler I am

Some of us want to wander with no plan. Some want a museum and a lecture by 10 a.m. Some want a deck chair and silence, and some want new friends with no curfew. Some want a tour guide to the bathroom. And some want to be dangling off something by Thursday.

Booking a “Scholar’s trip” when you’re a “Restorer” is how you end up exhausted in Rome, resenting the Vatican. (Knowing your type rules out half the map before you’ve unfolded it. If you don’t know yours yet, see the three-minute traveler quiz below.)

3. I pick my pace before my destination

One base and slow days, two or three stops, or keep moving?

Pace decides more about a trip than the place does. The same week in Portugal can be a sabbatical or a forced march, depending on how many times you repack the suitcase.

Choose the pace first, and the shortlist shrinks on its own.

Sign me up for more Legroom ✈️

4. I stop waiting for a plus-one

This is the big one. For single women (or women whose partners prefer a La-Z-Boy to an airplane), the trip often gets planned in the conditional—maybe when my sister can get time off… maybe when I meet someone… maybe next year—while prices climb and someday quietly becomes never.

The shift happens the day “What would you think if I…” becomes “I’m going to…”

I won’t pretend the version of me who waited for a green light is gone. She still shows up, but the light comes from my bank account, not from anyone else’s calendar. Sometimes the green light is enough cash, sometimes it’s mileage, sometimes it’s the right opportunity, or a publication that will pay for an article about my experience.

5. I check how long I can stay without a visa

For Europe, that means the Schengen 90/180 rule: Americans get 90 days in any rolling 180-day window, across every Schengen country combined. Not 90 days in France and 90 in Italy. Ninety, total.

I count my days before I get attached to a place. Getting attached is the easy part, and the border agent doesn’t care if you needed an extra day to see the Northern Lights.

(There’s a trick called the Schengen hop: spend time outside the zone and old days roll out of your window. It doesn’t reset the clock, though, and the EU’s entry rules are changing, so check the current requirements before you build a trip around it.)

6. I learn a few essential local rules—what to wear and what things mean

On an archaeological dig in Syria, I spent a summer with a binder clip fastened to the back of my too-short shirt, guarding the one inch of lower back that bending over a trench kept revealing. That same summer, a Kurdish boy on our crew gave me a little bracelet. I thanked him and put it on, and a teammate later explained I’d just agreed to be his. (I gave it back. Mortification is a fast teacher.) The rest of that summer is in my Syria series.

In America we expect to be pounced upon by over-friendly shopkeepers who know we’ll ignore them if we can. But in France, if you fail to say “bonjour,” it’s considered quite rude. When you’re ready to check out, they’ll be nowhere in sight.

A phrasebook covers please and thank you. It won’t tell you that shoulders stay covered in certain holy sites, or that a small gift can be a proposal. Ten minutes with a chat bot on local etiquette saves you a lot of explaining.

7. I research the real risk, not the headline

A close friend of mine works for the mayor’s office in Tel Aviv. She lives, like her neighbors, with a permanent low hum of tension. I don’t romanticize that.

I also don’t let the evening news make my decisions. If I did, I’d never leave the US. I might not leave my driveway.

So I read the State Department advisory, talk to friends and colleagues overseas, and look for what women who’ve been there recently are saying about safety.

Caution is not the same as avoidance. For the record, I’ve felt safer on some streets in the Middle East than on plenty of American ones.

8. I buy the insurance, and I know my way out

If the region is shaky, I want a policy that covers medical evacuation and trip interruption, not just lost luggage. I check the exclusions, because some policies won’t pay out in countries under a Level 3 or 4 travel warning.

I enroll in STEP (the State Department’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program) so the embassy knows I’m there. I leave my itinerary and hotel names with my sister, so she doesn’t bully an ambassador into finding me. Then I sketch a plan B: the nearest border I could cross, and a second route home if the airlines stop flying.

I’d planned none of that in 2001. When 9/11 happened, I was in a remote region of Syria and my family’s only way to reach me was through the village’s only mobile phone. Nor did I plan for lack of banking infrastructure, or more specifically, ATMs. When my banking cards didn’t work, I had no means of ready cash and had to give strangers IOUs. (That story is here.)

Nobody likes to buy travel insurance. It feels scammy. But unless you’re confident in your ability to airlift yourself out of a crevasse, should the need arise, get it. I know from personal experience that it saves lives.

9. I leave room in the plan

Room for it to go wrong, first. I once set off by train for Florence, only to have the train break down and get rerouted to Barcelona. I didn’t actually like Barcelona. (I know. Everyone loves Barcelona. I wanted Florence.) Now I book flexible tickets where I can and leave a spare day before anything I can’t afford to miss.

And room for it to go right. On a train to Nice, I met a gorgeous man with lovely wrists and never got his number. He got off before my stop, and this was long before cellphones, so there was no time to trade anything. We kissed goodbye, awkwardly, in the European style. Then I watched him rush out. He’s probably in Geneva right now, loosening his tie after a Rolex convention. Mmmm. But I digress…

Traveling alone means nobody is waiting for you to finish your train conversation. You can leave space in the day for the detour, the second coffee, the guy’s number.

10. I find someone to mind the house & pets, free-ish

This one’s obvious: hold the mail, put the bills on autopay, and make sure someone is looking after your ficus.

What’s less obvious is that the someone doesn’t have to cost a thing. Through TrustedHousesitters, a verified sitter moves in while you’re away to care for your pets, or just the house. No money changes hands between you; you each pay the platform a membership fee, and that’s it.

TrustedHousesitters works in reverse, too. Sign up as a sitter and your next stay abroad can come with a free roof—and someone else’s cat.

My Siamese, Louie, has never approved of my leaving, but he does enjoy a fresh audience. (He used to travel with me, until he grew into the size of a small walrus.)

Sign me up for more Legroom ✈️

Bonus: I sort out the car before I land

I once booked a gloriously cheap rental car online from a local French company, using my American license, and walked two miles to the pickup. The agent heard my vowels and pronounced it was impossible without an International Driving Permit (IDP). The booking site hadn’t mentioned it, and my reservation apparently didn’t matter.

Goldcar rescued me. (I had no trouble with them, though the company has collected its share of complaints from travelers about aggressive charges for scratches and dings.)

So now I do three things beforehand:

• Check whether I need an IDP. Some countries require one. Some rental companies insist on one even where the law doesn’t. As I learned the hard way, the agent at the counter that day is the law.

An IDP is a translation of your license, not a replacement, so carry both. In the U.S., only AAA and the American Automobile Touring Alliance can issue a real one, and both take applications online. The IDP is good for a year, so check the expiration date before each trip. For now, it costs $20 and you’ll need passport photos. AAA can usually issue it in minutes if you can go in person. If you’re already overseas, an IDP can be mailed to you. It’s not a digital document.

• Read the fine print. Fuel, deposit, and damage policies, plus cross-border fees. Book an automatic car early if you need one; they’re scarcer and pricier abroad than manuals. Photograph or video the car at pickup and again at return.

• Pay with a travel card that covers rentals, and confirm the coverage applies in the country you’re visiting.

What’s one thing you always do before you book—or the one you learned the hard way? Tell me in the comments. This list is ever-evolving.

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About the Author:

Hi there Legroomers! I’m so glad you’re here.

I used to be an archaeologist—excavating ancient cities and trying to figure out why humans did what they did. Later, I became Editor in Chief of International Living, helping people design new lives around the world. I’ve also been an investment newsletter editor, a thesis writing tutor, and a Mesopotamian art professor.

In other words: I’ve spent my career studying the stories people tell about who they are… and who they might become.

I divide my time between North Carolina, Florida, and Europe (mainly France—it’s a baguette thing).

As a single, never-married, child-free woman, I know how much room there is for stories that don’t follow the expected arc. And I can’t wait to hear yours…

It was fall of 2001, on an archaeological dig in northeastern Syria. A Kurdish boy on our crew pressed a small bracelet into my hand—the kind of trinket you’d find by the register at an American drugstore. I thanked him warmly, put it on, and went back to my trench. Later, one of the Syrian women on our team took me aside and explained that I’d just agreed to be his.

I gave it back through an interpreter, inventing a boyfriend back home—which is no way to let anyone down easy.

Wherever you grow up, you internalize the rules of partnership. In America, you meet someone, you date, you marry or you don’t. But those rules can be a landmine the minute you step across a border.

Elizabeth Gilbert ran into the same discovery at book length. In Committed, the follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love, a marriage skeptic went looking for how the rest of the world pairs up, paid her respects to the world’s much-needed Auntie Brigade, and then got married anyway. (Immigration officials had a hand in that, but still.)

If we take a cue from her homework, there’s a vast menu out there for sustainable partnerships. Given how many American marriages end in divorce, I suspect our church-wedding menu is too short.

A Sampling of Other Menus

Mosuo “walking marriage” (China). Around Lugu Lake, Mosuo households are built around the mother’s line. A partner visits at night and is back at his mother’s house by morning, and the children are raised by her family, maternal uncles included. (Anthropologists call it matrilineal, not matriarchal—men still hold much of the formal political power—and the tourist-brochure version, which treats it as free love, is mostly fiction: most of these partnerships are monogamous and built to last.)

France’s PACS. The pacte civil de solidarité, or “civil solidarity pact,” is a contract between two adults, same sex or different, of any nationality, to organize a shared life. You register it at the town hall or with a notary, and it carries some of marriage’s protections with none of the production.

It’s no fringe choice: France registered about 197,000 PACS in 2024 alongside 248,000 marriages, and in 2020 PACS actually outnumbered weddings.

Either partner can end it alone, without giving a reason. You keep what’s yours, and jointly owned assets are generally split 50/50.

Living apart together. Committed couples who keep separate homes. Also not fringe: a 2024 UCL study found roughly one in ten heterosexual couples in the UK lives this way. (Totally support this one. Why would you ever share a sink if you didn’t have to?)

Boston marriage. The late-nineteenth-century New England name for two women who made a home together, often educated and often supporting themselves.

The term was allegedly inspired by Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians, which follows two women, Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant, who share a home and a cause. (James never used the phrase himself.)

The women were professors, doctors, and writers who didn’t need a husband’s paycheck. At Wellesley, only one of 53 women on the faculty was conventionally married, and most of the rest lived with female companions. Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote “America the Beautiful,” was one of them.

Until the 1920s, these households were considered natural and respectable. After that, people started asking questions. Naturally, historians are still arguing about the answers.

Family projects (Syria). The marriages I encountered in Syria were arranged or at least approved by the families, usually after a formal engagement. Even when a couple chose each other, the relatives got a vote. (About one Syrian marriage in three joined relatives, according to a 2009 study of 68,000 couples.)

My teammate’s engagement to a Syrian man on our archaeological dig ended when his family weighed in. And at night, in walled garden courtyards, I watched women compelled to vanish into coverings all day emerge as glamour shots—shiny-haired and runway-ready. Two women in one body, only one of them allowed out after dark.

The expiration date (Germany, the Philippines, Iran). Two proposals, one real practice, one idea: marriage as a contract with a term.

In 2007, Bavarian politician Gabriele Pauli proposed that civil marriages expire after seven years unless both partners signed up again. The bishops were not amused.

Three years later, a women’s group in the Philippines suggested a ten-year lapse unless both spouses renewed the marriage, the way you’d renew a passport. There’s no divorce law for most Filipinos and annulment is expensive, so they pitched it as a mercy.

Neither the Bavarian nor the Philippine proposal became law.

For a version that actually exists, there’s Iran’s sigheh, a temporary marriage practiced among Shia Muslims in which a contract sets the term—anywhere from a few hours to several years—and the man pays an agreed sum. It’s frowned on socially, and the woman must wait two menstrual periods before marrying again. (So many inappropriate comments, so little time.)

Prix Fixe vs. à la Carte

The American script, at least in my southern town, came as a set menu: husband, house, kids, no substitutions. The Default Husband was the expected entrée. And in my hometown, it arrived in time to give your mom grandchildren.

Other cultures have set menus too, of course. But it would do us good to embrace an à la carte list—mains, sides, a smattering of uncles—where people get to decide what they’re actually hungry for. Without inviting expensive divorce lawyers.

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The Reckoning

Walking marriage: Would not have worked for me. A) I’m not Mosuo; B) I’m in bed by 8pm with a book.

PACS: Maybe. If you end up in a Big Little Lies situation, a PACS keeps the dissolution simple. If American marriage were a lovely ceremony + PACS agreement, it seems a win-win for everyone, other than the lawyers.

Living apart together: So sexy. And ideal for longevity, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like to hear people crunching cereal.

Boston marriage: I’ve noticed an increasing number of widows making this arrangement. It sounds better than Spinster marriage. Plus once you a certain age, a “roommate” implies you can’t afford more legroom, or you’re crashing with fellow supermodels in New York.

A family-arranged match: My mother tried this. Based on her choices, it was clear she’d never met me. But a little family and congregation matchmaking seems to have worked well for my Mormon friends. And since so many American marriages end in divorce, our hormones are not trustworthy. (Or is it pheromones?)

Expiration dates: If I were a politician, this might be the hill I’d climb on. They say everyone gets the seven-year itch. If you wake up one day and decide you can absolutely put IKEA furniture together solo, then you can gently decide not to renew. Unlike the PACS, at least you know there’s a date at which the two of you will come to the table.

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What I’ve Already Built

My à la carte order, as it stands:

• a brother-in-law who steps in as my handyman (grumbling something about not reading the fine print on his marriage license);

• nephews and nieces I adore and bribe so they’ll visit me in my dotage;

• a fascinating network of friends in the US and abroad, willing to join me on whatever adventure is brewing;

• a Siamese cat with a passport who’s indifferent to where he’s being worshipped.

Most importantly, nobody sighs when I press play on another documentary on medieval medicine (or the lack thereof).

So, would we still choose singledom?

Speaking for myself, more than likely. But if commitment catches up with me, I’ll have the menu in hand.

Tell me which one you’d have ordered. 🥂

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

About the Author:

Hi there Legroomers! I’m so glad you’re here.

I used to be an archaeologist—excavating ancient cities and trying to figure out why humans did what they did. Later, I became Editor in Chief of International Living, helping people design new lives around the world. I’ve also been an investment newsletter editor, a thesis writing tutor, and a Mesopotamian art professor.

In other words: I’ve spent my career studying the stories people tell about who they are… and who they might become.

I divide my time between North Carolina, Florida, New York, and Europe (mainly France—it’s a baguette thing).

As a single, never-married, child-free woman, I know how much room there is for stories that don’t follow the expected arc. And I can’t wait to hear yours…

Previously: on September 11th, 2001, news of the 9/11 attacks reached our archaeological dig in Syria over a shortwave radio. My tenacious little sister got the U.S. embassy to patch a call across the desert to make sure I was alive. I told her I’d be home on schedule—and then both my legs began to go numb.

The dig director sent me to the village doctor, who spoke only French and Arabic, so we conducted the appointment in my schoolgirl French. I could walk, but my lower back ached constantly, my toes and calves felt bizarrely numb, and the sensation was traveling north. He said I needed an MRI, and that the nearest good one was at the American University Hospital in Beirut. And so I added another adventure to the summer’s growing collection…

A Detour Through Beirut

At the border crossing between Syria and Lebanon, a rotating cast of ominous-looking men asked a great many questions.

I was in the back seat of a hired car, my passport going soft in my damp hand, certain we were going to be turned back.

We weren’t.

A room had been found for me with a kindly French couple I’ll call Odile and Henri, both in their late sixties and living in one of Beirut's old central-hall houses gone a little shabby at the edges; a home built when Ottoman silk money was flowing: three stories, a red tile roof, and a tall arcade of arched windows that let the whole place breathe.

My hosts also spoke French and Arabic and only a little English, so we got along in my broken French, which by then had survived a medical exam and was feeling rather pleased with itself.

(If you’re wondering why anyone in the region spoke French: France governed Lebanon under a League of Nations mandate from 1920 until independence in 1943, and French has remained the language of many schools and much of the city’s business ever since.)

Odile and Henri had lived through Lebanon’s civil war, which ran from 1975 to 1990 and left its signature on nearly every building in the city. That was why there were so many bullet holes pocking the facades, as though no one had gotten around to filling them in. During the worst of the bombing in the ‘80s, they told me, their whole community had hidden together in a bunker, waiting it out.

They walked me through downtown, where stunning Roman ruins lie between contemporary buildings, and through the city’s patchwork of neighborhoods: Sunni, Shia, Druze, and Christian. The former ‘Green Line’ divided predominantly Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut, though the civil war involved shifting alliances of Lebanese militias, Palestinian factions, Syrian forces, Israeli forces, and others.

In 2001, Beirut was living with a hard-won peace—one that, to me, seemed to be held very carefully, like a cup filled to the brim.

And the city was beautiful. Nobody had warned me. Beneath the scars it was a resort destination—sophisticated, stylish, glittering along the Mediterranean—with everything, as far as I could tell, except a way for me to get cash. My credit card had been continuously rejected, and as I’d encountered in Syria, ATMs weren’t readily available.

So I borrowed a hundred U.S. dollars from Odile and Henri. They gave it gladly, and then asked, gently, that I send it back as soon as I got home. A hundred dollars might not be much to an American, they explained, but it was a great deal to them.

I’ve thought about that sentence often.

At the American hospital in Beirut, the doctor examined my legs and agreed with his colleague in the desert: I needed an MRI. The wait, however, would run weeks—longer than I could stay in Lebanon. His counsel was to go back to Damascus and catch a flight home. The small hitch: I couldn’t get a seat. The attacks had thrown international air travel into chaos, and every route out seemed cancelled, rerouted, or booked solid with other stranded travelers. So I went back to Damascus to wait some more.

Stranded with Australians… and Disney Lovers

In Damascus I checked into the Sultan, a hotel near the old Hejaz railway station popular with spendthrift archaeologists. It billed itself as a hotel but ran more like a youth hostel, and its big common room was where the strays collected. I met many intrepid Australians there, all of them on month-long holidays, which is what happens when you’re born way down under and have to make the trip worth the airfare.

(Lest you’re wondering why Austrailians would pick Damascus over Bali, Syria remains one of the most beautiful, haunting countries I’ve had the privilege of visiting. The ancient city of Palmyra, before the devastation ISIS inflicted on it during Syria’s civil war, will stay with me forever.)

I spent most of my Damascus days wandering the souk, the city’s elaborate indoor/outdoor bazaar. Teenagers roamed its lanes in American logos—knockoff logos, mostly, hand-stitched onto whatever shirt or bag would hold them. There was something disarming about being resented by a government and adored, in bootleg form, by its teenagers. I even watched American movies in a Damascus cinema.

Some evenings I met up with a fellow archaeologist or two, back from their own dig seasons, and we’d visit the exotic restaurants of the city. That’s where I glimpsed a world I didn’t expect: No abayas or hijabs, but Syrian women in evening wear, full makeup, hair done within an inch of its life, and enjoying narjilas (hookahs) alongside the men.

Before I’d left for Beirut, the dig director had asked a young family he knew in Damascus to look out for me while I found my way home. They were Christians and quite Westernized. In their living room, I watched television for the first time in months—and saw the footage.

Until then, 9/11 had been something I’d only heard: a crackling voice on a borrowed radio in the desert. Now there were the towers and the smoke, over and over. The family was watching the drama unfold with the same avid attention as I imagine everyone in the US was. And then they did what nearly every Syrian I met that fall did.

They apologized. We’re so sorry about those crazies.

Back home, much of the early post-9/11 commentary cast ‘the Middle East’ as a single, hostile place. The Syrians I met complicated that picture. Several went out of their way to tell me the opposite, distancing themselves from the jihadists who’d orchestrated the attacks.

The family’s teenage daughters, like other young Syrians I’d met, peppered me with question after question about American life. They’d traveled to Disney World before and could not wait to go back to Orlando.

Sold to a Harem?

Eventually an airline seat opened up, and I got home a few weeks ahead of schedule, thanks to my legs. The airport was solemn, and security was thorough and entirely unamused. My treasured pink pocket knife was confiscated, now on the list of things the world no longer let you carry.

When I walked out into arrivals, past the drivers holding up their little name signs, there was my sister—the same tenacious little sister who had talked the U.S. embassy into patching a call across the desert—wearing a T-shirt printed for the occasion. On the front, my face and the words HAVE YOU SEEN ME? On the back, a camel, the date I’d left, and the suggestion that I had possibly been sold into a harem for camels.

I was home, while the rest of the team was still out in the trench. And one of the first things I did was send a hundred dollars back to Beirut.

My parents’ relief was immense. They had been ready to get on a plane and come fetch me themselves, because the news coming out of the Middle East was terrifying.

Then there was the matter of my legs. An American doctor diagnosed me before I’d even had the MRI: bulging discs in my spine, courtesy of the pickaxe, plus some nerve damage in my knees from squatting in the trench all day without giving my body highly advisable breaks. The MRI, when it came, came quickly and backed him up. I’d never been so grateful for American medicine—for the doctor’s quick eye, and for a scanner I didn’t have to wait weeks for.

I was lucky, they told me. If I’d gone back into the field and kept swinging, a disc could have ruptured, and I’d have faced a very long recovery. As it was, my sentence was a couple of months of nothing more strenuous than swimming instead of running, which, as sentences go, I could live with.

Why I Keep Going Back to the Middle East

I came back from Syria wishing every American could see what I’d seen. I’m convinced that if more of us went, there’d be far less heat between East and West—maybe not among the leaders, but certainly among the ordinary people who value life every bit as fiercely as we do.

I’ve gone back to the Middle East several times since, sticking to Turkey, Israel, and Jordan. I know I may not always feel safe wandering alone, but in many of the places I visited, the ordinary texture of daily life felt calmer and kinder than the warnings I’d absorbed from afar. Tourism sustains many communities, yes—but the welcome I remember felt more human than transactional.

I’ve a close friend in Tel Aviv who works for the mayor’s office and lives, like her Israeli neighbors, in a permanent low hum of tension. I don’t romanticize any of it.

And I’ll never again travel with the sheer chutzpah I carried in my twenties, when I feared nothing and packed accordingly. At fifty I move with more caution. But caution is not fear, and it is certainly not avoidance.

I still want to be pulled out of my comfort zone. I still want to learn these places from the inside rather than through a screen—the same screen, come to think of it, that probably taught a boy on a bus everything he thought he knew about me.

But here is the part I most want you to carry away…

When conditions allow, visit the Middle East one day—with curiosity, humility, and attention to local realities. There is so much beauty there, so much to learn, so much warmth waiting in the places you’ve been taught to fear. And let it sharpen your gratitude for wherever you were lucky enough to be born free.

Two months in a Kurdish village, a borrowed telephone, and an overachieving binder clip pried open my sheltered Western world—and taught me how fortunate I’d been all along, back before I had the sense to notice.

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About the Author

Hi there Legroomers!

I used to be an archaeologist—excavating ancient cities and trying to figure out why humans did what they did. Later, I became Editor in Chief of International Living, helping people design new lives around the world. I’ve also been an investment newsletter editor, a thesis writing tutor, and a Mesopotamian art professor.

In other words: I’ve spent my career studying the stories people tell about who they are… and who they might become.

I divide my time between North Carolina, Florida, New York, and Europe (mainly France—it’s a baguette thing).

As a single, never-married, child-free woman, I know how much room there is for stories that don’t follow the expected arc. And I can’t wait to hear yours…

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Complete the Series:

You don’t need a partner’s income to survive the eye-watering costs of US living. You need a sunnier country, a residency card that’s easy to get, and healthcare that won’t gut your savings. Here’s where to start—and how to keep one foot back in the US (if your family likes you).

The scariest thing about being single isn’t sleeping alone for the rest of my days (there are batteries for that), or going to parties alone (there are escorts for that), or having no one to rescue me at 90 when I inevitably fall asleep on the toilet and wake with my nethers in the air.

What steals my sleep is the thought of mopping floors at Dairy Queen at 75, or waking daily to the peeling linoleum and astringent odors of my Medicaid nursing home.

Let’s begin with the 2 a.m. math, because if you’re single I suspect you’ve done it. One income. One Social Security check. One person responsible for the rent, the roof, the property tax, and the increasingly theatrical price of eggs.

My mother doesn’t see the problem. “Can’t you find a nice (rich) widower on CatholicSingles.com? Like Joanie’s neighbor’s friend’s daughter in Cleveland?”

But providence handed me a different solution… One I’ve watched work for woman after woman who decided that growing older alone in an overpriced suburb was not, in fact, her only available ending.

Here’s the uncelebrated truth I learned working for International Living: in a surprising number of countries, one modest American income is a comfortable income. The same $3,000 a month that leaves you white-knuckled in Phoenix can buy you a sun-washed apartment, a daily farmers market plus wine habit, a doctor who doesn’t require a credit check, and even a super-hot gardener—in places you can legally call home, even part of the year.

If you can bring your work with you, or are in retirement, you can spend a few months abroad in the sun and a few months back in the US with the people you love. Many desirable countries make that easy.

Let me show you some of the options, and what to watch out for…

Most “retire abroad” advice makes one lazy mistake

“Cheap to live in” and “easy to move to” are NOT the same thing. They are, maddeningly, often opposites.

A country can be gloriously affordable once you’ve arrived—and then demand you prove an income many single retirees don’t have, just to hand over the residency card. (Bureaucracy: the gift that keeps on requiring notarized copies.)

So before you lose your heart to a place, you have to weigh it on two different scales. I call this the Two Scales Problem, and it’s a nifty filter for the retire-abroad decision.

The following list of expat-friendly countries is by no means exhaustive. They’re some of the most popular and the flight time is US-friendly. (Thailand, Malaysia, and Uruguay, for example, are well worth exploring as budget-friendly and expat-friendly destinations, but are considerably further from the US.)

Countries Cheap to Get Into: Income required for a single applicant (2026)

Cheap to Live In: What a single actually spends to live comfortably (2026)

Read those two tables side by side and you’ll spot the cruelty: in some countries, the numbers are nearly mirror images. Greece and Mexico are the cheapest places to actually live—and two of the hardest to get into on income alone. Greece will ask you to prove some $4,000 a month for the privilege of spending half that.

Meanwhile, here’s a number to hold in your other hand: the average US Social Security check is now about $2,080 a month. Look back at that first table. In 2026, a single American can qualify for legal residency in Costa Rica or Panama on a $1,000-a-month pension, in Portugal on about $1,080 a month, and in France roughly $1,650 to $1,750 a month. Which means the average SS check—no pension, no side hustle, no widower from Cleveland—clears all four bars.

The Questions I’m Asked at Every Dinner Party

Can a single woman retire abroad on Social Security alone?

Yes. The average 2026 Social Security check of about $2,080 a month meets the visa income requirements for Costa Rica, Panama, Portugal, and France (*among others I haven’t detailed here, such as Uruguay, Colombia, Belize, Ecuador, and Thailand).

What’s the cheapest country to get residency in as an American retiree?

Among countries you’d likely want to live in, Costa Rica and Panama tie at a $1,000-a-month lifetime pension—and US Social Security counts for both. Panama’s version is permanent residency from day one—and drops to $750 a month if you buy $100,000 of Panamanian property.

Which countries let you live abroad part-time?

Panama is the champion: one visit every two years keeps your permanent residency alive. Costa Rica requires only about four months a year in-country, and France’s long-stay visitor visa has no minimum-stay quota in its first year—all three work for a snowbird split between the US and abroad.

Does Medicare cover you overseas?

With minor exceptions, no. The strategy is to enroll in the local public health system—which in these countries costs a fraction of US coverage—and keep a plan for trips home.

(A paid subscription costs less per month than the candle my mother lights for my future husband. She’ll need a lot more matches.)

The Sweet Spots: Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, and France

Costa Rica is the single woman’s friend. Its pensionado residency asks for just $1,000 a month in pension—and Social Security qualifies. You’ll join the public health system (the CAJA) for roughly 9% to 11% of declared income. On the average $2,080 SS check, that's $190–230 a month with no copays, no lifetime caps, no theatrics.

Best of all for the part-timer, you need only spend a few days to four months a year in-country to keep your status, depending on how your renewal is assessed. So you could spend the gray months among the volcanoes and toucans; spend summer in the US earning grandma points.

Panama is Costa Rica’s overachieving neighbor, and its fine print is almost suspiciously good. The Pensionado visa asks for the same $1,000-a-month lifetime pension (Social Security counts, and the bar drops to $750 if you buy $100,000 of property)—but where everyone else on this list hands you a temporary status to nurse along, Panama hands you permanent residency on day one. (Mexico technically sells the same ticket, but the (income) fare is north of $7,000 a month.)

The presence requirement is basically a wink: one visit every two years keeps your card alive. Panama also doesn’t tax foreign income at all, and the economy runs on the actual US dollar—the one place on this list where exchange rates aren’t your problem.

Then there’s Law 6, the national retiree discount program written into law since 1987: 25% off restaurants and airfare, half off hotels midweek, 15% off the hospital bill, 25% off your utilities. Panama invented the retire-here playbook and has been running it, without drama, for nearly forty years.

Living well runs $1,400 to $2,200 a month—Boquete in the cool highlands and Coronado on the beach hold the biggest expat communities. The trade-offs: healthcare leans private (budget $150 to $350 a month for insurance, then take your mandated discount at the doctor), the best hospitals cluster in Panama City, and the application runs through a Panamanian lawyer—roughly $2,000 to $4,000 all-in, three to six months, no drama if your pension letter says “for life.”

Mexico is the cheapest of the lot to live in—$1,200 to $2,000 goes a long, dignified way in Mérida or Lake Chapala, where the expat communities are warm and the hospitals are genuinely good. The catch is that income bar (recently nudged up to around $4,400 a month, or about $74,000 in the bank), and as of January 2026, Mexico also doubled its residency processing fees—the government has noticed how popular it is.

Clear the bar through the savings route—which is, frankly, the realistic route for most of us—and Mexico still rewards you handsomely: public health coverage for $55 to $95 a month, a residency that doesn’t chain you to the country, and a flight home shorter than some of your dinner reservations.

France—yes, France—belongs in this company, and nobody believes me until I show them the math. Its long-stay visitor visa asks for income around the French minimum wage (about €1,450–1,500), and US Social Security is the kind of income the French consulates like to see, but note that income requirements can vary by consulate.

Unlike Greece, the visa imposes no minimum-stay quota, so a true snowbird split is on the table. Living well outside Paris runs $2,000–$2,800 a month, and healthcare is the stuff of legend—world-class, and astonishingly gentle on the wallet once you’re in the system.

And France hides one more gift most articles miss: the US–France tax treaty is famously kind to American retirees. Your Social Security and US retirement income are generally taxed only by the US—not by France. (Confirm your particulars with that cross-border accountant I keep mentioning. She earns her fee here especially.)

Tip: If “can I still see my family?” is at the top of your checklist, Greece expects you to stay six months a year; Italy 183 days. Costa Rica leaves the door wide open. France is subtler: there’s no official day count for the annual renewal, but the prefecture will want proof you actually live there—utility bills, rent receipts, ideally a French tax return.

Keep a home in France and a paper trail, and the snowbird split works year after year. The six-month math only becomes law if you're after the coveted 10-year residence card: available after five years, it requires that no single absence run longer than six consecutive months—and that your absences total no more than ten months across the five years. In essence, you can spend two months a year visiting family outside France, and still meet the 10-year residency card requirements.

Decide early which France you want—the winter fling or the marriage—because the paperwork differs.

A Word on Portugal (and Why It Slipped)

Portugal is everyone’s darling, and deservedly so: the D7 visa has the gentlest income bar in Europe, about $1,080 a month (it’s pegged to the Portuguese minimum wage, so it inches up each January). But it expects you to genuinely live there—roughly eight months a year.

(Porto, along the northern Portuguese coast, is a popular US expat destination. And so photogenic I couldn’t choose just one image…)

That makes Portugal a glorious choice if you’re ready to make it your real home and fly back to the States to visit, rather than the other way around. File it under “new life,” not “long vacation.”

A Word on Italy (and Why the Line Moves So Slowly)

Italy is the country everyone asks me about first, so let me save you a consultation fee: its visa is called Elective Residence, the income bar is about €31,000 a year—roughly $3,000 a month, and that’s for strictly passive income. Italy won’t count a salary, a freelance gig, or even remote work for an American employer.

But in small towns across the south (generally under 20,000 people)—in Sicily, Sardinia, Puglia, and their neighbors—as long you're drawing a foreign pension (and Social Security counts), you’ll pay a flat 7% tax on your income for up to 10 years.

The country expects you there 183 days a year, and citizenship takes ten. Then there’s the fine print nobody warns you about: 1) You need a registered one-year lease or a property deed lease before you apply; 2) Each consulate interprets the rules its own way (couples have sued over whether €38,000 means combined or each), and applications that just barely clear the bar are the ones that get bounced.

You might say Italy has auditions more than entry requirements. It makes you dress up, wait in line, and hope. If you clear its velvet rope… welcome to one of the loveliest lives on Earth.

The Wild Card: Malta

If the phrase “learning the language” just made you tired, meet Malta: an EU member smack in the middle of the Mediterranean where English is an official language. You can read your own lease. You can describe your own symptoms. You can argue with your plumber.

Malta’s gate works differently from everyone else’s on this list. Its Retirement Programme sets no income minimum at all. Generally aimed at those 55+, your pension must make up at least 75% of the income you bring into the country. You must rent for at least €9,600 a year (about $850 a month) or buy at €275,000-plus, and you’ll pay a flat 15% Maltese tax on your pension income, with a floor of €7,500 a year. For the average SS check, that’s about $680/month—high for a modest pension.

Add it up and Malta lands in the middle of our first table: gentler than Greece, sterner than Portugal. (Applications also run through licensed local agents—Malta does not do walk-ins.)

The residency math is friendly to a traveler: just 90 days a year in Malta keeps your status. The catch—and it’s a real one—is that you can’t spend more than 183 days a year in any other single country. Malta wants to be your main squeeze. The US can stay in your rotation; you can’t move back in with it.

Malta is the priciest place on this list to actually live—rents have climbed hard for years, and comfortable now runs $2,200 to $3,000 a month for one person. And the public health system isn’t yours the way Costa Rica’s CAJA is: as a non-EU retiree you’ll carry comprehensive private insurance, typically €150 to €250 a month as a condition of the visa.

What you get in exchange: an historically rich country with three hundred days of sun, one of the safest countries in Europe for a woman on her own, and an airport that puts the entire Mediterranean a cheap flight away.

Sidebar: Why Spain Didn’t Make the Cut

Spain… ah, Spain. It’s arguably the best country on the planet to actually live in: one of Europe’s safest for a woman alone, superb public healthcare, trains that work, deep English-speaking expat networks, and a clean ladder: permanent residency after 5 years of legal residency, citizenship eligibility at 10.

But Spain’s Non-Lucrative Visa’s €2,400/month requirement is the highest in Europe—roughly $2,780, well past the average SS check, and the visa explicitly prohibits all work, including remote freelancing (which Portugal’s D7 allows).

Even if income isn’t a concern, here’s the real bitch of it: where France hands your Social Security back untouched, Spain taxes it like a paycheck.

As an American you file US taxes forever, no matter where you live. Move to Spain and you’ll file Spanish taxes too. US expats earning income from a foreign country can claim the Foreign Tax Credit—a dollar-for-dollar credit for income taxes paid overseas, so you aren’t taxed twice. So whatever you pay Spain gets subtracted from what you’d owe the IRS.

Sounds fair, but the catch is that you end up paying whichever country charges more, and that country is Spain. If you’re living on the average SS check, you likely owed the IRS nothing in the first place. So there’s nothing to credit. The workaround doesn’t rescue you from a tax bill; it just makes sure only one country sends it.

The Part That Lets You Sleep: Healthcare

The American medical bill is the real nightmare for a singleton—the thing that can vaporize a careful lifetime of saving in a single ambulance ride.

This is where moving abroad stops being a lifestyle choice and becomes a financial strategy.

The asterisk: The public health system does not start the day you land. You’ll need private health insurance to get the visa in the first place, and to bridge the gap until you’re enrolled locally—France, for instance, generally wants to see about three months of residence before its public system takes you in. Private policies get pricier (and eventually scarcer) past 70 or so, and pre-existing conditions can be excluded. None of this is a dealbreaker. It is a line item. Budget for the bridge, and the bridge is short.

One more caution: Medicare does not travel. With minor exceptions, it won’t cover you abroad—which is the whole point of leaning on the local system—but keep a plan for trips home. And Uncle Sam is clingy: as a U.S. citizen you’ll keep filing taxes wherever you sip your morning coffee. A good cross-border accountant earns her fee.

And since we opened this essay with me face-down on a toilet at 90, let’s close the loop: the aging math abroad is kinder too. Full-time in-home help in Mexico costs less per month than the parking at some American assisted-living facilities. A live-in caregiver, a housekeeper, a driver—the constellation of support that would bankrupt you in the US is, in much of this list, simply what middle-class retirement looks like. Growing old alone is a staffing problem. Abroad, you can afford the staff.

Sidebar: How Far Does One Social Security Check Go?

The average U.S. Social Security check now runs about $2,080 a month. In Phoenix, that’s a tightrope. In beautiful Mérida, Mexico, or Costa Rica’s Central Valley, the same money buys a singleton:

• A bright one-bedroom within walking distance of the city center

• A daily habit at the local market, plus dinners out a few times a week

• Public health coverage folded into the budget, not bolted on at terrifying cost

• And—crucially—enough left over for the flight home when you miss your people

Stretch to $3,000 and you’ve added weekend trips, a cleaner who comes twice a week, and a well-stocked wine rack. On one income.

The Europe Bonus: Travel Gets Absurdly Cheap

Here’s the part my travel-loving readers have been waiting for. Plant yourself in Europe and the continent becomes your backyard—priced accordingly.

Budget carriers routinely sell flights between European cities for less than an American airport sandwich meal. Valencia to Rome. Porto to Paris. Malta to Sicily in under an hour. Athens in the off-season, when the tourists are gone and the light is still ridiculous. The train network fills in the rest: you can breakfast in one country and dine in another without ever seeing a TSA bin.

This is the upgrade nobody prices in when they compare Phoenix to Porto. In Phoenix, “travel” is a line item you save toward. In Porto, it’s a weekend.

Two ground rules: First, residency in one EU country makes the rest of Europe easy to visit, not to live in—your residency card belongs to the country that issued it.

Second, if you’re doing the no-residency version—sampling Europe as a long-stay tourist—know the actual Schengen rule: 90 days within any 180-day period, counted across all Schengen countries combined. You cannot do 90 days in Portugal and then slide into Spain for 90 more; the clock is shared. (There are elegant ways to work with this—France’s long-stay visa among them—and I’ll be covering the full playbook soon.)

Three Unsexy Realities (That Are Cheaper Than Therapy to Learn Now)

The dollar wobbles. Your budget is in dollars; your rent is in euros or pesos. When the dollar slides 10–12%, your $2,000 month quietly becomes a $2,250 month. Keep a cushion, consider a multi-currency account, and don’t build a budget with zero slack. (Panama, which runs on the US dollar, is the one place on this list where this problem does not exist.) Currencies are like men in their fifties: charming, but not entirely stable.

Keep your American paperwork alive. Some foreign banks side-eye American customers (blame US reporting rules), and you’ll file a yearly report on foreign accounts over $10,000. The fix is simple: keep a US bank account, a US credit card, and a US mailing address (a sister, a friend, a mail service). Women who burn their American paper trail on the way out almost always regret it at renewal time, tax time, or Christmas.

The cat is coming, and the cat has paperwork. Health certificates, vet visits on a strict timeline, airline rules about cabins and carriers, and a few countries with quarantines. It’s all doable—thousands of expat cats (and dogs) are living their best Mediterranean lives right now—but it’s a project, not an afterthought.

Before You Pack

A few hard-won rules from those who’ve already done this well:

Rent before you buy. A low cost of living if you don’t vibe with the environment is no bargain at all. Lease for a season first.

Use the savings door if your income falls short. Selling the family home is often the key that unlocks the cheapest countries.

Overshoot the income bar. Consulates apply their own exchange rates and their own moods. Applications that exactly meet the minimum get bounced on technicalities; aim to show 10–15% more than the published figure and yours won’t be one of them.

Go where the communities already are. Established expat groups mean instant friends, English-speaking doctors, and someone to call when the power goes out and you’re still learning the language.

You Don’t Need Permission

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the women who actually do this: not one of them waited until she felt ready. But every one wished she’d done it sooner.

If you’re tired of the math, curious about the map, and brave enough to book a one-way ticket for a single season, experiment! If San Jose isn’t for you, try Braga or Pau next time.

Here’s how to stay in foreign locales for months at a time for no more than the cost of airfare.

You’ve spent decades taking care of other people. A single income asks you to be more deliberate about where you plant yourself—but deliberate is not the same as doomed. Somewhere warm, with a market down the street and a doctor who won’t bankrupt you, there’s a version of this next chapter where you’re not bracing against the future but actually savoring it.

And remember… you can plant your flag in one country or region for a season, and try on another the next. In fact, I’d advise shopping around until you’ve found your perfect overseas home.

You’ll need to do some homework on visa and residency rules in countries you’d like to explore. And I should note that residency is not the same as citizenship. In most countries, you’ll need years of residence before you’re eligible to apply for a second passport—and the timelines are stretching.

Portugal, for one, now asks a decade of most non-EU applicants, up from five years. A second passport is a lovely perk if you can get there—especially if you’d like to work in a foreign country or move between EU countries on no particular timeframe—but build your plan on residency, and let citizenship be the bonus round.

The takeaway is this: You don’t need a partner’s paycheck to finance a worry-free, adventurous life. You need a passport, a plan, and the nerve to use both.

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As a traveler, there’s a moment when it dawns on you that the rules you grew up treating as the rules are just—local. One town’s version of normal that a plane can lift you clean out of.

That’s the whole premise of this new little series. Every place I go hands me some small, delightful, faintly unhinged fact about how humans have decided to organize themselves—the kind of thing that never makes the guidebook because the locals don’t find it remarkable in the slightest. Welcome to Wacky Things You Learn From Travel. We begin, as one does, with incest.

Iceland has about 330,000 people. That’s not a country, that’s a mid-sized concert. And when the whole population traces back to a handful of Norse settlers who showed up a thousand years ago, the family tree stops being a tree and starts being more of a dense, closely woven hedge. Everyone is, to some tolerable degree, related to everyone. Which is charming at Christmas and a genuine logistical problem at the bar.

So in 2013, three software-engineering students at the University of Iceland built ÍslendingaApp. The app was built on top of Íslendingabók, “The Book of Icelanders,” a real genealogical database maintained by a genetics company that traces most of the country’s family lines back centuries. Type two names in the app and it tells you exactly how, and how closely, you’re connected.

The feature everyone remembers, though, was the bump. Two people could tap their phones together, and if they were too closely related, the app would sound the alarm.

Here’s the thing: It wasn’t actually a dating app. It was a genealogy lookup tool that happened to include the relatedness check. Naturally, that’s the bit the international press seized on, at which point it got reframed forever as Iceland’s Anti-Incest Dating Aid. Which is a better headline than it is a fact. But the underlying problem was real enough. In a population that small and that interwoven, accidentally going home with your cousin isn’t a punchline. It’s a Tuesday.

I collect random tidbits like this on purpose…

When you’re single and childless, you can’t come to the water cooler or the cocktail party with default topics. The married ones have the wedding, the renovation, the in-laws. The parents have the school districts and the sleep deprivation and the cute thing the toddler said in the bath.

In terms of small talk, singletons don’t get to coast on the domestic scoreboard. So we go out and gather. We come home from a puddle of a country in the North Atlantic with a word like sifjaspellsspillir and the whole table leans in.

That’s the accidental superpower of the singleton life. Nobody ever leaned in for sleep deprivation. But everybody leans in for incest.

So that’s installment one of WTILFT (or WTF for short). This is going to be a recurring thing, and I’m already collecting the next ones—the countries with rules about baby names, the places where a specific hand gesture will start a fight. Ammunition, all of it.

But I’d rather hear yours first…

What’s the strangest local custom you’ve ever stumbled into while traveling—the thing that everyone around you thought was completely ordinary?

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Previously: on a Syrian archaeological dig on the eve of 9/11, I learned the local grammar the hard way—a binder clip guarding one inch of lower back, and a dime-store bracelet I accepted from a Kurdish man before anyone explained I’d just agreed to be his. The language barrier, it turned out, was just getting started…

In the village near our dig site in Kurdish Syria, a curly-haired blonde, maybe seven years old, planted herself in front of me.

She wore pink pajamas printed with daisies—at 3 p.m. Without a word in common, she took my hand and made it clear I was to come with her, now.

She led me to her home, little more than a hut, where her father explained in broken English that his daughter, Delal, had invited me for tea, and so the matter was settled. This man, whose entire acquaintance with me was that his small daughter had marched me through his door, poured tea and laid the table with local savories they could ill afford to share.

“She likes guests, my daughter,” he said, smiling. “Especially Americans.”

It remains one of the warmest welcomes anyone has ever handed me.

Delal, he told me, means cherished.

Language lessons from the trench

The Kurdish workers at the dig pronounced my name “Stiffen.”

Digging down through archaeological levels, you disturb things in their lairs—a frog, say. To their endless amusement, the Kurds learned I couldn’t bear it if they killed even an insect. After that, whenever a living thing came out of the dirt, they’d carry it over to Stiffen and let me set it free.

One day they pulled out a scorpion (creatures so common in the region we turned our boots upside down every night to prevent a morning surprise). Normally a scorpion was killed on the spot. But it was too tempting, I suppose, to see how Stiffen would react. They’d let it go, they said, but we’d have to cut off its stinger—and I had to do the honors. While one man held it fast, I sliced the tip off the scorpion’s tail with a small blade, then set it loose.

I just hope the scorpion survived, unlike its dignity.

My Arabic was rudimentary at best, and the Kurds loved to teach me—mainly to hear me mispronounce things. One afternoon in the trench I was joking alongside two of the guys when they dropped their trowels and climbed out. Before I knew what was happening, every Kurdish worker was sitting along the rim in open revolt.

Baffled, we called over the leader of the Syrian team to consult with them. The answer came back: Stiffen had called one of their brethren a “donkey,” and to insult one was to insult them all.

I’d no idea I’d called anyone anything. But our directors had seen this before—a convenient excuse to knock off work for the day. It took hours, threats, and a few sweeteners to coax them back into the trench, while I writhed in mortification.

One of the Kurds worked daily on his English with us. He longed, he said, to make his way to the West. We used to tease him, because while the rest of us dug in shabby tees that would never be quite clean again, he came to dig each morning in a crisp white shirt. Every night, his mother and sisters laundered and starched that shirt, the bearer of their hopes.

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Shedding the abaya

In Damascus I visited a mosque that required me to put on a full-length abaya, the kind the mosque keeps on hand to drape over tourists. The novelty lasted about ninety seconds.

After that came the claustrophobia: yards of black polyester swallowing me whole. Polyester in summer is no fun, but I’d also never been asked to erase my womanhood, and discovered I was bad at it.

Even the smaller versions—using that binder clip and covering my hair in town so as not to draw attention—lodged a splinter of resentment I couldn’t quite pry out.

And yet that abaya gave me a deep, faintly embarrassing gratitude for a freedom I’d done nothing to earn beyond being born in the right place at the right time. I’d spent my life taking it for granted, the way you take air for granted right up until someone rations it.

I’ve never been so relieved to disrobe.

The strangest and most beautiful version of an abaya shedding came at night.

In restaurants tucked inside walled courtyards, I’d watch the Syrian women transform: the daytime coverings gone, dressed to the nines, hair done, makeup immaculate, luminous and plainly delighting in being seen.

By day, in the street, they were obliged to vanish. By night, behind the garden walls, they were permitted to reappear. It was like watching two entirely different women stacked inside one body—and only one of them allowed out after dark.

Men behaving badly—and a call from the US Embassy

I learned a beat too late to be wary of wandering alone as a foreigner. Outright violence was rare here; the punishments were severe enough to prevent it. But beginning with the bus incident, it became clear that more than one Syrian man thought American women were all one wink from yes.

The worst of it came in a shop where I was the only customer, admiring a belt. Let me show you, the salesman said. And before I understood what was happening, he’d seized the hem of my shirt, yanked it up to bare my midriff, and reached around to fasten the belt at my waist himself. I was too stunned to move. I stood frozen for a second or two, then walked out and kept walking.

That was near the end of the dig season, when I was back in Damascus waiting on a flight that had no intention of coming. Because by then the Twin Towers were rubble.

On September 11th, the news reached us the way news reached everyone out in Kurdish territory: crackling over a shortwave radio, in a village that owned one mobile telephone—the property, naturally, of its richest man.

Weeks later, a truck rumbled up to the dig site in a swirl of dust, steered by an ominous-looking villager in keffiyeh and sunglasses. He climbed out, holding that mobile phone out like a relic.

“Stiffenie Reed,” he called.

I was on my stomach in the trench, gingerly brushing dirt off a human bone. The U.S. embassy was on the line. My tenacious little sister had gotten them to patch her call across a desert to reach me (the former Ambassador is still afraid of her).

For one cold instant I was certain someone in my family had died. But she only wanted to hear my voice—to confirm I was still attached to it—since the university had told our families little more than they are safe in Kurdish territory, which, if you were watching the news in America, was about as reassuring as you’d expect.

I told my family I was fine, that I’d be home on schedule in a month.

Then both my legs went numb.

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Not because the math didn’t work, but because I should have done it in my 30s.

By the time I signed the papers, I’d already paid the default husband a decade’s worth of compound interest.

I hadn’t chosen him. I’d assumed him. And every financial decision I made got scheduled around his arrival.

Most of us take for granted that we’ll find a life partner eventually. To my mother’s distress (not to mention my godmother), I assumed Mr. Default would turn up when the time was right. My efforts to hurry him along were modest at best.

My friends were dropping like flies along that marriage aisle. How hard could it be? I’d get around to it, the way you eventually get around to the dentist… checking one more line item off my Life List.

And somewhere underneath sat the expectation I’d absorbed without ever being told—that when the money got serious, a man would be handling it.

So I waited for the version of my life that started when he arrived, waving a joint checkbook.

Here’s how I came to my senses…

My sister, who lived nearby, had a surprise baby at 41, which meant I could be the auntie who had all the best toys, took the kid for waffles, and showed up to school plays.

I looked around at the family I already had… and felt joy like I’d never experienced before.

So I bought the house, and with it, the life I’d always wanted, buried under everyone else’s expectations.

I painted my home office pale pink because there was no one to negotiate it down to greige. Before Christmas, I strolled through Pottery Barn and blew half a paycheck on full-priced, whimsical tree ornaments because they made me laugh.

When I visit my married sister, whose home is sprinkled with the muted browns and sock musk of cohabitation with males… I feel a small, smug spark of gratitude for my bright Anthropologie bedspread and overpriced laundry sheets.

That’s the smug part. Here comes the part nobody writes about.

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I started investing at 40. I could have started at 16.

I have a business degree from a respected institution. But personal finance courses were not on the menu. I had no idea what compound interest was when I graduated.

I fell—luckily—into a job editing financial advisories in my 40s. That’s when I learned what a Roth IRA was. What an index fund was. Why starting early matters so much more than starting big. I set up my first 401(k) and felt like a grown woman doing grown things.

I cracked open a copy of Smart Women Finish Rich and seethed at every page, because if anyone had taught me its lessons at sixteen, when I got my first job, I could have retired at forty-five. (Okay, I’d still have blown most of it on jelly shoes and Madonna albums at sixteen, but you get the point.)

I suggested to my financial advisory firm that we launch an investing newsletter for women. “The advice would be the same as in any of our other newsletters,” they argued. This was 2013. And they still could not understand why an audience that had been left out of the conversation for centuries might want a newsletter that addressed them by name.

The advice isn’t the same. The audience isn’t the same. Women, in my experience, are quieter, more patient, more methodical investors. We don’t chase the meme stock. We don’t yell at the CNBC anchor. We build slow, quiet wealth—the kind no one tells us we’re capable of—by siphoning off a little each month into an account we don’t see until it has compounded into a future.

We just have to be told it’s possible. And we have to start.

The mistake list (incomplete)

I postponed buying property until my early 40s because, somewhere in the back of my head, I assumed I’d be buying it with someone.

I postponed learning about retirement contributions for the same reason.

I took on graduate school debt assuming a partner would help me carry it, or a tenure-track job would forgive it. (One of my graduate mentors funded his Egyptian dig projects by charming wealthy widows. Genuinely. That was the financial model on offer.)

I gave up my PhD-track and took the financial advisory job for the salary, not the freedom, because Mr. Default was going to come along and allow me to return to my PhD.

And later, the corrective: I took a pay cut to take a job that let me work from anywhere, because no one else’s healthcare or tuition was on the line. (That one I’d do again.)

What the married friends say

My married friends regularly tell me they envy my freedom.

Not because they don’t love their partners. Because they cannot pick up and go to France for three months. They cannot accept a job in Ireland on a whim. They cannot order six pairs of shoes to try on, keep one, and quietly return the other five without hiding the boxes from someone.

That’s the legroom. And the legroom has a price tag: I’m the only person funding it.

What still keeps me up at 3 a.m.

Plenty.

I’m the only single sibling of three, which means the unspoken family contract is that I’ll be the one to look after our elderly parents—a contract that complicates the French residency card I’m working toward. My parents are still wildly active, but I do the math on missed birthdays and holiday weekends and feel it.

I haven’t looked at long-term care insurance yet, because I’m still scrambling to fund my 401(k) and survive American single-income life. I don’t have a real six-month emergency fund—I have an aspirational one.

I know married friends who could retire today on what their household has put away, or who could lose a job tomorrow and not panic. I’m not one of them yet.

The 3 a.m. version of me is an eighty-year-old woman in a double-wide working the night shift at Dairy Queen because she didn’t put enough away. (The 7 a.m. version knows it’s more likely the day shift at Starbucks.)

Part of my actual retirement plan is to live abroad part- or full-time, where a Social Security check or a modest income stretches into a life that, in Florida, it can no longer fund. That’s not escapism. That’s compound interest in another currency.

The emerging philosophy, on a Post-it

I’m still figuring this out. But here’s what I’d whisper to thirty-year-old me, who was assuming a partner would turn up:

The default husband is the most expensive man you'll never meet. He’ll cost you your financial freedom if you keep saving and investing as if he’s on his way.

It’s never too late to fund your freedom—but the cheapest day to start is today.

Slow, quiet wealth is yours for the taking. A little, every month, into a “coffee can” fund you don’t watch. That’s the entire secret.

(If I were starting today on a tight budget, I’d open an IRA with $25 a month on auto-deduct. The price of some cheap-ass sunglasses. You will not miss it.)

And nothing—nothing—is more tragic, or less necessary, than spending your precious life with a partner who restrains you (or who may not be faithful) because the math of leaving doesn’t work.

I’d rather paint my office pink, blow half a paycheck on Pottery Barn, and become the eighty-year-old woman who got the residency card and plays pickleball with her expat friends. With the wealth—slow and methodical—that nobody told me I was allowed to build.

Here’s the part that stings… and the part that saves me: Nobody was ever standing between me and this life. The pink office was available at thirty. So was the house. So was the IRA. I just had them filed under later, in a folder marked Some Guy, Some Day.

That guy can show himself out. He’s been billing me long enough.

Is it too late to start investing at 40?

No—forty is not too late. It’s never too late, unless you’re death adjacent. (In which case, a puffin rescue is a nice way to offload funds. I like puffins.)

Forty is later than ideal and I won’t pretend otherwise—starting at sixteen would have been worth more than starting big at fifty.

But forty leaves you twenty-five years of compounding before a traditional retirement age… more if you keep working. I opened my first IRA at forty. The account exists. That's the whole test.

Should a single woman buy or rent?

Buy, if your solo income covers the mortgage, taxes, insurance, and a handyman on speed dial. Rent if you’re not sure where you want to be in five years—mobility is worth real money, and a house you can’t leave is a cage with equity. (My compromise was buying without an HOA—my local rules allow me to Airbnb the place when I travel.)

I love to joke that if I met a carpenter who cooks, I’d drag him down the aisle. Truth is, I’d feel sorry for the guy. He’d be at Home Depot and I’d be in France.

My mistake wasn’t buying. It was treating “the math works” as a question I’d answer jointly later. A house bought at thirty-two on one salary is not a smaller version of a house bought at forty-two with two. It’s a decade of equity you can’t buy back.

How much do I need to retire on a single income?

Less than you think, if you’re willing to change countries, even part of the year. The average US Social Security check clears the income requirement for legal residency in several places—within easy reach of the US—where it funds a genuinely good life.

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Rome2Rio answers can I even get there in time. Punch in any two points in 240-odd countries—and it gives you every possible route: plane, train, bus, ferry, drive, with durations side by side.

Seat61 is the stronger tool once trains are involved. Not an app—it’s a website run by a former British Rail manager (“The Man in Seat 61”) who apparently hasn’t slept since 2001. Learn which platform to take and booking site is gouging you.

*Rome2Rio tells you the train exists. Seat61 tells you how to actually board it.

Moovit is for after you arrive. Local buses and metros in real time. Especially useful in towns where the official transit map is more of a rumor.

If you have another ingenious transit hack, let me know—I’d love to add it to this list!

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On the eve of 9/11, I went to excavate an ancient city in northeastern Syria. I came home with something I hadn’t gone looking for.

The hand came around slowly, the way a hand does when it’s betting you won’t notice until it’s too late to object. It crept along the narrow gap between my seat and the wall of the bus—aimed with real ambition at my right breast.

We were somewhere in the middle of the Syrian desert, hours from our dig site, my teammate dozing in the seat beside me. I watched the hand encroach the way you watch a spider decide which way it’s going to go. It took me a few incredulous beats to realize this was happening. Then I elbowed the hand away, spun around, and let the owner have it.

He was maybe sixteen. A Syrian teenager, mortified that the American girl had come equipped with reflexes and a voice—a boy who’d concluded, from our movies and tv or whatever version of me had reached him through a screen, that American girls were easy and I’d be pleased by the ambush.

I lead with this not because it was the worst thing that happened to me in Syria—it wasn’t—but because it showcases the smugly naïve woman who entered the country. The woman who flew out was quietly rearranged.

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I went in the summer of 2001, a graduate student with the University of Chicago, sent to lift a city out of the ground that had been dead for thousands of years. I was fearless then, in the way you can only be before life has gathered the evidence to talk you out of it.

Our destination was Hamoukar, in the far northeastern tip of the country, deep in Kurdish territory and about five miles from the border of Iraq, where a giant roadside portrait of Saddam Hussein stared back at us across the line.

We’d come to excavate one of the earliest cities in northern Mesopotamia, thriving centuries before Sumer’s great cities, like Ur and Uruk, rose to the south. (Hamoukar is the modern Arabic name. Its ancient name hasn’t been identified with any confidence.)

The buildings of Hamoukar were constructed of mud-brick (as was our dig house, built hastily in the weeks before—and during—our dig season). I was packing a trowel, hand brushes, and dental picks. Six thousand years of human ambition, uncovered by the tools of a fastidious hygienist.

What I didn’t know, kneeling in that pit during those first weeks, was that I was about to live through one of the most disorienting and transformative months of my life—and that almost none of it would have to do with the bricks or the bones.

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The clip and the bracelet

Our dig was a small experiment in coexistence: a Syrian team, an American team, and a crew of Kurdish laborers from the nearby village who worked the site alongside us.

The villagers found us endlessly fascinating—the children most of all. They would come out to the trench and squat at the rim for hours, not talking, not moving, simply observing the odd Westerners and their trowels. Eventually we put one or two on the payroll, dispatching them into the village to fetch our mid-morning meal—loaves of bread and boiled eggs from the Kurdish women. (We worked sunrise to noon, until the heat became unbearable.)

By local standards, I was a skinny Western woman—not the regional idea of beauty, not even in the running. The men were far more taken with curvier women, to the deep satisfaction of one teammate who’d spent her whole life at war with her body and now found herself, at last, in the right country. (She became affianced to a Syrian on the dig. His family later put the kibosh on that.)

Modesty governed everything, and I learned its grammar fast. As Westerners we were permitted to leave our hair uncovered, and I could get away with short sleeves. But no other skin was up for negotiation.

So while I spent my days bent double over a pit, dusting off human bones (I maintain that one of the guys I uncovered was killed by a frying pan), I wore a giant binder clip fastened to the back of my shirt and pinned to my waistband, standing sentry over the one inch of lower back that gravity kept conspiring to reveal.

I won’t pretend I didn’t resent that binder clip—the vigilance, the heat, the novelty of having to treat my midriff as a security risk.

There was a Kurdish boy on the crew, maybe eighteen, who pressed a small bracelet into my hand one afternoon—the kind of trinket that might cost a dollar in an American drugstore. I was touched. I thanked him warmly, put it on, and thought nothing more of it.

Later, one of the Syrian girls on the team took me aside and gently explained what I’d done. To him, accepting that bracelet was no small thing. It meant I’d agreed to be his.

I gave the bracelet back as gracefully as mortification allows, and told him—through a translator, which is no way to let anyone down easy—that I was flattered but I had a boyfriend back home. This was a lie. But it was the kindest fiction on the shelf.

It was my first real lesson in how a gesture can mean something quite different the instant it crosses a border. And the first time the language barrier would get me into trouble.

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You’re standing in a chicken coop at 6 a.m., and Lizzo, one of the eleven chickens on your watch, is dead. Not sick. Dead.

You call the owners, panicked. They’re vacationing in the Dolomites, giddy as teenagers, and you get to deliver the bad news.

They’re kind about it. This will happen with farm animals, they say. They tell you to double-bag her and put her in the freezer. You wonder whether they plan to eat her.

Welcome to petsitting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You meet Grace in a picturesque sailing village on the coast of North Carolina. She’s petsitting for a month here, on the heels of two months in Scotland. Not vacationing—she’s living in different homes around the globe, for free, in exchange for looking after the owners’ pets and grabbing the mail. She’s retired, sure, but that’s not the point. She’s showing you that this life is possible.

You take notes from Grace, and within months, you’ve sat for cats in a spectacular Asheville mountain home and dogs in Chicago with a rooftop terrace.

Within a year, you’ve booked a free month in Cornwall, UK—and you’ll do it while running your business, five hours ahead of your US readers, with mornings free to sip tea and chat up the locals.

Here’s how to get in on this…

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The Secret to Global Petsitting

TrustedHousesitters is a platform where homeowners post their sitting needs and travelers apply to stay in their homes for nothing. You cover your travel costs. They cover your housing in exchange for pet care. It’s that simple.

TrustedHousesitters isn’t the only platform of its kind. It’s the one I know personally. You pay an annual fee—from $129 to $399—and you get the ability to sit for other people’s pets and/or the ability to invite sitters to look after yours while you travel. The higher tiers allow you to do both. (If you’re not a pet person, don’t despair. There are people who do just want a housesitter—filter for them.)

The homeowner posts their dates. You filter for times you can travel. You scroll through listings—dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, birds, even reptiles—and tell the homeowner why they should pick you (I don’t mention Lizzo).

The homeowner vets you. Your reviews do the talking. Once the homeowner trusts you, you’re their person. Repeat bookings follow.

Free Market Research for the Life You're Building

My goal is to live half the year in the US and half the year abroad, but I haven’t decided exactly where yet. So I’ve been deliberately choosing sits in the Carolinas, in cities I’m thinking about living. Asheville. Charlotte. Greenville.

Same with Europe—I’m scouting France and other visa-friendly countries, testing neighborhoods and regions to figure out where I want to land long-term. It’s free market research for the life you’re building.

I’ve done repeat sits in Chicago—where I lived in graduate school—that allow me to visit old friends, along with Pixel & Merlin, a cat and dog team I adore. Merlin is a shaggy bear-sized Leonberger and children will cross the street to pet him. When I’m lucky, they drag along their cute single dads. In sum, Chicago is free housing that doubles as a homecoming. And the occasional date.

Dr. Merlin the Leonberger; PhD in Women’s Lit; dissertation: Eat, Pray, Love, Shed

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How Petsitting and Travel Points Make a Month Abroad Doable

Housing is often the biggest expense when you travel. Remove it, and suddenly a month abroad isn’t a luxury—it’s doable. More than doable.

And then there are the travel points. Every flight you book to get to the sit is building your airfare stash. A couple of initial international flights—say, one to Scotland, one to France—and you’ve got enough points to keep the cycle going. If you’re more responsible than me, and can put all your expenses on a travel points card without terrorizing your financial planner, you’re not paying to travel anymore. You’re earning your way around the world.

Stack two sits back-to-back in the same region, and your flight or train costs become negligible. Stay in Europe for 90 days—the Schengen visa-free limit for US travelers—and you could knock out sits in three regions or countries before flying home. The math compounds in your favor. (Carole, the author of the CNN Schengen piece, is a single gal currently petsitting in Turkey.)

How to Become the Sitter They Call Again

• Be ultra-responsive. Understand that homeowners—especially those new to the petsitting service—carry anxiety about leaving their pets with a stranger. Your job is to dissolve that anxiety.

• Send daily photos and videos. Show them their pets (and sometimes plants) are thriving, not just surviving. One-up yourself and send little video clips in the pet’s voice—narrate their day as if the dog or cat is reporting back. (I did this with Lizzo and her coop buddies too, before one of them took her out.) Videos delight the pet owners and give them something to look forward to while they’re away.

• Communicate with radical transparency. If you’re inviting friends to stay—yep, this is how you get free housing for your friends too—tell the owner who’s coming and when. Volunteer their LinkedIn profile if it helps. Reassure them that your guests are pet lovers or fellow sitters. And make it clear that you will never leave the pets unattended while entertaining guests.

• The owners who invited you back to their palazzo on the Riviera (people DO score sits like this) are the ones who felt consistently reassured.

Your Global Network: The Hidden Payoff of Repeat Housesits

Here’s what nobody tells you: petsitting isn’t just about free housing with pets to cuddle. It’s about the connections.

You meet other sitters. You meet homeowners who become friends. You build a global network of people who get the independent life—because they’re living it too. I’ve met remote-working couples who do sits together, then apart, each taking their own booking—and getting free marital therapy—when dates overlap so they can travel continuously.

I’ve met retirees stacking sits across three continents. I’ve met digital nomads like me, treating housesits as home bases while we run our businesses from someone else’s kitchen table.

My favorite co-working space to date. Fellow creatives I met in France; we planned this “work” trip to Bordeaux together (atrium of our Airbnb.)

And sometimes, you meet people who invite you back not because they need a sitter, but because they want your company. A homeowner becomes a friend. A fellow sitter becomes a collaborator when the owner asks for two people (important when there are multiple dogs). The network becomes the real currency.

You also rack up skills you never expected. Chicken bagging. Donkey grooming. And of course, living in new places changes you. Even if it’s learning about a blanket brand you can no longer survive without. (No kickbacks attached. If you’re single, sooo much better than a sweaty bedmate. But wait for a sale.)

Living Local: How Petsitting Cures Solo Travel Loneliness

Petsitting cures the loneliness of solo travel because you don’t arrive as a visitor—you arrive with a reason to be there. A dog to walk. A neighbor to greet. A routine.

There’s also this: petsitting gives you someone(s) to come home to (other than the blanket above). You’re beyond a tourist passing through. You’re living there, grabbing coffee at the local café, sitting in the village square. You meet other travelers and locals eager to embrace you. You’re a novelty, after all.

You’re meeting other singles—perhaps even dating them. And the people you meet this way tend to be fellow globetrotters curious about you and other places. They aren’t asking you to fit into anyone’s mold.

It’s a nice side effect of choosing your own adventure.

P.S. Lizzo was not eaten. Look for her story in an upcoming dispatch.

P.P.S. If you’ve tried TrustedHousesitters or other petsitting platforms, like Rover (where sitters are paid), let us live vicariously… and tell us your experiences in the comments.

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Within five minutes of arriving in Provence, I was asked to drop my top. And so began the best education I ever got. (Dad, you might want to skip this one.)

The bus let me off at the foot of a long gravel lane in Aix-en-Provence and rumbled away in a cloud of dust, taking a good bit of my courage with it.

Lugging my two suitcases, I trudged up the winding cypress-lined driveway to the house where I’d spend the summer. The path dead-ended at a sprawling limestone manor and pool, where my new housemates—students from Italy, Spain, and Denmark, all of us boarding with the same French family—were mid-game in a spirited round of topless water volleyball.

“Bonjour!” they called. “Enlève ton t-shirt. Viens avec nous!” (Lose the shirt and join us!)

I froze at the edge of the pool, clutching my luggage and my modesty. I’d been raised in the American Deep South, home of bodily shame and repression.

It took me two months and nineteen days—the day before I flew home, to be exact—before I joined a game of topless volleyball.

It was terrifying.

And oddly liberating.

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I’m the little girl who hid behind her mother’s skirt and still looks for the quietest corner of the party. It amazes me that I found the nerve to go to Provence without knowing a soul. Chalk it up to the naïve confidence of a twenty-year-old. I had to make friends quickly, open myself to new ways of living, and navigate countless mortifying moments along the way.

Since we were only allowed to speak French in the house, I barely said a word for the first two weeks.

Our host mother, Vivianne, ran the house like a benevolent general, correcting my French at dinner and refusing to do laundry until we’d all emptied our poches of coins and croissant crumbs.

At her table, I learned what a tomato should taste like. That coffee wasn’t Folgers. And that wine could be enjoyed at lunch without eternal damnation.

This was a culture I could get used to.

I left France ravenous to discover more of what Europe—and the world—had to teach me.

Since then, I’ve taken dozens of solo trips abroad.

Some were easy, others less so (hello, Syria). Along the way I’ve learned to trust my instincts, rely on the generosity of strangers, and strike up conversations with the people sitting next to me—you never know who the universe has placed there.

Wandering Jerusalem’s Old City, 2018. On the flight over, I talked for hours with the Senior Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who happened to be my seatmate.

Making wine—the Lucille Ball way—on a solo trip to Portugal in 2023. My stomping partner and I became fast friends and have since met up for other travel adventures.

Traveling with friends can be wonderful.

But traveling alone has its own magic.

It stretches your boundaries and reconnects you with yourself. Often by scaring the crap out of you. I always go home a little braver than the woman who first stepped onto the plane. And with new friends willing to let me live on their sofa if Interpol’s parking division ever catches up with me.

Looking back, that summer in Provence didn’t just nurture an obsession with Nutella crepes.

It pulled me, once and for all, out from behind my mother's skirt. And instilled a wanderlust I've followed ever since—first into Middle East archaeology (turns out, poverty wasn't romantic), then into telling stories about solo travel, culture, and life abroad.

These days, I’m the one at the edge of the pool, calling to the newcomer still clutching her suitcase: Enlève ton t-shirt! Viens avec nous. There’s plenty of legroom.

Aix-en-Provence Travel Guide at a Glance:

What to Eat, See, and When to Go

Aix-en-Provence, nicknamed “the Paris of the South,” is a sprawling university town in the heart of Provence, and the hometown of Cézanne.

Why Visit Aix-en-Provence

Plane trees arch over Cours Mirabeau, the city’s central boulevard, and mossy fountains burble on nearly every corner. Locals call Aix la ville aux mille fontaines, the city of a thousand fountains. We students spent many an evening lazing in the Cours Mirabeau cafés, sipping aperitifs and feigning sophistication.

Markets and Food in Aix-en-Provence

Go for the Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday produce markets, no doubt the inspiration for Cézanne’s still lifes. Order a calisson, the almond-and-melon sweet Aix has been making for centuries.

How to Get to Aix-en-Provence from Marseille

Aix is an easy 30-minute train ride from Marseille, and once you arrive, the fountain-lined streets are walkable from end to end.

Best Time to Visit Aix-en-Provence

Spring and early fall dodge the August crowds and the high heat.

Day Trips from Aix-en-Provence

• Arles. Walk the Roman amphitheater, then drive a few minutes out to the Barbegal aqueduct, where arches stand in an olive grove.

• Nîmes and the Pont du Gard. Nîmes has a Roman arena and the Maison Carrée, a temple in remarkable shape. A short drive away, the Pont du Gard was part of a channel built to carry water to Nîmes. Bring a swimsuit for the little beach on the Gardon river.

  (Deep in a dusty box is a picture of 20-something me in a bikini with Pont du Gard in the background. I’d have displayed it proudly, had my super-sexy study abroad friend not been posing next to me.)

• Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Walk the Roman ruins of Glanum just outside town, and see where Van Gogh painted during his stay. I keep hoping an uncle I’ve never heard of has a cottage there with a stocked wine cabinet, and no other heirs.

• Roussillon. Walk the Sentier des Ocres through ochre-red cliffs in the Luberon hills. Your clothes will be covered in red dust if you do it right. Wear trail shoes.

• Gordes. A hilltop village of pale stone. It’s a jaw-dropping vista that never gets old. But the hills are serious. Bring good lungs. Roussillon and Gordes sit close together, so pair them in one day, ideally by car.

Aix-en-Provence to Nice or Monaco by Train

Plan this as an overnight, not a day trip. From the Aix TGV station, a direct TGV OUIGO takes just over three hours, while from the central station you’ll take a regional train to Marseille and then a TGV of about two hours forty minutes. Book ahead. (And if you see Alexandre, the gorgeous guy sitting next to me on the train to Monaco 30 years ago, give him my number.)

On the way, stop at Cap d’Ail, the last station before the Monaco border. A steep flight of steps leads down to Plage Mala. It’s secluded and spectacular. A great place to go French-topless in relative privacy.

A few quick notes:

• Car access: I’m going from general knowledge on the Luberon villages, so confirm drive times and whether you’d recommend a car or a tour.

• Order: if you’d prefer search-friendly headings, “Day Trips from Aix-en-Provence” and “Aix-en-Provence to Nice by Train” are the phrases people actually type.

Cours Mirabeau. Photo by Ladislaus Hoffner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As long as it was fresh & firm, one was pretty much as good as the next. Eventually you’d end up in separate beds with your teeth in a jar on the nightstand. But you’d have love, stability, and children to cuddle.

Goldie met every serious boyfriend I had in my 20s. When I hit 30, she sat me down and pleaded:

“Just pick one—they were all perfectly nice.”

Goldie passed away at age 94—when she finally gave up on me.

Looking back, I can’t say singledom was a conscious life decision. But time after time, I chose career, adventure, and self-discovery over the white dress.

The life of a singleton can be rich with little luxuries... but it’s not without its struggles.

There are snot-filled days I’d love someone to bring me chicken soup. Days I daydream of a partner who can fix the plumbing, chop a mean onion, and pad my retirement account. I pray there’ll be someone to change my diapers when I’m 90 (probably a robot). But for a woman who values her autonomy above all… ringless can be priceless.

If you can’t settle for “perfectly nice,” but are stuck navigating a world that tends to treat singledom like a yeast infection, this is your tribe.

So here goes, the actual manifesto part…

1. Single Is Not Scary

There’s a particular tilt of the head, a puzzled expression people assume when they learn you’ve never been married. They begin scanning you for signs of damage: an allergy to intimacy, chronic halitosis, excessive cat hair on your jeans.

Some will find you fascinating—a delectable party guest to regale the room with stories of life in Narnia.

But the general assumption is that something went wrong.

Let’s be clear:

Singledom is not a glitch in the human chromosome. It’s a legitimate setting.

2. This Is Not the “Before” Picture

I spent years living as if my life was building to the cinematic climax…

You know, where the heroine dashes through airports, meets friends in exotic locales, builds career, collects charming and not-so-charming exes, and then—finally, mercifully—meets the romantic lead, at which point the music swells and she collapses in his arms aboard his Mediterranean yacht. End credits.

The problem with living like a permanent “before” picture is you never let anything count. Jobs, apartments, roadtrips, hairstyles, all become draft versions of a life that hasn’t officially begun.

Then one day you realize this is the movie. There is no rehearsal.

This is the part where you eat Fruit Loops at midnight and book flights irresponsibly and buy the luxury sheets because there is no future imaginary spouse to object.

You are not waiting in the lobby of your life for someone to escort you in. You’re already inside.

3. Freedom Is Not the Consolation Prize

Whenever a woman admits she likes being single, she’s expected to add a little disclaimer, the way people apologize for liking Taylor Swift.

“I mean, of course relationships are wonderful, but I do love my freedom…”

As if freedom were the consolation prize they give you when you don’t win the spouse.

Here’s a wild thought: What if freedom is the actual prize?

Freedom looks like:

• Moving countries without convening a committee

• Changing your career because you had a thought in the shower

• Fostering kittens and a one-eyed goat

• Sliding into bed at 7:30 on a Saturday, spread-eagled

4. Stereotypes Are Boring (We Are Not)

Single women over 35 are supposed to come in one of three varieties:

1. The Tragic Workaholic

2. The Desperate Husband Hunter

3. The Quirky Aunt Who Owns Too Many Dolls

In reality, we are:

• Archaeologists, professors, bartenders, software engineers, attorneys, bartenders again

• Godmothers, dog people, baby lovers, mile-high-clubbers, plant serial killers

• Women who can assemble bookshelves, taxes, and entire new lives from IKEA-level instructions

We are not the cautionary tale.

We’re the other storyline—the one where the heroine doesn’t get married in Act III and still has to figure out who she is.

Frankly, that’s the more interesting movie… With endless opportunities for sequels.

5. Reinvention Without a Witness

One of the unsung, wonderful things about being single is how often you get to reinvent yourself without spousal permission or a socially approved excuse.

Just… a quiet sense that you’ve outgrown something and it’s time to re-pot yourself.

You start a new career, move to a different city (or different country), change your entire aesthetic from “respectable neutral” to “woman who might own a sword,” and people say:

“Oh! Did something happen?”

Yes. I did.

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Single women get very good at this kind of internal-migration reinvention. No ceremony, no witnesses, no clear before-and-after—just another version of you quietly moving into a new layer of life.

If anything, that’s harder. And braver.

6. Desire Didn’t Die; It Multiplied

People sometimes talk to single women like we’ve been spayed.

“As long as you’re happy,” they say, in the tone reserved for people who collect antique soup cans.

But desire doesn’t vanish because you’re not co-signing a mortgage with someone. It simply has more places to go.

Desire for:

• Travel

• Work that doesn’t slowly eat your soul

• Friendships that feel like chosen family

• Lovers, maybe

• Quiet, often

• A life that feels coherent from the inside, even if it looks confusing from the outside

7. You Are Not the Supporting Sidekick

This is the heart of it.

You are not the quirky supporting character in everybody else’s love story. You don’t exist to babysit, to fill in the wedding seating chart last-minute, or to be the Only Interesting Person at Thanksgiving.

You are the main character of your life. You get the full arc: the conflict, the growth, the plot twists, the gorgeous establishing shots, the long introspective voiceover.

Partnership and parenthood may or may not appear as subplots. Great. We love subplots. But they are not the premise.

In plain terms:

• You are not late.

• You are not unfinished.

• You are not practice for someone else’s real relationship.

• You are not “too” anything—except possibly interesting.

You are a woman whose life is happening right now—in all its absurd, lovely, inconvenient, expansive detail.

You are allowed to enjoy it without apologizing. To grieve the parts you wanted and didn’t get. To want things intensely and still not center your entire existence around finding a partner like they’re the last lifeboat off the Titanic.

Being a smug singleton isn’t about being better than others; it’s about the quiet confidence of building a life that makes sense to you alone.

That’s what our community is for: A place to map out who you are when no one’s handing you the script.

My great-aunt Goldie would have opinions, of course. But then, she was born in the deep south in 1914—an era of few choices. I’d have loved to witness the journey of this remarkable, self-possessed woman if she’d had ours.

Share with someone this reminds you of.

About the Author:

I used to be an archaeologist—excavating ancient cities and trying to figure out why humans did what they did. Later, I became Editor in Chief of International Living, helping people design new lives around the world. I’ve also been an investment newsletter editor, a thesis writing tutor, and a Mesopotamian art professor.

In other words: I’ve spent my career studying the stories people tell about who they are… and who they might become.

I divide my time between North Carolina, Florida, New York, and Europe (mainly France—it’s a baguette thing).

As a single, never-married, child-free woman, I know how much room there is for stories that don’t follow the expected arc. And I can’t wait to hear yours…

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Please return your seat to the upright position. Actually, don’t—recline all you like. There’s nobody behind you.

Your captain

I’m Steph: never married, no kids, and a woman who’s spent most of her life going places alone and a fair amount of it explaining why. Along the way I’ve dug up a Mesopotamian city eight kilometers from the Iraqi border, run the editorial side of International Living, and paid more single supplements than I care to total.

Here I write about the life I actually live—and help you build yours.

The flight plan

All the Legroom is for women living a self-shaped life—single by choice, circumstance, or a long run of excellent decisions. We cover three things:

• Going places solo. Travelogues, misadventures, and practical guides from women out there doing it.

• Living well on one income. At home or abroad, on your own terms, without apologizing for the room you take up.

• Rewriting the script. Honest, wry takes on aging, reinvention, and the cultural stories about how women “should” live.

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Seats are unassigned. Pick the one that fits—and take all the legroom you want. 🥂

About Me, Your Curator

I used to be an archaeologist—excavating ancient cities and trying to figure out why humans did what they did. Later, I became Editor in Chief of International Living, helping people design new lives around the world. I’ve also been an executive editor of financial advisories, a thesis writing tutor, and a Mesopotamian art professor.

In other words: I’ve spent my entire career studying the stories people tell about who they are… and who they might become.

As a single, never-married, child-free woman myself, I know how much room there is for stories that don’t follow the expected arc. And I can’t wait to hear yours.

I was side-eyed by a bearded goat while weeing behind a Chamonix barn, and that was before the Rolexes…

But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is rude.

The story began a week earlier, when I rented a car in La Rochelle, France and drove cross-country to meet my family skiing in Tignes. (Lift tickets: a fraction of Colorado. Lunch: not a cardboard sandwich in sight. The French are insufferable about food quality, even at 10,000 feet.)

After a few glorious days in Tignes, eating frites while others huffed down the mountain, I pointed the car north toward Chamonix—a two hour journey of switchbacks, tunnels, and Mont Blanc looming closer with every turn.

I had no plan other than to spend the day in this Bavarian postcard of a town, where the shiny-haired and diamond-encrusted come to ski. Twelve minutes after arrival, I was behind a barn in desperation. (You’ve met the goat.)

Half an hour later, I was sipping white Burgundy at a café like none of that had happened. Then I took the Aiguille du Midi cable car to 12,600 feet and watched the world drop away in every direction. I’ve rarely felt more like a character in a Bond film.

I had three more days to explore before meeting a friend in Geneva, so I bookmarked Chamonix for a return visit (when my wallet was fatter), and pointed the car west toward Annecy, the so-called Venice of the Alps.

I’d heard the tales… and still wasn’t prepared.

Tucked between the Alps and one of the cleanest lakes in Europe, Annecy is a true jaw-dropper. Turquoise water. Pastel old town. Canals crossed by stone bridges dripping with geraniums. Snow-capped peaks in the distance. And the whole thing is so compact you can wander into a fairytale and back out again before lunch.

I spent my first day video calling everyone in the U.S. who might pick up, spinning in slow circles so they could see the views, quietly envious of the people who actually live here. (I’m hunting for a month-long rental.)

Abundant Local Talent

I’d also left Bumble on Travel Mode, and—holy moly.

The pop-ups were more like pin-ups. Patrick Dempsey hair. Multiple languages. Bespoke suits. A far cry from my home turf of Florida, land of bespoke baseball caps. Half these Bumble men lived an hour away in Geneva, where—of course—a watch convention was underway. I kept picturing all those strong wrists in Rolexes. Loosening their ties.

You don’t need a Bumble date in Annecy (albeit I recommend a sneak peek). The city itself handles the heavy romancing. The lake, the light, the terraces, the stone streets… they’ll show off for you alone.

Safe for solo women? Extremely.

Annecy is one of the safest towns in France for a woman alone. Small, affluent, well-lit, well-touristed, low violent crime. The old town and lakefront stay lively into the evening—cafés spilling onto cobblestones, nobody paying you much attention. Pickpockets work the crowded markets, and while you might get a catcall or two, I never felt unsafe walking home after dinner.

When I’m traveling alone I like to find a B&B where the hosts are on site to offer tips, and I look for historic and quirky. Le Boutik Hotel fit that bill. And the location was perfection.

What to do

• Stroll the Vieille Ville, especially around the Palais de l’Isle—the tiny stone prison on an island in the Thiou canal.

• Bike the Voie Verte, 40 km of flat paved path along the lake’s western shore.

• Cruise the lake, or rent a small electric boat yourself (no license required).

• Swim at Plage d’Albigny or Plage des Marquisats in summer.

• Climb the Château d’Annecy for the museum and rooftop views.

• Hike to the Basilique de la Visitation for the Alps-and-lake panorama.

• Hit the markets Tuesday, Friday, or Sunday mornings for Savoyard cheese, saucisson, and tarte aux myrtilles.

• Order local: tartiflette, fondue savoyarde, féra (lake fish), a glass of Apremont.

• Day-trip to Talloires, the Gorges du Fier, Semnoz mountain, Chamonix, or Geneva by train (under an hour).

Where to meet people (other than Bumble)

Given its proximity to business hubs like Geneva, Lyon, and Paris, Annecy hosts its share of solo travelers on planning retreats, etc. I chatted up one of them at the “tree bar” at Chez Ingalls restaurant and brewery. (It’s a lovely mix of warm and chic. And a must for Little House on the Prairie fans.)

Paraglide tandem with a pilot over Lake Annecy (this is a world-class spot for it). Take a cooking class. Go on a guided hike (ask for a “farm to summit” hike, where you can taste dairy farm cheese.)

Before you go to Annecy, join one or two of its expat Facebook groups. I’ve found this to be a great way to meet other English speakers wherever I’ve traveled. Tell them your plans and see who wants to meet for coffee or cocktails or a walk around the city. You’ll likely be surprised at the enthusiasm!

Should I brush up on my French?

Si vous voulez. You’ll be fine with English, but you’ll blend in more if you attempt some French. Annecy is mostly French tourists, followed by Swiss, Brits, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Italians. It isn’t on the U.S. circuit the way Paris or Provence are, though it’s gaining traction on Instagram. The energy is European holiday, not American tour group.

Go alone. Flirt across the border. Eat the cheese.

You can easily romance yourself in Annecy… The city does half the work. Bumble, if you’re so inclined, handles the rest.

About the Author:

Hi there Legroomers! I’m so glad you’re here.

I used to be an archaeologist—excavating ancient cities and trying to figure out why humans did what they did. Later, I became Editor in Chief of International Living, helping people design new lives around the world. I’ve also been an investment newsletter editor, a thesis writing tutor, and a Mesopotamian art professor.

In other words: I’ve spent my career studying the stories people tell about who they are… and who they might become.

I divide my time between North Carolina, Florida, New York, and Europe (mainly France—it’s a baguette thing).

As a single, never-married, child-free woman, I know how much room there is for stories that don’t follow the expected arc. And I can’t wait to hear yours…