Psychology says people who eat alone rather than compromise their values aren't being difficult. They've simply reached the point where self-betrayal costs more than solitude.

Last Thursday evening, I sat alone at a small corner table in a hawker center here in Singapore, eating a bowl of laksa I'd confirmed three times was made without shrimp paste or fish sauce. The place was loud — families laughing, friends clinking bottles, couples sharing plates. And there I was, a seventy-year-old woman with her one careful bowl and a glass of water, looking — I'm sure — like someone who'd been forgotten by the world.

A younger woman at the next table glanced over and gave me one of those smiles. You know the one. It's the smile people reserve for old women eating alone. Part pity, part projection, part the unspoken thought: I hope that's not me someday.

The thing is, I wasn't lonely. I wasn't sad. I was relieved.

Twenty minutes earlier, I'd politely excused myself from a group dinner with acquaintances because the restaurant had almost nothing I could eat — and more importantly, because the conversation had turned to how "extreme" it was that I wouldn't just have a little bit of the fish. "It's not going to kill you," someone said, laughing. And I smiled, and I said something about my stomach not agreeing with me, and I left. Because I've learned — after decades of swallowing more than food at tables like that — that the cost of staying and pretending is always higher than the cost of walking out alone.

The Invisible Math We Do at Every Shared Table

If I'm being honest, I spent most of my adult life doing a kind of emotional arithmetic at meals. How much of myself could I set aside in order to keep the peace? How many comments about my food choices could I absorb before the knot in my chest became unbearable? How many times could I say "Oh, I'm fine, I'll just have the salad" before I stopped recognizing my own voice?

The answer, it turns out, was thousands. Thousands of times over thirty-some years of marriages, work lunches, family holidays, and dinner parties where I folded myself into whatever shape the table required. I ate things that made me feel sick — not in my stomach, but in that deeper place where you store the things you wish you'd said.

There's a concept in psychology called self-concordance — the degree to which your actions align with your authentic interests and values. Research by Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot found that when people pursue goals that don't align with their core values, they experience diminished well-being even when they succeed at those goals. The achievement feels hollow. The belonging feels borrowed. You're physically present but psychologically absent, and your body knows the difference even when your mind tries to ignore it.

That's what I was doing for years at every compromised meal. Succeeding at being agreeable. Failing at being myself.

The Moment the Cost Tips

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become "difficult." That's not how it works. What happens is slower, more accumulative — like dust on a windowsill you stop noticing until one day the sunlight hits it and you can't see anything else.

For me, the tipping point came about five years ago, not long after I'd moved to Singapore and started hosting my weekly vegan dinners. I'd spent an evening at a friend's birthday dinner where the host had assured me there'd be "something for you" — which turned out to be a plate of white rice and steamed broccoli, served with an apologetic shrug while everyone else had a three-course meal. I sat there smiling, telling everyone it was fine, eating my rice and watching the table enjoy food that had been prepared with thought and care and intention — none of which had been extended to me.

I drove home and sat in my car for fifteen minutes, engine off, just breathing. And the thought that surfaced wasn't anger at the host. It was this: Why do I keep showing up to tables where I have to pretend that being an afterthought doesn't hurt?

That question changed everything. Not dramatically — I didn't make a scene or send a manifesto. But something inside recalibrated. I'd reached what I've come to think of as the threshold — the point where self-respect finally outweighed the fear of being alone.

Self-Betrayal Has a Body

Here's what I've learned from therapy in my fifties and from living in this body for seven decades: self-betrayal isn't abstract. It lives in the bones. It accumulates in the jaw, the shoulders, the gut. Every time you say "I'm fine" when you're not, every time you eat something that violates what you believe because it's easier than explaining yourself, your body registers it as a small act of abandonment.

Research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has shown that people who suppress their authentic selves in social situations experience increased physiological stress responses — elevated cortisol, higher blood pressure, disrupted sleep patterns. The researchers call it the cost of "inauthentic self-presentation," but I call it what it is: the price of lying to yourself at the dinner table so nobody has to feel uncomfortable about your choices.

I think about my mother, who was a seamstress in small-town Pennsylvania and who spent her entire life making sure everyone else was comfortable. She developed rheumatoid arthritis at sixty-eight, and while I know that's not a simple cause-and-effect story, I also know that a lifetime of swallowing what she actually thought and felt didn't help. The body keeps the score, as they say — and it keeps it in places we don't always think to look.

Being "Difficult" Versus Being Whole

The word "difficult" gets applied to women — particularly older women — with a precision that should embarrass the people using it. A man who refuses to eat something is "particular" or "he knows what he likes." A woman who does the same, especially past sixty, is difficult. High-maintenance. Making a fuss.

But there's a difference between being difficult and being whole, and emotionally intelligent people eventually stop explaining the difference. Because the explaining itself becomes another form of labor — another way you're expected to justify your own existence at the table.

When I became vegan, it wasn't a whim. It was the culmination of years of paying attention — to my body, to the world, to the gap between what I said I believed and how I actually lived. Closing that gap cost me dinner invitations, a few friendships that turned out to be more shallow than I'd imagined, and the comfortable identity of being "easy-going Adam who goes along with everything." What it gave me was something I didn't even know I'd been missing: the experience of sitting down to eat without that low hum of self-betrayal running underneath every bite.

Solitude as a Form of Integrity

A study from researchers at the University of Virginia found that people who choose solitude for positive reasons — rest, reflection, alignment with personal values — experience none of the negative psychological effects typically associated with being alone. The loneliness research we hear about usually describes involuntary isolation. But choosing to eat alone because the alternative requires you to abandon what you believe? That's not isolation. That's sovereignty.

Every Sunday, I bake bread in my kitchen. Sometimes friends come for my weekly vegan dinner. Sometimes no one comes. Both are fine now — and I don't say that with the forced cheerfulness of someone performing contentment. I say it because I've done the math. I've lived both versions: the version where I'm surrounded by people but quietly betraying myself with every concession, and the version where I'm alone but completely intact. The second version is quieter. It's also the only one where I can actually taste my food.

I've written before about how the loneliest part of retirement isn't being alone — it's realizing how many relationships were held together by proximity rather than genuine connection. The same is true at the dinner table. Some tables hold you. Some just hold a place setting with your name on it.

What I'd Tell the Woman Who Smiled at Me

If I could have said something to that young woman in the hawker center — the one who gave me the pity smile — I would have told her this: the version of me sitting alone with my one bowl of laksa is the happiest version of me that's ever existed at a dinner table.

Not because I don't want company. I do. My weekly dinners, where friends gather around food I've prepared with care and no one has to compromise or apologize or pretend — those evenings are among the best of my life. But I'd rather eat alone every night for the rest of my years than sit at one more table where the price of admission is a piece of my integrity.

That's not being difficult. That's what it looks like when a person over sixty has finally reached a level of emotional independence that most people spend their whole lives working toward.

It took me almost seven decades to understand something that I suspect my mother knew but never had the language — or the permission — to say: the table that requires you to leave yourself at the door isn't offering you a seat. It's offering you a costume. And at some point, if you're paying attention, you stop putting it on.

I finished my laksa that night. I walked home slowly through the warm Singapore air, listening to the sounds of other people's evenings drifting from open windows. And for the first time in what felt like a very long while, I wasn't rehearsing what I should have said or replaying what I should have done differently. I was just full — in every sense of the word — and it was enough.