Choosing Solitude Over Performative Belonging at Christmas

I’m not talking about rejecting generosity or romanticising loneliness. It is all about being discerning, which might mean saying no to an offer to conform at the Christmas table attended by people who are not related to you, but for some reason want to make sure you don’t feel excluded. After all, it’s the festive season and that’s about offering kindness to “others”, including single you.

I have often found myself single at times of cultural high stakes, including Christmas and pretty much all of the festive season, until January returns again. I have accepted genuine offers to come to family gatherings I would have no business being at on any other day. Luckily I’m not homeless and I can afford food, but sometimes it does feel right to be among others, rip open a bonbon with a stranger and eat too much pavlova. 

This year felt very different as I was invited by a person who I don’t know too well, who felt it her mission to ensure I celebrated Christmas “with us and our friends”. If she had said “lets celebrate Christmas together”, I might have just done so. But I already had my suspicions about this person, who had made contact many years after we went to high school together. We weren’t friends then either, but 2025 seemed to be for her to all about rekindling a friendship that was not there in the first place. My gut instinct screamed to decline, in the form of nausea and panic. I felt there was an agenda, which did reveal itself in various ways. There seemed to be a power imbalance, with her seeking me out, buying me gifts that made me feel uncomfortable, leading conversations with a presumed superiority, and now this invitation. An opportunity to ensure I didn't feel “lonely and left out”.This new/old “friend” with a surplus of her own, and enough of everything to share with inadequate and unpartnered me. 

By offering me the chance to spend a celebration with her friends merely reinforced the popular idea that being alone at Christmas was something that could be prevented and avoided, if only I’d play along. Pick any random family, and pull up an odd chair. The family didn’t matter, being with people the only goal. 

I could see myself being the odd one out and my new/old friend’s gathering, creating the need for a generous amount of small talk for everyone including me. I knew from past experiences that this type of Christmas invitation is less about welcome and inclusivity, and more about control and sanctimony. It arrives framed as kindness but ultimately functions to make the host feel and be seen to be decent, generous, inclusive. 

I’d guess that by declining and being discerning I have come across as ungrateful and fragile. 

The difference is subtle but unmistakable. Genuine offers feel lateral. You are spoken to as an equal, not absorbed as a project that “no single person is left to fend for themselves”. You blend in rather than stand out, the one making it an odd number around the makeshift christmas table.  Making the trifle having to stretch over an odd number of dessert bowls. Meaning one person had to use a fork instead of a spoon for the fruit salad. 

And don’t even ask how to tackle the bon bon popping with one person having to do it twice. 

Christmas is uniquely efficient at exposing entitlement. It is a ritualised display of family, coupling, abundance, and belonging. Those who do not conform to the preferred configuration like myself, an unattached woman identified as a “guest” rather than an equal, welcome but to remain on the periphery. Not seated next to somebody else’s husband for fear of the rupture of a firmly held longstanding relationship, happy or not. A need to remain small and not very interesting for fear of upending connections that are unfamiliar to me. 

There is also a quieter irony at work. Some of the people extending these invitations are themselves enduring Christmas rather than enjoying it. They are managing family obligations, performing harmony, tolerating dynamics they would never choose voluntarily. The table is full, but not necessarily intimate. Togetherness, in this context, is compulsory rather than desired. What better way to experience genuine loneliness, surrounded by “loved ones”. 

Which makes the moral framing stranger still. The solitary woman is cast as the problem to be solved, while those privately counting the hours until the day ends are positioned as secure and superior. Loneliness is projected outward, as though presence is enough proof of belonging.

Anyway, this Christmas I remained authentic to my solitary predicament and went to the movies. This was not an act of withdrawal. It was a refusal to participate in a false situation that may have helped in the immediacy of Christmas day, but would have left me then obligated to be grateful to my new/old friends who, after all “made sure I was included at Christmas”. 

I would rather not be single. But until that changes, I am not willing to live as though my life is on hold, killing time while the world turns for those playing along. Making the most of it is not denial, it is being genuine. It is choosing fullness where it is available, and refusing invitations, social or romantic, that ask me to shrink in order to belong.

Ironically, the film I watched was The Housemaid. A story about what happens behind closed doors in the most horrific of ways. The plot twisted and turned, I reeled and got caught up in genuine emotion and feeling, not forced smiling and listening to conversations about all the things that happened to a group of people on all the other times that I wasn’t there. 

I left the cinema thinking about how much violence, hierarchy, and silence have always been protected by the idea of family, by walls mistaken for safety, by togetherness needing respect at all costs. I walked back into the evening alone. And clear. The day passes. The ritual ends. No harm is done.

As for my friend who I hardly know? I haven’t heard from her, thankfully, checking up to see if I have survived the presumed impossible. To see if she can help make me feel more like her and her friends. To continue scoring more points to keep me indebted to her

I am more resolute about 2026. I have started making plans to travel at times of tradition, including Easter, while the world continues to perform around celebrations, being pro-active, and living my best life as a single person.