How to Take Yourself to a Movie

If dinner alone still feels like a bridge too far, start here. The cinema is the training wheels of masterdating, because it is the one social outing where nobody talks to anyone anyway. You are not doing something unusual. You are doing the normal thing, minus one.

The Tuesday matinee

2:00 on a Tuesday. There will be eleven people in the room. The screen is yours, the armrests are all yours, and the peculiar luxury of an empty cinema is one of the few genuinely free pleasures left.

Weekend evening showings are the opposite: crowded, loud, and full of couples. It's a harder room. Don't start there.

Where to sit

Two-thirds back, dead center. This is the seat the sound was mixed for and it is almost always available to a party of one, which is the recurring theme of this entire enterprise: the best version of a thing is frequently sitting there unclaimed because it only fits one person.

Pick the harder film

Here is the actual argument for going alone. With company, you optimize for consensus — the film you'll both tolerate. Alone, you can go see the three-hour subtitled thing, or the restoration nobody else wants to sit through, or the deeply stupid one you'd be embarrassed to suggest.

Nobody is negotiating with you. That's not a limitation of the solo trip. It is the entire product.

The part people skip

Do not go straight to the car.

Walk somewhere for twenty minutes afterward, or sit down with a coffee, and let the film finish happening. When you see something with a friend, the conversation in the lobby does this work — it converts the experience into something you've processed. Alone, you have to do that yourself, and the twenty minutes is where it happens.

Skip it and the film evaporates by the time you're home. Take it, and you'll still have the thing next week.