A week alone in a foreign city is one of the better forms of practice for dating, and it involves no dates at all. Without a friend to talk to, a person on a solo trip has to ask strangers for directions and start conversations with whoever is nearby, many times over a few days. Psychologists have studied each of those small exchanges, and the findings point the same way. People are far better received in conversation than they expect, and the fear of starting one shrinks quickly with repetition.
Conversations With Strangers
In 2014 Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder of the University of Chicago published a set of 9 experiments on what happens when people talk to strangers, starting with commuters on Chicago trains and buses. Commuters who were asked to start a conversation with the person next to them reported a more pleasant trip than those who were asked to sit in silence. Before the experiment, most participants had predicted the opposite. They assumed the other person would not want to talk, and that silence on the train meant nobody was interested.
The result held for introverts as well as extraverts. A 2021 follow-up study found the same pattern in a different form. People expected a conversation with a stranger to be less pleasant than it turned out to be, and the main reason was a belief that the other person would be uninterested.
The Liking Gap
A second line of research looks at what happens after the conversation ends. In a 2018 paper in Psychological Science, Erica Boothby and colleagues paired strangers for conversations lasting between 2 and 45 minutes and then asked each person two questions. How much did they like their partner, and how much did they think their partner liked them? People consistently underestimated how much they were liked, a pattern the researchers called the liking gap.
The gap was wider among shy participants. Their partners had sent friendly signals during the conversation, but the people who were worried about how they came across tended not to notice them. A first date also puts two strangers together for a fixed time with an uncertain ending, and the liking gap can make a good one feel like a failure.
A Week of Scavenger Hunts
In 2022 Gillian Sandstrom, Erica Boothby and Gus Cooney ran a study with 286 university students in the United States and the United Kingdom. For about a week, half of them used a scavenger-hunt app that told them to find a particular kind of stranger and talk to them. The other half were told to find the same people and only observe them.
The students who talked to strangers felt more confident about starting and ending conversations by the end of the week, and they expected fewer rejections. Actual rejection was rare. Of the 1,336 conversations the participants had, 87% were with the first stranger they approached, and a week after the study about 40% of participants said they had swapped contact details with at least one person they met through the game. The gains in confidence were still there at that follow-up, while the students who only observed strangers showed no change.
Choosing the Kind of Trip
On a solo trip almost every task requires talking to someone, and the choice of trip affects who those people are. Hostels with shared kitchens and small group tours put a visitor among other solo guests, while traveling in luxury brings its own meeting points, such as the hotel bar and the concierge desk. A cooking class or a walking tour puts a visitor beside a small group of strangers for several hours.
The number of Britons going solo has risen sharply. In ABTA’s Holiday Habits research, 11% of British holidaymakers went on a solo trip in the 12 months to August 2022. The figure was 16% a year later, and the 2025 to 2026 report put it at 19%, the highest since the trade body began tracking solo holidays in 2014. In the 2023 survey, people aged 25 to 34 were the most likely to have gone alone.
Personality Change After Time Abroad
Time abroad also changes personality, at least for a while. In a study published in 2013, the German psychologists Julia Zimmermann and Franz Neyer followed more than 1,000 students from about 200 universities over an academic year, comparing those who chose to study abroad with those who stayed. Students who spent time abroad became more open and more emotionally stable than those who stayed at home, and the change was largely explained by the new friendships and support they built while away.
The students who went abroad were already more open and outgoing before they left, so part of the difference came from who chose to go. Even so, the study found change on top of that starting point. Emotional stability describes how strongly a person reacts to setbacks, including a rejection or an awkward silence.
A five-year follow-up, published in 2020 by Julia Richter and colleagues including Zimmermann and Neyer, tracked the same kind of students after they came home. Small differences between those who had gone abroad and those who had stayed appeared soon after the trip. Over the longer period, the estimates still pointed toward lasting gains in openness and emotional stability, but the later measurements were too imprecise for the result to reach statistical significance. Time abroad appears to start the change, and what a person does afterwards affects how much of it lasts.
Bringing the Practice Home
A person who has asked 20 strangers for help in a language they barely speak will find it easier to start a conversation at a party back home. Someone who has eaten alone in a busy restaurant every night for a week has usually stopped worrying about how a table for one looks. That habit is spreading at home too. OpenTable reported in September 2024 that solo dining reservations in the United States had risen 29% over the previous two years, so a person who is comfortable eating alone is no longer unusual in a restaurant.
Picture the last evening of that week. A visitor waits in line at a night-market food stall, orders in a few words of the local language and asks the person behind what they would recommend. The answer turns into a conversation that lasts until the stalls close. Back home a month later, the same person walks into a first date and opens with a question, because asking strangers questions has become routine.
