Carmen Hyden’s fixation with solomaxxing started after coming out of an intense two-year relationship. “The idea of rushing into another one felt impossible,” she says.
In the nearly three years since the breakup, Hyden, 28, has stopped
dating and focused exclusively on herself. She started traveling solo and reading more, tried out paddleboarding, road cycling, and bouldering. She also picked up meditation and breathwork, created a walking club, and began working as a skin therapist at Facegym in London, where she lives.
Solomaxxing—also sometimes referred to as singlemaxxing, alonemaxxing or bymyselfmaxxing—is a new-ish trend among young people who intentionally choose to stay single and prioritize their own independence over dating.
For Hyden, the experience has been freeing. “It’s changed the way being single feels. It’s no longer something to fix or move on from,” she tells WIRED via email. For her, the trend removes the stigma of being unmarried and alone, and recasts it as something to aspire to, not avoid.
As these trends often do, solomaxxing blew up on TikTok in recent months as Gen Z flocked there to document and discuss their frustrations with the
rising cost of dating. In the US, inflation has spiked to a three-year high, causing gas and groceries to skyrocket (the surge was sparked by shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, a result of the US and Israel’s war with Iran). The average all-in cost of a date in 2026 increased to $189, up 12.5 percent from 2025, a rate that is outpacing the cost of living according to a BMO Real Financial Progress Index report from earlier this year.
In the UK, where Hyden lives, a
study by British bank Barclays found adults spend more than £111 per month ($147) on dates and dating apps, with 52 percent of Gen Z adults saying the added expense has stopped them from dating altogether. This reality has even forced some dating apps to resort to offering free gas to motivate daters.
But for Hyden, solomaxxing has nothing to do with financial woes and everything to do with “building a life that feels full on its own terms,” she says. “Being alone means no one is triggering you or pulling you out of your own rhythm.” She says solomaxxing for her isn’t actually about avoiding people but tapping into her potential through new hobbies, rituals, and self-discovery, which she’s happy to spend money on. “There’s no loneliness filling the gaps, just contentment.”
Bella DePaulo, a social scientist and author of
Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, sees this as a positive evolution for Gen Z, particularly for how it rejects the long-established belief that marriage, to borrow from millennial lexicon, is peak relationship goals.
“It is such a remarkable twist, after decades in which marriage was seen as a sign of societal and personal stability. People who married were said to have ‘settled down.’ The irony is that single life, for people who want to be single, is completely stable. It is marriage that is unstable,” DePaulo says, adding that it can be undone by all manner of things, including separation, divorce, or the death of a spouse.
The term solomaxxing comes from Gen Z’s ongoing hyperfixation with personal self-enhancement: how you look (“
looksmaxxing”), what you eat (“ proteinmaxxing”), where you find pleasure (“ nutmaxxing”). The ridiculousness of the whole maxxing trend aside, there is some substance to what solomaxxing attempts to redefine when it comes to how people think about the future of relationships, and all the ways relationships have changed.
A
new survey from analytics firm MyIQ on dating burnout found that nearly half of adults aged 18 to 34 say being single feels more peaceful than being in a relationship, while 42 percent of respondents said being paired interferes with personal goals, financial stability, or self-development.
Different relationship structures emerge as new generations define what love looks like for them. In recent years, more flexible romantic practices like
ethical nonmonogamy and relationship anarchy have become even more mainstream. But despite Gen Z having more options than previous generations to romantically connect with one another, young people are electing to stay single.
“It is part of a long history in which women and men have been transcending rigid gender roles, and queer people have been feeling less pressure to fake heterosexuality,” DePaulo says.
In his book
The Intimate Animal, Justin Garcia, director of sex research center the Kinsey Institute, suggests that there is almost no other society in cross-cultural literature where this many adults have been single at a given time. “We may be on the shoreline ahead of a global singledom wave,” he writes.
Almost half of the adult population in the US is single (42 percent), according to
2023 Pew study, which notes that “even though the share of adults who are unpartnered has ticked down and the share who are married has inched up, it is not the case that more people are getting married.” In fact, more adults are rejecting marriage altogether, and some 80 percent of one-parent family groups are maintained by a single mother.
But singlehood, despite efforts from MAGA world to promote Christian family values and
turn women into trad wives, is not a cage for Gen Z. Some of them appreciate the single life for the peace and autonomy it offers, cherishing the time they have to themselves instead of fearing it.
“Bymyselfmaxxing until I find someone whose company I enjoy more than my own,”
@raspbbymel posted on TikTok in June.
The trend is also part of a larger rebrand happening online when it comes to being single, and what that looks like today. The term
heterofatalism entered the zeitgeist last year, and in October, Vogue wondered, “ Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?”
On TikTok, creators have even started
loneliness influencing, where they record POV videos of their introverted lifestyles and post about having no friends. But these shifts, DePaulo says, can also lead to a broader, and perhaps more complex, understanding of singlehood as a more rewarding alternative to marriage.
“Contrary to the stereotype of single people as ‘alone’ and as not having anyone, single people typically are better at maintaining ties to more different people,” she says. A
study from 2021 found that people who lived with others experienced similar, and occasionally higher, levels of loneliness as people who lived alone.
For Hyden, who calls herself “a lover girl at heart,” the last few years have been revelatory, and though she hasn’t totally given up on romance, she is enjoying the long detour.
“Relationships do ask for your time and energy. They can get in the way of certain things if you’re not intentional. Solomaxxing has never been about closing the door on that. It’s just been about not settling,” she says.
<small>Source: Wired</small>
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