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.
