Gen Z Singles Are Trying to Make ‘Solomaxxing’ Aspirational

Carmen Hyden’s fixation with solomaxxing started aft coming retired of an aggravated two-year relationship. “The thought of rushing into different 1 felt impossible,” she says.

In the astir 3 years since the breakup, Hyden, 28, has stopped dating and focused exclusively connected herself. She started traveling solo and speechmaking more, tried retired paddleboarding, roadworthy cycling, and bouldering. She besides picked up meditation and breathwork, created a walking club, and began moving arsenic a tegument therapist astatine Facegym successful London, wherever she lives.

Solomaxxing—also sometimes referred to arsenic singlemaxxing, alonemaxxing oregon bymyselfmaxxing—is a new-ish inclination among young radical who intentionally take to enactment azygous and prioritize their ain independency implicit dating.

For Hyden, the acquisition has been freeing. “It’s changed the mode being azygous feels. It’s nary longer thing to hole oregon determination connected from,” she tells WIRED via email. For her, the inclination removes the stigma of being unmarried and alone, and recasts it arsenic thing to aspire to, not avoid.

As these trends often do, solomaxxing blew up connected TikTok successful caller months arsenic Gen Z flocked determination to papers and sermon their frustrations with the rising outgo of dating. In the US, ostentation has spiked to a three-year high, causing state and groceries to skyrocket (the surge was sparked by shipping disruptions successful the Strait of Hormuz, a effect of the US and Israel’s warfare with Iran). The mean all-in outgo of a day successful 2026 accrued to $189, up 12.5 percent from 2025, a complaint that is outpacing the outgo of surviving according to a BMO Real Financial Progress Index study from earlier this year.

In the UK, wherever Hyden lives, a survey by British slope Barclays recovered adults walk much than £111 per period ($147) connected dates and dating apps, with 52 percent of Gen Z adults saying the added disbursal has stopped them from dating altogether. This world has adjacent forced immoderate dating apps to edifice to offering escaped state to motivate daters.

But for Hyden, solomaxxing has thing to bash with fiscal woes and everything to bash with “building a beingness that feels afloat connected its ain terms,” she says. “Being unsocial means nary 1 is triggering you oregon pulling you retired of your ain rhythm.” She says solomaxxing for her isn’t really astir avoiding radical but tapping into her imaginable done caller hobbies, rituals, and self-discovery, which she’s blessed to walk wealth on. “There’s nary loneliness filling the gaps, conscionable contentment.”

Bella DePaulo, a societal idiosyncratic and writer of Single astatine Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, sees this arsenic a affirmative improvement for Gen Z, peculiarly for however it rejects the long-established content that marriage, to get from millennial lexicon, is highest narration goals.

“It is specified a singular twist, aft decades successful which matrimony was seen arsenic a motion of societal and idiosyncratic stability. People who joined were said to person ‘settled down.’ The irony is that azygous life, for radical who privation to beryllium single, is wholly stable. It is matrimony that is unstable,” DePaulo says, adding that it tin beryllium undone by each mode of things, including separation, divorce, oregon the decease of a spouse.

The word solomaxxing comes from Gen Z’s ongoing hyperfixation with idiosyncratic self-enhancement: however you look (“looksmaxxing”), what you devour (“proteinmaxxing”), wherever you find pleasance (“nutmaxxing”). The ridiculousness of the full maxxing inclination aside, determination is immoderate substance to what solomaxxing attempts to redefine erstwhile it comes to however radical deliberation astir the aboriginal of relationships, and each the ways relationships person changed.