Let's hear it for the loners: going to the theatre solo is a freedom unlike any other

This time last year I found myself under the stars in the expansive Nitmiluk national park. I had a small picnic (chicken, salad, chips) and a blanket to wrap around myself when the chill set in. In front of me was a giant inflatable screen.

I was there to watch the inaugural Northern Territory Travelling film festival. All around me were couples canoodling, friends talking and families breaking bread. But I was alone. And, in terms of drinking in the art, all the better for it.

I was reminded of that evening this month when Opera Australia announced a new Melbourne initiative: Opera for One. Fear of attending the opera solo is, according to an Opera Australia survey, the number one reason people do not go at all.

Related: Body positivity can come in many forms – even a custom-made wedding dress | Alana Valentine

The solution? Sit all the Opera for One people together in the same row and create a drinks event so that they can mingle. As Opera Australia puts it, the program provides someone to “chat to during those awkward moments”.

I get it. In my teens – young, gauche and prone to worrying about what other people might think – the idea of attending anything alone was a matter of acute embarrassment. It signalled, I assumed, a lack of friends. Or worse, that there was something wrong with me. (That fear is tapped into in surrealist movie The Lobster, which depicts a dystopian world where being single is forbidden. In this universe, doing even basic activities such as going to a mall alone, without carrying papers to prove that you have a partner, is punishable by law; the forest-dwelling outlaws who disobey are known as “loners”.)

Today, as an arts critic and writer, I often find myself at performances solo; sometimes in black tie (for the ballet, say), sometimes under an inky night sky in the outback. On occasion, the experience has been transformative.

Take a trip to the Brisbane festival in 2016, where I watched Lippy, a play by Irish theatre company Dead Centre. It tells the true story of four women in the small Irish town of Leixlip, who, in an apparent suicide pact, starved themselves to death. They barricaded the doors and sat. And waited. For months.

The show left me reeling. I desperately wanted to talk to someone. Instead, I spilled out into the hot sticky Brisbane night, into the garish bright lights of the South Bank fairground, and into the onslaught of bodies and children and noise.

Armed with a cider, I sat and processed everything I had seen – processed a play that wrapped up so much horror in poetry – and let it tingle across every inch of my body. Suddenly it felt deeply personal. Something that I now did not want to share straight away, selfishly perhaps.

I’ve had similar – near visceral – experiences when I eat alone in a foreign city, or when I hike alone. There’s freedom in not having to worry about or make conversation with someone else; freedom in submitting, fully and completely, to what is in front of you.

A friend of mine remembers, acutely, the movies he loved that he first saw alone, sitting in a dark theatre. He put it another way: “It’s not a date. It’s not about glancing at how the other person is absorbing it. It’s really about you.”

So why the social anxiety?

For most people going to a cafe alone to work is OK. Going to the gym alone, fine. Shopping? No problem. The bank? Of course. But, as academics Rebecca K Ratner and Rebecca W Hamilton observe in their 2015 paper Inhibited from Bowling Alone, these are all functional activities. When it comes to fun activities done in public – having a drink in a bar, going to the opera – being alone becomes socially loaded. And it runs deep: entire Reddit forums are dedicated to the question of going to the movies alone.

Sharing the arts, of course, has its benefits. Some of my favourite memories are of a weekly movie night in a friend’s courtyard in the old alleyways of Beijing, where I worked as a reporter. Every week we’d gather over red wine and pizza and watch a film together and then discuss it. We were a community of people who loved movies.

Related: Cloudstreet review – play is big on spectacle but can't solve the problems of Tim Winton's novel

Opera for One is being launched in that same spirit: for opera lovers to meet other opera lovers. But to me it also seems, at least in part, misguided: an initiative that feeds off the judgment of others. Why is it awkward to be alone at the interval? Isn’t this valuable time to reflect? Solitude, after all, is key to fuelling creativity. It has its own rewards.

For those still afraid to take the plunge, one last anecdote might help. As a small child, my father remembers his granny taking him to the beach in Bournemouth. Once there, standing on the sand, he’d refuse to get changed, shy about perceived onlookers. To appease him – or perhaps just to tease him – my great-grandmother would cry: “Oh look darling! All the little fishies are jumping out to watch!”

It’s a story I tell myself sometimes. A small reminder that if you’re worried about what other people think, don’t be. No one really cares but you.