When Tess Daly announced she was ending her 22-year marriage, one intriguing detail lurked in the background of the ensuing coverage: Tess apparently wants to spend a year travelling the world. Alone.
Buried beneath the dissection of a celebrity marriage and recycled photos of happier times, her gap year plans were a passing line. But then I found myself deep in the article’s comments, and that’s where something began to emerge that felt bigger than Tess, bigger than divorce gossip, and certainly more loaded than just another travel fad.
“Selfish,” said one commentator, drawing swift agreement from those below. Why would a woman approaching 60 want to do something supposedly reserved for deferment-year students? “She needs to grow up.” Another labelled her plans professionally reckless: “That’ll be the end of her time on TV.” Had she not read the rulebook? Leave education, start working, keep going to pension age. Do not pass go, do not collect £200. (Sarcasm my own.)
There’s a lot to unpack here. But let’s start with who’s ‘allowed’ to take gap years – or rather who’s taking them anyway, whether the keyboard warriors approve or not.
The so-called ‘golden gap year’ is increasingly recognised as a trend among midlife and older women. The number of solo female travellers taking flights from UK airports has risen by 91% over the past decade, with the sharpest increases among women aged 55 to 64. At Intrepid Travel, women over 45 now make up 62% of solo travellers.
Are these numbers pointing to a lifestyle trend or something more culturally significant?
The question isn’t why women would want a golden gap year. The desire to see more of the world, step outside routine, meet new people – none of this is difficult to understand.
The more interesting question is why it still makes some people so uncomfortable.
And perhaps more importantly, whether this discomfort is really about travel at all.
“Women are allowed to reinvent themselves, but preferably with a medically or emotionally approved reason attached. ”
Golden gap years aren’t happening in a vacuum: increasing numbers of women over 50 are leaving long-term marriages and, in many cases, choosing to remain happily single thereafter. It’s easy to see why the patriarchy might feel uneasy about the idea of women clutching decree absolutes in one hand and boarding passes in the other. But solo travellers aren’t necessarily single – or even, in Tess’s case, soon-to-be.
A case in point: recently I came across photos from a former colleague on Facebook having a whale of a time in various glamorous locations. Over the following weeks, more appeared: solo dinners, train journeys, unfamiliar cities. It became clear she was travelling alone. My heart sank. I remembered her marriage as deeply happy and instinctively assumed something must have gone wrong.
But then came messages about missing her husband. Plans to reunite later in the year. No marriage collapse after all.
That stayed with me because it disrupted the narrative, I had unconsciously written for her. We tend to understand female reinvention most comfortably when it’s attached to crisis: divorce, burnout, grief, illness, recovery. Women are allowed to reinvent themselves – or even book a one-way flight – but preferably with a medically or emotionally approved reason attached.
It’s tempting, and perhaps comforting, to imagine the world neatly divided between sexist dinosaurs and the enlightened. But the reality is less binary, and far harder to swallow. The discomfort around female autonomy often comes from women too, because all of us absorb ideas about what a ‘good’ woman should be.
“Internalised misogyny is very real,” acknowledges Chartered Psychologist and author of How To Be Selfish Suzy Reading, when I call her and share that I’m depressed by the commentary about Tess and her gap year. She believes we’ve all spent decades “marinating” in what she calls the “selfless woman archetype” – the idea that our “worth is contingent on how well we facilitate everybody else’s needs, how little we need ourselves and how uncomplainingly we get on with it”.
“…one marriage, one career, one home, one identity, one opportunity to travel before real life begins ”
And this is where we have to come back to that word: selfish.
Personally, I’d like to retire the word selfish altogether when it comes to women. Or at the very least see this debated in parliament (imagine!): why does it still get deployed so quickly any time a woman deviates from total usefulness to other people? It’s just such a loaded word for women. We’re selfish if we don’t want children. Selfish if we pursue something for ourselves once we have them.
Men, of course, aren’t immune from judgement. If Tess’s future ex-husband follows a gap year dream, he might be accused of having a midlife crisis. But ‘crisis’ feels temporary, almost comic, even faintly glamorous. Selfishness lands differently for women. It hardens into character assessment. It lingers.
Reading argues that women are labelled selfish for almost any assertion of self: resting, expressing a preference, saying no, changing plans or simply taking time for themselves. “But the opposite of selfless isn’t selfish,” she says. “It’s boundaried.”
Perhaps what gets labelled selfish is often simply self-advocacy? Midlife womanhood itself is shifting. Linear professional lives are dying alongside the old life script: one marriage, one career, one home, one identity, one opportunity to travel before real life begins.
While running a series of restorative yoga workshops, I noticed something interesting. Classes labelled ‘Deep Rest’ or ‘Restorative Yoga’ drew moderate interest. But then I renamed one ‘Permission to Rest’. One woman messaged saying the title alone made her feel emotional. The session filled faster too.
In theory, rest already is permission. Nobody needs authorisation to lie down in a candle-lit room for an hour. But perhaps what women are searching for isn’t permission itself, but relief from the guilt and judgement that still so often accompany rest, autonomy or self-directed desire.
Women don’t necessarily need permission to reshape their lives. Many already are. But we’re social creatures, and approval still affects how emotionally safe our choices feel – especially when those choices attract criticism.
Reading believes part of the reason this conversation is surfacing so powerfully now in midlife women is because peri/menopause itself can create what she calls “a capacity issue”. The things women previously “muscled through” in their twenties and thirties suddenly become much harder to tolerate. “It becomes impossible to keep denying ‘self’,” she says.
But she’s careful to stress that self-advocacy is also a skill to continue honing through life – and one many women were never taught. “A good baby doesn’t cry. A good child doesn’t talk back,” she tells me. “So how do we suddenly become adults who feel comfortable expressing needs and feelings?”
“Women are labelled selfish for almost any assertion of self: resting, expressing a preference, saying no, changing plans or simply taking time for themselves.”
Perhaps part of what we’re witnessing in midlife women now isn’t selfishness, but decades of conditioning finally colliding with a growing inability – and unwillingness – to keep denying self.
And perhaps that’s what sits beneath the rise of the golden gap year too. Not a sudden female selfishness epidemic, but a generation of women becoming less willing to organise their entire lives around self-erasure.
If the reports about Tess Daly are true, good for her. Not because solo travel is inherently noble, but because there’s something deeply attractive about a woman choosing herself.
I find myself picturing her at Heathrow with a backpack slung over one shoulder, heading not necessarily towards reinvention or self-discovery, but something perhaps even rarer for women of her generation (and perhaps this is what so many other women are responding to here): an unscripted chapter.
And while we might not need anyone’s permission to want that, wouldn’t it be nice if we weren’t called selfish in the process?