Single Women Deserve Honeymoons Too—Here’s How to Plan One

Reported by SELF.

Stop saving your dream trips for someone else's milestones. The bachelorettes, the babymoons, the destination weddings — single women have been showing up and celebrating everyone else's big moments for years. The "we-moon," a solo-or-friend-group trip built around your achievements, is a direct response to that imbalance. A book deal, a promotion, a graduate degree — any of it counts. According to SELF, the concept is simple: make the same phone call your coupled-up friends make when they need someone to celebrate with, except the milestone is yours.

The logistics, though, require more intention than a standard girls' trip. Joy Harden Bradford, PhD, author of Sisterhood Heals, recommends starting with the budget conversation before anyone books a flight. "Some people are like, 'We don't need a five-star hotel,' and other people are like, 'No, I like luxury,'" Bradford notes. Separate sleeping quarters are equally non-negotiable when the budget allows — private space gives everyone room to decompress without the low-grade friction that kills group trips by day three.

Designing the Trip Around Everyone's Version of Rest

Overscheduling is the enemy of a good vacation, and Bradford is clear on this: people carry enormous expectations into their one annual escape. Build the itinerary collaboratively, make most activities optional, and protect blank time. One person's solo yoga session is another person's room service morning, and neither is wrong. The activities you do share — a spa afternoon, a Jeep excursion, a margarita-making class at the villa bar — land harder when no one was dragged there reluctantly. Research also supports learning new skills for cognitive health, though three cocktails in sixty minutes may test that particular theory.

The deeper value of the we-moon isn't the destination — it's the conversation you finally have time for. Bradford argues that real friendship requires vulnerability, and your regular routine rarely creates the conditions for it. The right setting matters: not a loud restaurant, not mid-massage. Think: a private jacuzzi at sunset, a bottle of wine, nowhere to be. That's where the actual intimacy happens — work stress, dating fatigue, the things you keep putting off because there's never a good time.

You don't need a partner or a pregnancy to justify a trip that's entirely, unapologetically for you — you just need a reason worth celebrating and the audacity to ask your friends to show up for it.

Read the original at SELF.