When I Travel, I Manufacture a Male Companion to Stay Safe

Yes, traveling is gendered…even in 2026.

There is a trip I have wanted to take for years, and I know exactly what it looks like.

A cabin somewhere in the English countryside, surrounded by nothing but fields, trees, and maybe sheep. I would go alone and stay for a week, or maybe longer. I would bring the books I have been meaning to read and the journals I have been meaning to fill. I would wake up without an alarm and fall asleep without a plan. I would turn my phone off, let my mind go quiet, and let the days blur into one another until I forgot what day it was.

I have thought about this trip many times. I have browsed listings, saved photos, imagined myself there, standing at the window with tea, watching the rain move across the hills.

But I will not go. Not because I cannot afford it, and not because I cannot find the time. I will not go because I am a woman, and remote means something different for a woman than it does for a man.

I have thought about bringing a girlfriend, but one girlfriend does not change the math. I have thought about bringing two girlfriends. Still, two girlfriends do not change the math either. Three women alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere does not inspire any sense of safety. The math only changes when a man enters the picture.

Only then is safety suddenly implied. The presence of a man signals something to other men: this woman is not alone in the way you can take advantage of. This woman is accompanied. This woman is claimed.

I think about this math more often than I would like to admit. I thought about it last November, in an Italian village, when a small kindness from strangers revealed itself to be something else entirely.

Can Kindness Just Be Kindness?

Last November, I embarked on a quest I called #LindaTakes5countries. For three years, I had kept a streak going: visiting at least 10 countries every year, which is no small thing on a Nigerian passport.

However, 2025 was so busy I had to pause that streak, because I had spent the better part of the year doing hard things. I wrote a book for one of the world’s most recognized tech publishers while doing an MBA and holding down a full-time job.

When I submitted my final manuscript, I felt the specific exhaustion of someone who has been sprinting for so long that they have forgotten what walking feels like. So, I decided to reward myself with movement, and my trip to Italy was part of that itinerary.

I went from Lagos to London to Edinburgh to Interlaken, Switzerland. A friend flew in to meet me in Switzerland, and we decided to take a train to Lake Como. By the time we arrived, it was after dark. Varenna was invisible except for dim lights and the outline of steep hills. There was no Uber, no taxi service to speak of, and our Airbnb was a fifteen-minute walk from the bus stop, which would have been fine if Italian villages were flat. They are not. They are staircases and cobblestones and hills that punish luggage wheels.

We dragged our bags up the hill, stopping every few meters to catch our breath and curse the romanticization of European travel. Halfway up, we passed a group of local men, young, maybe early twenties. They were smoking and talking, doing the kind of nothing that young men do in villages when the evening is cool, and there is nowhere else to be.

We asked for directions. They gave them, and then they offered more. They would carry our bags and walk us to our Airbnb. I cannot describe the relief of that moment without sounding dramatic. We had been traveling for 13 hours. We were exhausted. Our arms were aching, our patience was thin, and here were strangers offering help. I was overjoyed.

They carried our luggage up the rest of the hill and waited while we fumbled with the lockbox. I initially thought about tipping them, but I worried it might come off as insulting, as cultures differ, and we did not share enough language to explain our gratitude with words. So, I invited them in for dinner. They accepted, and it was a lovely evening, full of hand gestures, phrases typed into Google Translate, and laughter that did not require translation.

I remember the warmth I felt. I remember going to tweet something about how travel restores your faith in strangers, and how good people can be. Then, a day later, two of them messaged us. They wanted to take us to a nightclub before we left, so we could all have fun together. This, they suggested, was now the condition for helping with our luggage on departure day.

The phrase “have fun” meant exactly what you think it means.

I sat with my phone for a while after reading the message. I was not angry so much as tired. Not train-tired. Pattern-tired. Tired in the way women get when something familiar happens again.

I thought: Can men, as a group, be unoriginal for once? Can kindness just be kindness? Can there be no second act where the invoice arrives?

We carried our own luggage to the bus stop on departure day. The stairs were just as steep going down as they had been going up. But that was fine. Better that than owing something we never agreed to pay.

The Hidden Math of Traveling While Female

I left Varenna with a reminder that I am never just a traveler. I am a woman traveling, which is a different thing entirely. It means I am always being assessed, always being calculated, always being sorted into categories: alone or accompanied, available or claimed, safe to approach or not. And so much of that categorization comes down to whether I have a man by my side.

When I travel, I manufacture a man. I wear a fake wedding band. I tell strangers that my husband decided to stay back for some meetings while I went ahead to explore. I have said this sentence so many times that it comes out smoothly now, with the right amount of casualness, like I am not lying at all.

I am single. I do not have a husband. But I have learned that an imaginary husband offers more protection than my own two hands, my own loud voice, my own ability to say no. Every woman who travels alone knows this.

We learn that to feel safe (not actually be safe), we have to manufacture a man and run a lot of arithmetic calculations. We learn which streets to walk and which hours to walk them. We learn which train car to sit in and which seat on the bus to choose. We learn which hostels to book, which floors to opt for a room, and which come with locks. We learn which lies to tell and how to tell them convincingly.

We do these calculations while also trying to enjoy the view. And after enough years, we stop noticing that we are doing them at all. Men move through the world differently. I do not say this with bitterness. It is simply an observation.

A man can book the remote cabin in the countryside I have always wanted to stay in, and the main question he asks is whether he will enjoy the solitude. A woman asks a different question first. She asks whether the solitude is safe.

I have declined trips, turned down invitations, and stayed home when every part of me wanted to go. Not because I lacked money, time, or desire, but because the math did not work.

The cabin in the English countryside is still saved in my bookmarks. I look at it sometimes, the way you look at a place you know you will never visit. I know how this sounds. I am a woman who has built a career, written a book, and traveled to dozens of countries on a Nigerian passport. I am not someone who waits for permission or needs a protector.

And yet here I am, telling you that I will not book a cabin alone in the English countryside. That I need a man to make me feel safe from the possibility of encountering unsafe men.

I resent this. I resent that it is true. But resentment does not change the math, and awareness of and adherence to math are what keep women alive.

So, the cabin stays in my bookmarks. I will look at it again next month and the month after that. I will keep imagining myself there, standing at the window with tea, watching the rain move across the hills.

Until I have a man to go with.