I've come up with yet another excuse reason why I'm single. I'm not very friendly and open when I'm by myself.

This struck me at the Charlotte airport on Monday night, when a man sat down on the floor beside me and began rubbing the carpet with the palm of his hand, coming disconcertingly close to my upper thigh. Strangely, he hadn't seemed crazy up until that point, or after the rubbing.

Although my recent trip to England was the first time I spent real vacation time on my own, I do generally travel by myself. This means that I'm trying to watch all my stuff, keep track of my tickets, find gates, etc all on my own, and look reasonably confident while doing so. I have a special "travel face" that I wear, I think. And I don't think it's a very friendly face.

In fact, it's not meant to be friendly. And that's my problem. I don't want to make pointless small talk with strangers. I don't want to know where the person next to me is headed or what they were doing in the area. Frankly I don't care, and I can't bother pretending that I do. And I especially don't want to smile at you or your small child as they tear around the airport while I hope against hope that the kid isn't sitting near me on the flight.

But people who do those things, smile at strangers, talk to random people...they end up sitting next to someone on their flight and chatting and finding out that they went to high school with that person's cousin whom they later end up marrying all because of that conversation on the commuter flight to Boston.