On Her Own

Relationships

Recent Stories

Dating and self-defense with Caleb Giddings

I don’t know about you, but I grew up in the age of stranger danger. If I didn’t meet someone through a trusted source, then they might kidnap, rape, or kill me. And yet, in single woman world, we using dating apps and websites all the time to intentionally meet complete strangers from the internet

Budgeting for the holiday season

Not sure if you’re aware, but we are now officially under two months to American Thanksgiving. The holiday season is going to be hitting us fast and hard soon, and if you’re feeling as overwhelmed as I am about the way the year’s been going, then let’s start doing some planning so it will be

A September 11 memorial call to action

September 11, the September 11 marking the beginning of the War on Terror, is old enough to vote now. To show my age, it was perhaps the most defining event of my generation, the one where everyone knew where they were, what they were doing, when they heard about it. Many of us watched the

To do or not to do: that is the question

How do you decide something is worth doing? One of my followers asked me about deciding whether or not they should get a motorcycle, but the question makes me think about all sorts of other decisions too. They can be big ones like whether you should get married or move in with a significant other,

Boundaries 101

At its core, self defense is really about establishing and enforcing boundaries on your life. It’s deciding what someone can and can’t do with your body, mind, and heart, and then enforcing those limits against those who would intrude. It’s often easy to decide some of the big boundaries: Nobody gets to kill me. Nobody

Moving out, moving up: advice for a new girl in a new city

When I think about OHO, there are many types of women I think about. It’s hard to tell folks who OHO is for, because of all the different times in life when a woman might be on her own. One of the classic scenarios is when a young woman moves out from her family home,

Safe sexting [updated July 2022]

One of the keys to thriving on your own is to be willing to continually revisit and update your knowledge and skills. Just because you learned them once doesn’t mean you remember them now, or that there aren’t newer and better ways of thinking and doing. While we go back to some of the same

How to tell if someone is a good guy or a bad guy

You may have seen that I’ve been posting short “lessons learned” drawn directly from news snippets that I run across on a regular basis. They’re real-world illustrations of the topics I discuss at length here at OHO, meant to give you short and simple reminders to help you stay safe every day. Often, you’ll see

But we are not less

Independence Day is a special day, here at On Her Own. While you may be here for a whole host of reasons, the core of OHO has always been finding ways to survive and thrive as women who are independent from the normal relationships society assumes for us. Whether by choice or by circumstance, for

How to perform a root cause analysis, and why

When something, anything, bad happens, it’s easy to attribute it to the most obvious and direct cause. A car crash because someone ran a red light. A skinned knee because you fell. A broken window because a kid threw a ball. Addressing those causes can be a quick fix. Punish the driver who ran the