There are a few things to be said about going out alone, and one of them is you don't have to say anything. "So what did you think?" -- the question most frequently asked in theatre lobbies, or in the coat-check lineup, or while standing on frozen sidewalks waving in brave futility at passing cabs -- always seems a bit of a hard landing to me after being transported by a concert, or an opera, or a play, or a film.

It's not that I begrudge the presence of another human being -- particularly the one to whom I'm married. It's just that I require a certain period of decompression after a moving performance. It takes me a while to shift gears from feeling to thinking.

But a while is never part of the itinerary of a date. An hour or so of sullen silence is not what most women have in mind when they contemplate the term "after-theatre."

Another good thing about going out alone is that you don't get angry at anyone for being almost late for a show.

I don't know about you, but we are almost always almost late for almost every show. Split-second timing is something of a specialty around here. You know that couple that the ushers rush in to their seats at the last possible second, after everyone is settled and comfortable? That's us.

I'm not sure how this happens. Whenever we go out, it's 7 o'clock one minute and five minutes to 8 the next, and we're still two blocks from where we're going, and one of us is wearing high heels. This lack of punctuality, in my opinion, is never my fault. Just as, from the female point of view, it's never hers. Such radically opposing views can create a good deal of preperformance stress, and one of the ways to avoid this is to go out alone.

That way, when I'm almost late, as I was when I went to Roy Thomson Hall by myself the other night, I'm able to be more generous and even-tempered about who is to blame. Obviously, it's nobody's fault. It's just the way things are.

Going out alone must be done judiciously, of course -- that is, it should only be undertaken when your spouse is out of town. A marriage can only be so open. Even the most understanding of partners will have some difficulty with, "I've got a great ticket for Un Ballo in Maschera tonight. I'll see you around 11:30."

An additional bonus of going out alone is that it is possible to appear mysterious. To be a mysterious-looking couple is extremely difficult. Mention the word "babysitter" or make even the most fleeting references to the universities to which your child has applied, and the illusion of mystery is shattered.

It also requires a good deal of advance planning. The wardrobe co-ordination alone can take the better part of an afternoon. But if you are a man going out to a performance by yourself, all you need to do is refrain from talking to yourself and drape a vaguely European scarf over whatever the hell you happen to be wearing, and suddenly you are extremely difficult to categorize. You look mysterious. And, as I discovered the other evening, being the kind of mysterious man who goes to the symphony alone has a certain je ne sais quoi in the lobbies of certain concert halls. If you single gentlemen want a word of advice about how to meet women, my suggestion would be this. Forget the yoga classes.

Most importantly, though, going out alone means you can do whatever you want to do when it comes to responding to a performance. For instance, the other night I went alone to the Toronto Symphony. I was going to hear the Brandenburg Concertos, and had forgotten that Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen was also on the program. I'm not sure that I'd ever heard Metamorphosen -- a piece that Strauss wrote, in Germany, in 1945.

Strauss was nearing the end of his life, and he was, I think, a tortured soul. He had served as president of the Nazis' musical administration from 1933-35. He was able to make this fateful and abhorrent accommodation because, as Kevin Bazzana's excellent program notes point out, "he was an astonishingly self-absorbed man." And indeed, he quickly found himself in opposition to the regime. But by the time Nazism had run its course, Strauss's world -- like the opera houses in Munich, Berlin, Dresden, Weimar and Vienna -- lay in ruins. His passivity to the rise of the Nazis was something he regretted deeply. By 1945 it seemed to Strauss that a once-glorious civilization had come to a shameful and catastrophic end, and that he had played a role in this tragic metamorphosis.

Metamorphosen is so intensely personal a creation -- so deeply anguished and so very beautiful and so very dark -- that when it was first performed, in Zurich in 1946, Strauss, who was in exile in Switzerland, refused to attend the premiere because he felt it would be too painful to hear. The only time he heard it performed was at a rehearsal that he was asked to conduct. As Bazzana recounts, "He did so without interruption, thanked the musicians, turned around, and left."

And this, on an infinitely diminished scale of emotion, was how I felt when I heard it the other night. I like the Brandenburg Concertos. In fact, I like them a lot. I'd been looking forward to hearing them all week. Still, after Metamorphosen I decided to leave. The combination of Richard Strauss, the conductor, Jacques Israelievitch, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra had established something with which I did not want to tamper.

I felt that nothing possibly could follow Metamorphosen -- except, perhaps, a long walk through the empty streets of a city in the dead of winter.

This is not the kind of proposal that is very easily explained to a concert companion. It is not the kind of thing that wives greet with, "Say, that sounds like a good idea." Fortunately, in this instance, an explanation was not necessary. I didn't have to say anything. I'm not sure I would have been able to. Like Richard Strauss, all I had to do was turn around and leave.