Ten Years a Nomad by Matthew Kepnes

Author:Matthew Kepnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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FINDING ROMANCE while traveling isn’t hard. In the intense forge of travel, romances spring up rapidly. The same mind-set it takes to open yourself up to new experiences also helps you open yourself up to new people. Travel itself is romantic—passionate, scary, risky, all at once—and so it shouldn’t be surprising that travel fosters romance. When we’re on the road, we’re often our best—or at least our most exciting—selves. For a brief time in our lives, we’re people straight out of personals ads: curious, adventurous, full of new ideas and thrilling plans. Anyone seems sexier when setting out to explore a brand-new city than they do on the third of fourth morning of a five-day workweek.

Travel accelerates relationships, too. You can court, fall in love, and break up, all in a matter of a few days. In that way, there is almost paradoxically a perpetual singleness that goes along with traveling as well. It’s very hard to build a long-term relationship when you are always on the move and never in one place long enough to build a lasting relationship with someone who lives there. And if you are dating another traveler, at some point it’s time for you (or them) to move on. They go one way, you go another, and that’s the end of your relationship.

In 2006, I was in Cambodia talking to some other backpackers in my hostel when a group of Swedish girls sat down next us. One caught my eye. Or, more accurately, I caught her eye. When we all went out later, she and I talked mostly to each other. Our conversation lasted four months and three countries. We didn’t say good-bye until we were in Thailand, when she boarded a flight back to Stockholm and I stayed in Bangkok.

The following year, on a tour of Uluru in Australia, I struck up a conversation with a German girl. She became my travel partner for two months. I stayed at her place in Brisbane, and we met up again in Amsterdam the following year. We enjoyed one another’s company—but after a few months, we realized, in a sense, that we weren’t in the same story. We, too, went our separate ways.

Then there was the Austrian woman I dated while living in Taiwan in early 2009. When my visa expired, and when she moved back to Vienna, our relationship fizzled out. I visited her in Vienna a few months later, but the truth was painfully obvious: she didn’t want to leave Vienna, and I wasn’t ready to stop traveling. Spending time together outside the context of travel, when she was at home but I wasn’t, we both realized that the spark had gone.

This pattern repeats itself often on the road. I call these relationships “destination travel relationships.” Without “life” getting in the way, relationships, like travel friendships, move quickly. You don’t think about tomorrow. You don’t think about your partner’s past. You simply enjoy each other’s company for as long as it will last. Maybe that’s four months in Southeast Asia.

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