Don’t Date A Girl Who Travels. Really.

By

Don’t date a girl who travels. No, seriously. Don’t. She probably sucks.

Don’t date a girl who travels because she’s uncompromising and hard-headed about everything. Two roads diverged in a wood — and she went exactly the fucking way she wanted to go. The general will is always be trumped by her individual will, and she’ll refuse to participate in the aggregation of preferences. She’s not going to compromise. Rather, she’ll state her plans for the day — and that’ll be that.

In the unlikely event that you do win the battle, she’ll resent you for taking her off path.

Don’t date a girl who travels because she’s absolutely broke. She’s not freelancing or yoga teaching or any of that crap — because I’m sorry but who the fuck can afford to travel by freelancing?! She’s probably banging her forehead on her desk at work, saving up money for her next trip. And the second she gets money, she’s spending it on — you guessed it, traveling.

She isn’t some hippy-dippy free spirit who is “ruled by the sun and moon.” She owns a watch — and a smart phone. She recognizes that millions of people travel every year and knows it doesn’t make her any better of a human. The last time she instagrammed a picture of a Buddha quote was never.

She knows she’s nothing remarkable. That travel is wasteful and often exploitive; that it’s a privilege granted to her thanks to her middle class background. She’s figured out by now that a person’s character is comprised of more than their passport stamps.

But she can’t stop. She can’t stop because traveling is a coping mechanism, not a hobby. She books trips alone. Her greatest fear was always normalcy, and sometimes she swears it feels like she’s suffocating. The day-in-day-out routine scares her so much that sometimes booking trips is all she can do to keep from screaming on the bus to work. It’s the only way she knows how to make herself feel again.

There’s a 95% chance she’ll cry on the plane ride home. Because leaving always breaks her.

When she gets back to San Francisco, she’ll stand at the bar feeling like a fucking robot, googling how late the Walgreens is open, so she can grab a bag of chips before going where she really wants to be — home, in her bed. She’s not ready for dating, not yet.

She sure as hell won’t be sitting on her Facebook profile, sharing stupid blogs about not dating girls who travel. Who cares? She’s too busy googling images of new places, her version of porn, and trying to manipulate her boss into getting her transferred to one of the international offices. And when that day comes, you can bet your bottom dollar she’s going to go.

Don’t date a girl who travels until she’s ready. Because for now, there’s so much she still needs to learn on her own.