Traveling Beats Finding Love, Every Single Time

Plot of my favorite childhood fairytale story goes like this: A young man leaves his home with a rucksack on his back to go out in the world and get some proper life experience (fighting dragons and stuff, usually). So he goes on his quest of becoming a man to a foreign, far-away kingdom. And while not really having an idea about what is he doing, the young man overcomes many dangerous obstacles and finally ends up getting together with the Far, Far Away Kingdom princess.

While I can quite well relate to a young traveling man having exactly no idea of what he’s doing, these fairytale stories usually end just a bit too soon to give me a hint of what to do next.

I can only guess that in the unpublished secret sequel “Fairytale: Part 2” an unexpected plot twist comes.

The young man realizes that he kind of found his princess a bit too soon – I mean, there are still lots of kingdoms he wanted to check out on his own, before actually going back and settling down. And the princess was actually just about to leave for her gap year – she heard about this kingdom filled with windmills and magic mushrooms that she wanted to explore. And you know – even they were totally meant for each other by the destiny itself – none of them really feels like having something serious going on right now.

Without getting too deep into my fairytale metaphor, here’s the idea I wanted to stress out: When you’re not really planning to stay in one place for too long, relationships are just really, really difficult.

I mean, the fact that people travel around the world today, living in different countries and doing random around the globe, is awesome, no question about it. And doing it allows you to meet so many wonderful and interesting adventurous people, amongst which you will eventually find someone who you actually really like.

The problem is, that if one of you has those itchy feet, you will eventually want to go somewhere else and your life paths and plans will diverge.

And long distance? Well, we all know that doesn’t really work.

So, what to do about it? I wish I knew – it is one of the things the previous generation never really had to deal with – and it’s the millennials who will have to find the answer. So far, I could only come up with this: The sole thing you can do is to try to use whatever time you have right now and don’t break down when the time runs out.

What else? Oh, I’d almost forgot. Try hoping that when you’ll meet again in the future, it will be in a time when you’ll have your shit figured out a bit more. Don’t lose hope though – in the end, it’s said that people always meet twice.