The sacrifices of solo travel
I always get a pang of envy when I see someone rubbing sunscreen on a partner’s back. It’s a simple gesture of intimacy, trust, utility. It’s a reminder that not only am I alone, I will also have a splotchy and sunburned upper back in a few hours from the spots that are just impossible to reach.
It’s not as depressing as it sounds, but it is difficult to talk about sacrifices when you’re “living the dream.” Any complaints made with a backdrop of white sand beaches and impossibly blue skies will be met with a rolling of the eyes, a playful middle finger, a wistful look that masks possibly envy, possibly pity.
Friendships: There’s a reason why even the best of online friendships will eventually lead up to a desire for a “real-life” meet-up. We need to connect a laugh, a voice, a nervous mannerism, real-time wit with the polished image of a Facebook profile pic, an interesting Twitter bio, a carefully-designed blog logo.
But too many of the best friendships are built on something other than social media. These are the friends you call on the drive home, from a fabulous interview or a bad fight or simply because it’s late and you’re bored. The friends who knew you before blogging, Facebook, even MySpace; the ones who counseled through break-ups, cheered through graduations, cheers-ed for good news, bad news, or simply a night out.
You can maintain these friendships via Skype, Facebook, emails. But when your news consists of a new country or new city or new group of friends every weekend, and theirs is simply that the weekend is here: your daily Gchats and scheduled video chats lose some of their two-sided sparkle.
You will miss out. Some things will be forgivable—a concert, an annual girls night out, alumni weekend, the wedding of a not-so-close friend. But as life goes on, life events get bigger: housewarmings, bachelorette parties, weddings, babies. Snail mail birthday cards and postcards won’t mask your absence forever.
Relationships: Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired, Mark Twain once said. Even when you know a relationship isn’t going to go anywhere–you’re leaving the city or country or continent in x amount of days, and they’re pretty darn happy being a local of said city–how do you turn off that spark?
I didn’t relate when my mom told me that she couldn’t understand the girls who dated Frenchmen while studying abroad in Montpelier in the 1970s–she loved visiting France, but had no desire to live there. Why run the risk of falling in love and having to decide between the excitement of new love or the comfort of home? I suppose I’ve always erred more to the “Standing Outside the Fire” way of thinking: give your whole heart or nothing at all.
And when your relationships end simply because of space and time, you’re left with a lot of might-have-beens. Would the relationship have lasted if we lived in the same city? Or would we have gotten sick of each other in mere months? The not knowing leads to a lot of romanticized memories.
The urge to nest: Even if you have the funds to afford yourself some privacy—my budget consists of hostel dorms and crashing on friends’ couches, where the only moment to myself is in the shower—you will not have a space of your own. You will not be able to buy a bottle of white wine, order takeout curry, rent a DVD and spend a Friday night on your couch. You won’t have a favorite cereal bowl, or wake up to a photo of your best friends on your nightstand.
Even if you’re a master at living out of a backpack, it’s difficult to get comfortable and relax when you’re constantly sharing, packing, moving.
Not following the status quo: The novelty of being different wears off, and fixed life envy moves in. The pressure to get a real job, get a house, get married will needle its way in, through relatives’ not-so-subtle questions and through being surrounded—in the lives of locals and the online lives of friends—by those who are living exactly as society says they should.
I’m not ready to trade in my life of travel just yet, but there are more than a few moments when I stop—mostly when my upper back starts to turn blistering red—and wonder when the sacrifices will stop outweighing the simple and total joy of seeing a sun set over a new city.
