Lost in Translation: The Glorification of Travel Romances

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise

While I don’t exclusively subscribe to the concept of love at first sight (tempting as it may be), if travelling has taught me anything, it’s that lust at first sight is most certainly alive and well.

This, of course, is no foreign concept. Whether home or away, lust has its place in most corners of life, and for some is almost entirely consuming. Nights out are spent searching for someone to end them with, while evenings in are absorbed combing tiresomely through the same three dating apps. In an age where technology has become inevitably entangled with romance, it seems that meeting someone has evolved to become less about compatibility and more about self-marketing.

Despite dating apps such as Hinge, Bumble and Tinder offering the illusion of endless choice, we know by now that their addictive design does little more than provide a dopamine rush of matches to reassure us we’re still considered worthy and desirable. In real life, however, we are invited to observe a potential connection through a variety of factors which are often unlikely to translate well through a screen. While dating apps serve to facilitate a criticism of almost pure appearances, in-person interactions encourage a more authentic verdict of someone’s character, allowing us to inspect traits ranging from body language to conversational foreplay. More importantly, it provides us with the opportunity to utilise intuition. Someone we may swipe past online could have every opportunity to impress us under the right, tangible circumstances.

When travelling abroad, the chance to do so arises most commonly between 12-2am on a sticky club dance floor, concealed in an unconvincing camouflage of fabricated interest and the obligatory exchange of names and nationalities. Fed with heat, alcohol and social anonymity, the usual practised protocol of flirting is often lost in a realm of excitement and social reincarnation. As we would therefore expect in these situations, true consideration for compatibility rarely fails to blockade sexual desire. When faced with the inevitability of an easy escape (whether it be leaving the same hostel, or the country altogether), it seems that most people take full advantage of the situational evading that accompanies the travelling lifestyle, finding themselves operating more impulsive methods of courtship than would otherwise be used back home.

Nomadic liberty allows us to reinvent ourselves, particularly when there is no one presently qualified to challenge it. After all, how can our character be disputed by people we met mere hours or days earlier? Commonplace dignities are abandoned in lieu of testosterone-fuelled appetites and transparent sexual greed, often growing ever more impatient as the night progresses. Is it therefore inevitable that, in a sea of social interactions often void of any real intimacy, we glorify those rare occasions on which we meet someone we actually enjoy? And if so, is the root of their appeal ultimately embedded in their inherent impermanence? In the backpacking realm of relationships, the question I found myself most consistently returning to was: what exactly is it that makes travel romances so addictive?

In the space of my first three weeks travelling from Panama to Colombia, I’d lost count of the women with stories of travel romances gone painfully awry. The first I met was left shattered after spending a seemingly blissful three weeks with an Argentinian guitarist, who, on their fourth week of seeing each other, had stealthily disappeared in the dead of night, and despite her best efforts to find an explanation, was never to be heard from again. Some days later in a rooftop bar in Medellín, a German woman told me through a thick haze of smoke that she had been plagued by an inexplicable attraction to a Dutch man almost ten years her senior, who, after three months of adapting their plans to travel together, had left her for a twenty-year-old Icelandic dancer. Many more had stories just like this. Some had found their travel lovers intertwined with women in Brazilian street parties, while others had caught them in the circumstantial misfortune of booking the same hostel after discarded messages and social media expulsions. It seemed that, in one form or another, there was undoubtably a recurring chasm of authentic connection. Regardless of the particulars, all accounts came to the same conclusion: the majority of travel romances have an incredibly short shelf life. Consequently, this begged the question: is it possible (or even desirable) to continue any kind of romance without the likely potential of a real relationship? Do we relish in the delusional risk of liking someone so enormously out of reach? What’s more, does the mutual recognition of progressive limitations encourage more or less authenticity within romantic connections? And was it their superficial foundations that ultimately caused them to curdle?

In most instances, despite our better judgements, anyone who takes our fancy while abroad had most likely done so by being both unfamiliar and somewhat unattainable. In the common comforts of our own cities and hometowns, social events are more often than not accompanied by an invisible string of mutuals littered and lurking in surrounding bars and clubs. Imagined or not, we tend to recognise an unspoken obligation of decency to ensure our social preservation. Our anonymity is limited, and our names are recognised, therefore implying a certain cautionary consciousness (at least before our third or fourth drink). In contrast, the travelling lifestyle is one of idealism, and one in which we often allow ourselves free rein of indulgence in more glamorous projections of our personalities. In most cases, travel romances remain eternally situated in the transient so-called honeymoon phase, in which the impermanence of a connection reveals only the most impressive aspects of ourselves. Whether it’s Thailand or Panama, Vietnam or Peru, when travelling, we become free from the constraints of people’s prior social knowledge. After all, when faced with a ticking clock on our social interactions, why exemplify the traits we don’t like? If this is to be believed, is it therefore the lack of social consequence that frees so many people of generally considerate behaviour? Do we fall in love more with the idealised version of ourselves that we project, rather than the romances themselves? Is our neglect of responsibility (and on some level, our true selves) to be blamed for a vast lack of emotional accountability?

When travelling, particularly if your travel consists of hostel accommodation, you will often find yourself more or less in a constant state of inescapable social interaction. Granted, this is within your control, though generally it is part and parcel of the backpacking culture. As such, it can be easy to believe that, as a result, there will be many people with whom you find compatibility. While I consider this to be absolutely true for platonic relationships, the same cannot necessarily be said for romantic connections that progress beyond sex. Realistically, these scenarios are few and far between. While it’s easy to be enamoured by the idea of finding love abroad (particularly as someone whose parents met in Florida before falling in love and road tripping the US together several times), the reality of meeting someone in fleeting circumstances and having them somehow remain consistent in your life, though beautiful, has become both an unlikely affair and something of an emotional landmine. We know this. We’ve been warned of this. Whether it’s by friends who want to ensure we aren’t too heartbroken to endure a night out, or family back home hoping not to lose us to a sudden desire to migrate overseas; we’re discouraged from indulging too heavily in a connection that will likely pack its 60L Osprey backpack and walk out of the hostel doors in a matter of days. And yet, we romanticise it anyway.

A part of us, I believe, romanticises not only our idealised nomadic selves, but relishes the almost inconceivable plausibility of a relationship with someone who likely lives on another continent. After all, would any of these people be deemed even half as compatible were they from our hometown? In all likelihood: no. Nonetheless, we appear to be encouraged by it. Whether it’s by media such as the Before Sunrise trilogy, or a rooted subconscious belief system stemmed from the consumption of fairy-tale narratives, young women have often been subjected to a reinforced assurance that in some shape or form, someone may unexpectedly swoop us off our feet. We are taught to remain open minded, fed Disney chronicles of knights in shining armour to find and infatuate us in unforeseen circumstances. Of course, when backpacking, the prince charming narrative soon evolves to one disguised in elephant print linens and an absence of deodorant, gallantly ready to whisk us off our dishevelled Birkenstocks. Fortunately, by the time most of us reach travelling age, this fantasy was likely suffocated long before it turned international, and instead under its cloak revealed a tendency for untamed egos and saviour complexes. Luckily, most of us tend to recognise that, contrary to what the stories of our childhood promised, there is no white knight coming to rescue us from the modern-day dating pool. After all, being a hopeless romantic in this day and age is already a bleak affair; adding the element of travel is essentially self-inflicted psychological warfare.

Albeit a tempting simplification to disregard these obsolete fantasies, is it possible that these unfulfilled narratives still linger in our heads, despite our recognition of them as illusory? When our expectations of travelling romances fall short, are they doing so partially because a small piece of us thought that they may have been the outlier in a habitual pattern of disappointment? Despite the odds being stacked against us, as well as I myself being highly pessimistic on the matter of love, I can’t help but find the hopeless romantic’s approach to travelling relationships commendable. For every woman I’d met with a gruesome tale gone bad, the same familiar proverb hummed like a lullaby through my head: ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’

Ultimately, my personal philosophy on romance remains largely unchanged. In all likelihood, the tendency to glorify travel romances stems mostly from their encapsulation of excitement. Not only are they intertwined with our interpretations of youth, freedom and fun, they also immortalise them. Travel romances, particularly those which don’t last, force us to digest the truth that there is an unmistakable beauty to be found in impermanence: a tough pill to swallow as a long-time admirer of David Foster Wallace’s claim: ‘Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.’ Nonetheless, I am perpetually grateful to have learned the bittersweet graciousness in appreciating fleeting connections, a necessary acknowledgement, I believe, for those seeking to navigate this territory unscathed. Though it may well be true that our desires arise mostly from infatuation with the unknown, I firmly believe them to always be a worthwhile endeavour. After all, romantic preservation is far less fulfilling than the path of vulnerability. If nothing else, travel romances serve as an enchanting ode to the excitement of mischief, passion, and, of course, romance.