When I started online dating a few years back, my passport had not seen a stamp for close to a decade. It had expired three years earlier. I was taking somewhere around. My annual discretionary travel budget was fit for funding an overnighter to Downers Grove, so long as I packed my own dinner. What a well-traveled bunch single Chicagoans are, so many having touched down on anywhere from three to five continents, with aspirations to see all four oceans and climb the tallest peaks, always up for a weekend jaunt to San Francisco or New York City in between.
I could picture myself as the plus-one in every Machu Picchu selfie and Northern Lights expedition uploaded in the profile photos, never mind the corresponding narrative teeming with fundamental incompatibilities that would ensue. Good times. In my one photo not from Chicago, she saw herself seconds away from plunging down a mountainside on a bike.
For every twenty messages I sent to start up a conversation, my efforts produced only a response or two, often leading nowhere. So I spent even more time online, made even more outreaches. At a certain point the virtue of hard work becomes the turnoff of desperation.
Eventually I realized I needed to take a hiatus, a vacation from the taxing, addictive work of online dating. Then I thought, what better way to spend my online dating vacation than by getting out of town, evolving myself into more of an ideal mate while taking a break from everyday lifeβeven if my everyday life was happening in Chicago, which itself can offer such an experiential spectrum that just living here feels like a trip at times.
I do see why traveling and online dating go so well together. Both have an element of the unfamiliar, opening you up to new possibilities, expanding your geographical reach, providing a rush that can be addictive.
