[quote] Everyone in the cafe was turned to look at me. “MHMMMM” I said, with more oomph and soul than a Holy-Roller preacher woman. I licked my finger and flipped the page, devouring the words. The article, “Date A Girl Who Doesn’t Travel” by Debra Ly, was the perfect mixture of honesty and boldness.
While we all have ideals of what makes a perfect mate, there’s no denying that the “traveling” breed are one of their own. What do you think : does being a traveler / nomad make you an impossible partner? [/quote]
Don’t Date This Traveling Girl
model credit: ASAC
Date A Girl Who Doesn’t Travel
” A girl who doesn’t travel is easy to track, easy to predict. She’ll always be there. She’ll be on your couch at home, or hanging with her friends waiting for your call. You’ll know where to find her. When you do, you will talk about your day and she’ll talk about the latest episode of Jersey Shore. With you, she’ll be secure from the dangers of the world. She’ll be happy with her virtual one. She will be safe. She’ll enjoy a night-in with a movie or a PS3 game. She won’t expect, or even want, extravagant, expensive, creative days and nights out. You can pick her up a bottle of nail polish and be in for a good night.
A girl who doesn’t travel is very well-groomed. She can take the time in front of the mirror and have tidier eyebrows, even complexion and smooth, smooth skin. She won’t have the wiry mane of a girl who travels who pulls faces for photos in front of yet another heritage landmark. Her hair will be glossy and maintained. She will have the perfect picturesque pout.
It’s fun conversing with a girl who doesn’t travel. She’ll believe everything you say and then giggle politely when you tell her you’re joking. And then laugh louder when she gets it. She will let you take the social center stage. She will watch you from the sidelines with admiration. She won’t challenge you with the wit of a girl who travels. She won’t one-up you with stories from the foothills of the Himalayas. She will like everything you like and go everywhere you go. You will be the light of her life. She will turn to you for every lip tremble, every tear. She will wrap her dainty arms around your neck and embrace you with a need so powerful you know that she can’t live without you.
Don’t invest your time and love in a girl who travels for she CAN live without you. She knows how to take things in her fearless stride. She would be fun for now, not forever. She’ll never be around. She will come and go and laugh melodically at your pleas to stay. Don’t get caught up in her spiritual depth and hippy ways. She’ll just plant grand seeds of thought and question everything you ever believed in. Her passionate rants about the beauty of the world will send tremors and quakes through your foundations and belittle your existence.
A girl who travels will drive you crazy with her sporadic emails and unreliable contact. She will send you mad with video calls where you can see her but can’t touch her. She will make you cry with longing. You will realize that distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder – it fucking rips the heart apart and smirks at the shreds of despair. Date a girl who doesn’t travel because she won’t do that. She will take the tender steps to keep your heart intact. She will fold it up in cheesecloth and hum to its soft rhythmic beat. She will keep you in your realm of familiar and sit demurely in the passenger seat as you drive on that 4-lane freeway to the white-picket fence.
Let the girl who travels go off into that other dimension. Forget all the romantic stories she tells of pristine white beaches, gushing jungle waterfalls, and tropical wildlife encounters. Dismiss her tales of the whack-jobs she met and the adventures on which they embarked. Let her endanger herself with military run-ins, frightening South East Asian traffic and storm-whipped boat rides. Let her try quench her insatiable cultural thirst in countries with makeshift beds, dank toilets and parasite-ridden water. You don’t need it. You don’t want it. Not one part of it.
Find yourself a nice girl who doesn’t travel. You just can’t know where on earth a girl who travels has been. ”
So, was your head nodding along? Or do you vote to Date a Girl Who Travels?
Deb writing sporadic snail mail
Huge thank you to the talented, gutsy, and tenacious Debra Ly for this article.
Debra is a teacher/writer/seeker/traveller/humanitarian wrapped up into one neat little Asian package. (She counts herself as quite lucky too…so she’s a Fortune Cookie?)
Deb ‘answered the call’ in 2008 and abandoned her Melbourne-Australian life for an adventure that found her on a remote island on the Great Barrier Reef, which led her to Cambodia where she directed a grassroots anti-human trafficking organization and then, naturally, went hopping around the world. As her world expands, so do the possibilities. Find more of her wonderful writing here.
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'Date A Girl Who Doesn’t Travel' have 23 comments
October 22, 2013 @ 9:35 am Aleah | SolitaryWanderer.com
Love this line: “You will realize that distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder – it fucking rips the heart apart and smirks at the shreds of despair.” Soooo true haha
October 22, 2013 @ 1:37 pm brandy bell
so. soo true. Thank you, Aleah for the comment!
October 23, 2013 @ 12:54 pm Deb
Thanks, Aleah! It makes me happy that you’ve read my piece. I read yours many times over!
October 22, 2013 @ 9:39 am Cat of Sunshine and Siestas
I have it easy – my boyfriend travels so much for work, that he ENCOURAGES me to make my own plans and to go travel….just so long as I’m back when he comes back from deployment.
PS are you back in Madrid now?
October 22, 2013 @ 1:37 pm brandy bell
you do have it easy, carino! was just thinking of you today, I AM back in Madrid and would love to see you. plans?
October 22, 2013 @ 12:33 pm Julie
Such a good read and so very true 🙂 even though I love a travel I love a sleep on the couch too… But in another country
October 22, 2013 @ 1:36 pm brandy bell
nothing like curling up on a sofa to make you miss home!
October 22, 2013 @ 4:51 pm Jessica
Sometimes it works out….. ;-D
October 23, 2013 @ 3:41 am Taylor
Was this plagiarized from this: http://sean.terretta.com/dont-date-a-girl-who-reads-charles-warnke ? I’d be quite disappointed if the answer is yes.
October 23, 2013 @ 10:37 am brandy bell
Hi Taylor, and thank you so much for the comment. I checked out the link, and while I definitely see similarities in the theme I feel that Debra’s piece is drastically different and a personal account 🙂 What a wonderful story by Charles, though! Everyone should check it out 🙂
October 23, 2013 @ 12:52 pm Deb
Hi Taylor, that’s actually the first ‘date a girl’ pieces I read! I was definitely inspired by the ironic tone of his piece and originally wrote mine as a personal reflection. And then voila!
October 23, 2013 @ 8:23 pm Hogga
haha like this
October 24, 2013 @ 11:26 am Jo (The Blond)
Well, she sounds boring as hell!
October 24, 2013 @ 2:14 pm Vinay Chittora
In my case, I will never date a girl who doesn’t travel. Because I want her to be with me all the time. I want her to understand and be ready when I say “Let’s go anywhere”.
October 29, 2013 @ 1:08 am Joey
I knew this wouldn’t convince me of anything when I saw the words “Jersey Shore”, but I read it anyways, and honestly this is just straight up ridiculous. I don’t know any guys who want to date a girl who relies on them for everything and doesn’t have any experience outside her own back yard. Most of the guys in my group of friends would agree that girls who are always perfectly groomed and always around make great booty calls, but not girlfriends. I’d rather be with someone who has the capacity to one-up me with stories because it challenges me to do more with my life. Also, the argument that girls who don’t travel are more fun to converse with is garbage. It’s more fun because they’ll cling to your every word and laughs even though they don’t get it? That attitude gets old so fast. Girls who travel are generally more cultured, more well read, and (don’t kill me for this one) more intelligent.
But the line that killed this article most for me was this: “Don’t invest your time and love in a girl who travels for she CAN live without you.” Really!? Good!!! I hope any girl I date can live without me. It’s the fact that she chooses not to that makes her worth dating.
I don’t mean to disrespect your opinion, and I’m sure this does appeal to some guys (usually the insecure ones with major jealousy issues), but as someone who hasn’t travelled far from home in over four years, I’ve never felt any urge to avoid the girls who’ve just gotten back from worldwide adventures.
January 28, 2014 @ 4:46 pm Farah
I think this post are meant to be sarcastic in some way, because as a female traveler myself I could relate to this. Cheers 🙂
December 16, 2013 @ 7:43 pm Hanna
It’s an interesting perspective. A little bit one sided, but, well more like a literature piece to make you think and analyze your life.
January 8, 2014 @ 9:57 am jhaylz
pleasae read this blog
http://www.lovethesearch.com/2013/05/dont-date-girl-who-travels.html
you will love it:)
January 17, 2014 @ 4:58 am The Guy
What a great reflective article Debra. I can fully relate to this since I married a girl who does not travel (much anyway). Whereas I am travelling every month but always am home each month.
She does get confused with all the time zones I enter but I manage to keep her up to speed.
February 3, 2014 @ 4:45 pm Mariangela Ballardini
i really like it! i didn’t appreciate the article “don’t date a girl who travels” which talks about girls with a backpack, who sleep in camping and ignore nice restaurants and the comforts, as it make them the only ones who have a dream, a beautiful ideal, an outside the box vision, spontaneous impulses.
Ok, it is true that for me the concept of wearing fleece and the concept of having fun exclude each other, but this doesn’t mean that I didn’t spend my whole life trying to figure out who I want to be and where I want to be it, chasing a dream and then sometimes rejecting it and starting over again.”
you can travel with style, indeed
read it if you agree!
http://fashioniscomingtotown.blogspot.it/2014/02/dont-date-girl-who-travelswith-style.html
March 10, 2014 @ 7:24 am Wilfy @ Wilfys.com
Difficult to have different interests in a relationship,
luckily I met my soulmate while backpacking through Australia
We now travel together and have the best time! 🙂
http://wilfys.com/blog/so-i-got-married-to-a-backpacker-i-met-while-on-the-road-marriage/
July 7, 2014 @ 1:11 pm Esha
This was one whacker of a post. i was like LOL while i read it. I don’t purely agree that you shouldn’t date a girl who travels. I aspire to be a traveling girl too… I think then I’d need a man who travels or the one with a really strong heart to bear my absences. Distance doesn’t have to be a real deterrent for the relationship if you don’t want it to
October 16, 2014 @ 1:28 pm brandy bell
thank you for the comments, Esha! I agree, distance isn’t a deal breaker, and can sometimes build a lot of security and trust. As long as the hearts are strong and the goal is the same, anything is possible 🙂