Whatever the opposite of Eat, Pray, Love is, I did that.
It feels ridiculous to admit out loud. I grew up reading travelogues, dreamed of living abroad, saved for travel from the moment I got my first adult job. I could always see it off in the distance, sparkling brightly: the dream of traveling for a year.
Finally, a window of opportunity presented itself, so my partner and I gave up our lease and compressed our lives into two carry-on suitcases.
The plan was to spend three months in Japan, three months in Europe, three months in Southeast Asia, and then the final three months back in Japan. An extravagant travel schedule made possible by both the weak Japanese yen and the time that I’d spent working in the tech industry.
As a student of the aforementioned travelogues, I thought I knew roughly how this year was going to play out. I’d have some once-in-a-lifetime experiences, learn some things about myself, maybe pick up a few clues as to what I should do next in life, since my career had become relentlessly stultifying.
To be clear, I didn’t expect it all to be rainbows and unicorns and moments of self-discovery. I’ve always enjoyed traveling, but there are a lot of parts that are incredibly unromantic, no matter how you frame them. Show me someone who says they love the part of traveling where their red-eye flight is delayed for the third time, and I’ll show you someone who’s unhinged. But those moments always felt like a worthwhile trade-off to me, so I wasn’t too concerned.
I intended to write a newsletter from the road so that I could have a record of the trip, and to keep friends and family updated back home. When the first three months passed and I’d only written two posts, I should’ve been able to tell you that something was wrong. Reading them back is strange, like seeing myself through a kaleidoscope:
“I want to spend time looking, learning, and experiencing new ways of seeing — discovering all the many different shapes that people around the world have molded their lives into.”
“I had the beginning of a story: a girl gets on a plane to Tokyo, about to travel the world for a year. But I didn’t know what plot threads to focus on, or how I was supposed to frame the experiences I was having. Quite frankly, I still don’t know.”
Oh baby, I want to say. I want to take her hands in mine, this girl who doesn’t know what’s coming yet. Oh, sweetheart.
The plot is that your relationship is ending.
This isn’t the story that Eat, Pray, Love had prepared me for. Nor, for that matter, had any of the other stories that sat on my shelf of beloved travel writing: not The Lost Girls, not On Rue Tatin, not Under the Tuscan Sun. These are stories of women who go abroad and learn something about themselves, maybe find love, maybe renovate a house (it tends to be a toss-up between the two). Taking these as my holy texts was like bringing a guidebook on Antarctica to the Arctic. Sure, they seem related, lots of ice on the cover, looks right — but where are the penguins? I was promised penguins, and all I have are these deadly white bears that look like they want to kill me. Great.
To state the obvious, no travelogue is going to explain how to find a therapist who’s available for intensive couples therapy in Amsterdam.
No guidebook is going to point out the best cafe to cry at in Mexico City, nor is it going to suggest the luggage carousels in the Montreal airport as a good place to feel your heart fall into your shoes.
No local maps are going to give you a way to navigate the feelings you have when you’re walking through Kyoto by yourself, your partner back at the airbnb, simultaneously wishing you could share the things you’re seeing with him and feeling a confused sort of relief that you’re alone.
No memoir is going to prepare you to visit Venice together — Venice, the city you swore you’d only visit when you were falling in love — when you were falling out of love instead.
It’s farcical, having your heartbreak writ large across the world; your memories of a dying relationship set against gorgeous backdrops. Looking back, I honestly want to laugh at how mismatched the setting is from the story, but sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction.
All told, it took six months and eleven countries for our relationship to end.
But before I continue, I should interrupt this tale of relatively charmed misfortune to bring you a few disclaimers.
First, no one needs to do anything wrong for a relationship to no longer be the right one. I won’t be going into any specific details of how we fell apart, but I do want to say that there wasn’t any great schism that caused us to break up. No unforgivable acts were committed; there’s no villain here. Only the quiet unraveling of two people who were together for eight years and eventually realized that their branches weren’t growing more entwined, but were instead growing apart. This is simply the way life goes, sometimes.
And second, for any couple who looks at this story as a reckless travel-caused case of relationship manslaughter, and who are now wondering if they should cancel that upcoming vacation, lest they doom their life together: don’t worry, I think you’ll probably be fine on that trip to Paris, or Bhutan, or backpacking the PCT. Go for it! Make memories together! Research shows that sharing vivid memories generally strengthens relationships, so it’ll probably be a good thing, on balance.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that traveling together can introduce new, foundational problems into a relationship. But it does act as a stress test, a way of revealing the fault lines and weak spots that were already there. It’s possible that my partner and I would have stayed together for longer if we hadn’t traveled together, but in hindsight, the writing was on the wall before we even settled on an itinerary. The end was coming, sooner or later. I just didn’t know that by making those spreadsheets, buying those plane tickets, obsessing over which backpack to take… that I was in the process of choosing the sooner option.
In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that I was looking for new ways to be in the world, when I first set out. While I couldn’t have articulated this to you at the time, I was reacting to the fact that my relationship and career both felt like a pair of ill-fitting, uncomfortable shoes. Pinched toes and blisters for the soul.
Part of what kept me sane, during that last year or two before the Grand Tour, was the fantasy that if I could live somewhere else — Copenhagen, Montreal, Sapporo? — then I’d be happier. Pictures of everyday life in foreign locales would scroll across my Instagram and Pinterest feeds and I’d longingly imagine what life must be like if you walked down cobblestone streets everyday, or if your commute took you past ancient temples. Surely, surely, you must be happy.
Newsflash: you can be unhappy anywhere in the world. I bet you could’ve told me that, couldn’t you? But we all have a few things that we need to learn the hard way, and I learned this particular lesson by gathering a lot of memories of loneliness and devastation in laughably picturesque places.
It reads like an SNL sketch for a Discontented Millennial Travel Agency: Come see the world with us! Children under two fly free, and so does all your inner turmoil. Your personal flaws and tragedies are also invited to join in. Your bad habits will be checked, gratis, to your final destination. Enjoy your trip together.
An excerpt from my diary on the road:
I thought (or perhaps only hoped) that traveling would make me a better person. Someone who didn’t scroll the internet pointlessly, someone with a more adventurous palate, someone who got a lot more exercise, someone who pursued their hobbies more.
Well, surprise, wherever you go: there you are.
The only thing that’s really worked out is that I walk a lot more, which my body is clearly in favor of, but I’m also currently dealing with pain in my right index toe, which, who even knew that was a thing???
Yeah, no. Traveling won’t make you a saint. And living somewhere else, whether temporarily or for good, won’t solve all your problems in one go.
Oddly enough, this was an incredibly freeing thing to recognize. It removed the weight of finding a “perfect place” to live from my shoulders, because if I could be sad anywhere, then it followed that I could be happy in a lot of places too. There are many good lives out there to be lived, in many places around the world. A wise friend summed it up best: the grass isn’t greener on the other side. It’s greener where you water it.
When the dust finally settled from the breakup, I ended up moving back to the Pacific Northwest, to the same city where I’d started. A place where I have friends, favorite parks and coffee shops, a support network. The same place, coincidentally, that I’d been so convinced I had to leave. It turns out that the problem had never been the city: it was the life I’d been living in it before.
And you know what’s funny? I don’t doomscroll on the internet much anymore. My diet has improved, I exercise more, I spend more time on my hobbies — a lot of the things that I was hoping to do while traveling ended up happening naturally as my life resettled into a different shape. I’m happier, more present, more kind. Traveling seems to have shaken something loose.
So it turns out that the journey wasn’t a panacea, but a catalyst. A doorway to another life, even if the thing that changed wasn’t the locale, but the way that I exist in and move through the world.
It’s been a year since everything happened, and I ask myself if I regret it, sometimes.
After all, that trip was a lifelong dream of mine. I have guidebooks on my shelves dating back to middle school, when my awareness of the wider world kicked in. (What was I going to do with a Lonely Planet book at twelve years old? Daydream, of course.)
And that relationship? It’s the one that I thought I’d be in until the day I died.
But somehow, whenever I check in with myself, there’s no regret there. For a long time, there was grief, and pain — but when that passed, what I actually found waiting was gratitude. (Hokey! But it’s true.) Gratitude that I pursued this dream, that I didn’t give up on myself, that I went out and participated in the world. And another wise friend, back when my breakup was still fresh, said something that only feels more true as time goes on:
Just because a relationship ends doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile. We tend to define the success of a marriage, for instance, by its length. A couple could get married, fight like cats and dogs for a year, and be driving to the courthouse to file for divorce on their anniversary… and get into a car crash and die. And you know what we’d say? We’d say it was a success, it was a loving marriage, because it lasted their whole lives.
But what about the couple that gets married, love each other for however many years, and then eventually no longer fit together? There’s value in them recognizing that, and in separating before they hate each other. In understanding that their relationship’s purpose has been served. It’s even more romantic in a way, if you think about it, because they’re choosing to care about each other past the end of their love story.
It’s like walking down a road. Sometimes people will be going the same direction as you, and so you walk together for a while. And when their path splits off from yours, it’s okay to keep walking by yourself, or to eventually find others to walk with. But it wasn’t a waste to walk with that person for a while. To have shared the journey.
It isn’t a happy ending, in the classic sense. It isn’t a travel memoir that anyone would want to read. But it’s my life, and I’m at peace with how this chapter’s ended. I’m excited to see how the story continues to unfold.
So what’s next, you ask?
Well, I just submitted my application for language school in Tokyo. The difference this time around? I don’t expect it to fix my life. I’m just hoping to learn some Japanese.
– M
Leave a Reply