The Perfect Dating Line, Thanks to Camper Life
Camper life has taught me many things. Including a great introduction line.
Life has a way of presenting you with random encounters. Strange lines of dialog. Out there interactions and weird experiences.
Sometimes you’re left with nothing more than fractured ideas or broken memories. Pieces you can’t do much with other than brush them aside and wait for the day an experience presents itself to you with a crack at the edge. A crack that perfectly accepts the fractured idea you’ve stored in the back of your mind all these years.
And yet other times you’re able to use these strange experiences right away for good. At least good for yourself.
I spent the better part of this last year (nine straight months, to be exact), traveling the country in a 60s camper I renovated. I have more than my share of stories, experiences, experiences, both whole and broken, now part of my being. And yet it’s the top line, the “I just traveled the country in a camper” headline that’s proving to be the most interesting early dating nugget I’ve come across, possibly ever. I think it’s a line I’ll use in the preface of any relationship from here on out.
At least for the foreseeable future.
Partially Right
In John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley,” the famed American writer reminisced of the look in people’s eyes when he told them of his travels around the country. The longing they possessed to join him. To do whatever they could to tag along. Over the course of my nine months traveling the country (Steinbeck spent just three), I can confirm this to be true, and yet it’s incomplete.
Two kinds of eyes looked back at me when opening up about my travels. There were those of envy. Those who offered up their desire to do the same, if only such and such or this or that or the other thing in their lives changed. A desire that would likely go unfulfilled, and yet a desire all the same.
And then there was the other look. The look of disgust. The look of those who believed me as homeless. A good-for-nothing. A wanderer in life without the desire to set anchor and plant roots.
I never knew how someone would respond upon hearing of my travels. There were few repeat traits. One older motorcyclist, Vietnam patches on his leather jacket, said, “the gypsy lifestyle is where life truly begins,” before donning his helmet and riding around the dusty corner. Another man, similar patches of the same war on his cap looked, the sun and bewilderment to my story compressing his eyes into a squint. He’d spent his entire life within 100 miles of a small upstate New York town, outside of the stint in Asia.
And now that I’m grounded, at least for the time being, I don’t know how people will react, and with it, I learn more about them early in any prospective dating process than I could with almost any other question or line of dialog.
Q and A
As any red-blooded single individual, when I settled down following my travels I flicked on the dating apps. Because who doesn’t like to pull up photos of perfect strangers and judge someone’s appearance like a French monarch. Approving and disapproving with the flick of a finger.
Once connected there’s the typical early banter, including the “are you from here?” to which I offer up my, “well no (I’m staying with family for a short stint), I just spent the last nine months traveling the country in a camper.”
And that’s when I receive one of four answers. Yes, as is the case with dating, response options have doubled. I’m old enough now to realize dating rarely is made of yeses and nos but instead a million shades of maybe.
The first is the Steinbeck answer. The response of envy. Of mirroring my love of travel within themselves and their own desire to do something similar.
The second followed along the path of my travel reactions. From those with upturned noses as they breathed in the aroma of a conceived life experience gone foul. But, at the very least, it presented us both with something to talk about, which in itself is half the battle of meeting someone. And yet it’s a response from someone whose life likely would not align with mine. But it exposes this right away, instead of after multiple dates and conversations compressed under the weight of physical attraction and a few bar cocktails.
It’s the third response though that tells me the most about someone. And not in a good way. The “Oh,” and proceed-to-change-subject person. I'm not looking for the responses of envy or jealousy (at least that’s what I tell myself, but who knows, maybe somewhere deep down I enjoy it, or it lets me know I’m not the only person crazy enough to hit the road for so long). But if someone told me they spent the previous months traveling, living abroad, picking mushrooms in the Amazon, heck doing anything out of the ordinary for an extended period of time, I’d have some kind of response. A reaction. Sometimes I receive nothing but a blow-by.
I think when any one of us shares an exciting story with someone we want them to share in our excitement. Even if that excitement is manufactured. Whether we went to the moon or Ft. Lauderdale. Or we tried ceviche or chicken fried steak for the first time. It’s exciting. It’s new. Big or small, it’s new, and we want to share it with someone. And when that someone just waves it away, I think it says a great deal about that person. The attention isn’t on them, so they wave your attention away.
Either that or they are just terrible with in-person reactions (I was at the gym not long ago. Older man and woman sitting at neighboring machines. Woman asks the man how his summer’s going. He tells her, “I was diagnosed with Leukemia” to which she replies, “Oh...my AC stopped working.” True story).
But whether it’s someone who’s terrible with sharing my joy or they simply want the conversation dictated in their direction, that one reaction is all I need to know about someone and that I needn’t waste my time.
All thanks to giving them the headline of my life for the last nine months.
Oh, and that fourth reaction? Just being ghosted. It is a dating app, after all.