WHY NOT TO DATE AN ADVENTURE TRAVEL GUY!
Recently someone forwarded me an article titled ‘Why not to date a travel girl’. The article gave an interesting perspective from a girl’s side. We guys also have challenges when it comes to dating or finding a life partner. I decided to write our own story based on our experiences (mine and my old time travel buddy Sankara). We have been doing on & off traveling for nearly a decade. Backpacking travel is still not accepted as a preferred way of travel in our society. The general perception is that backpackers are those people who have gone insane or don’t have enough money to support normal way of travel.
So here are the 7 reasons why a girl should not date or marry a travel guy:
1. He will have lots of time for you: Don’t date a guy who loves traveling because he will not have enough time for dating purpose. Our long holidays are meant only to travel abroad. You would be having an expectation that weekends will be used for movies, shopping and partying. However we people love spending weekends in traveling. Your weekend romantic plan goes for a toss because we are never in the town over the weekends. And if you are trying to be considerate by believing that weekdays will work, please forget that. Weekdays are when we research & plan our travel. Normal socializing is also a challenge. We can’t spend hours having conversations on phone or chatting with you on whatsapp. We can talk but for max 10 minutes per day as we have other travel stuff to focus on.
2. He will be well groomed, clean shaved and smartly dressed: That’s impossible. Trekking gets one tanned so much that my mom needs to show my pictures taken 5 years earlier to convince people that I was fair skinned at some point of time. My cousin sister declines to introduce me to her friends, as my face color is darker than her colored brown hair. Wrinkles, pimples, cut marks, body scratches, skin rashes & dark eyes come as part of travel package. Luckily we don’t need to mess with our hair, both decided to keep ourselves bald, its painful to see losing hair due to all travel related side effects. We look 5 years older because of continuous travel, unhygienic food & water on which we survive, and intermittent travel associated illness/diseases . Hitting gym for us is only to build strength and not to show our muscles. When it comes to clothes, we prefer to wear cheap cotton t-shirts and shorts as these are the most comfortable ones when we travel. We never buy Calvin jeans or Burberry shirts, too expensive to risk for travel.
3. He is financially very stable: A general question girls generally ask is which brand of car we drive & how big is our house/apartment. Well we do have a bike for our travel, a very stable bike that can survive the ordeals of Himalayas. And that’s it, no house, no car. Savings : well if you keep on spending money on travel, your credit card statement follows a sine curve with +ve balance at the start of month when you get salary and goes to –ve at the end of the month. Once I was asked if I do have any assets of financial value. I thought for couple of minutes and then I proudly told her yes I do , I have camera gear worth 10k USD and entire camping & travel gear for another 5k USD. But that was not the answer she was expecting.
4. He lives life king size: Well, we prefer living life as king of travels. So when it comes to eating, we can eat anywhere, anytime and anything. We have eaten with laborers in their thatched houses and with fishermen on their boats. We believe firmly in ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ but people who serve us food don’t have same belief; hence we tend to ignore an insect in fried rice or the plates licked by dogs before food served on the same plate. So if you are finicky about food, don’t come with us. We understand the benefits of rich & mixed diet, but most times we don’t have a choice. So I have survived on rice for exact 5 months. That’s only carbs. But this was still better than some places where you get to eat things which creeps, crawls, wriggles (I literally mean to throw your imagination to the wildest). If you have to survive, you eat what you get. One of my close friends deleted me from her messenger friend list simply because she could not bear what I was eating. We love staying at world’s top 100 places to stay. Clarification — we mean in terms of location only. Some times our budgets don’t allow, on most occasions, places where we visit don’t have good places to stay, and on some occasions places will not have any places to stay at all. So if you don’t like common dormitory, or sleeping at bus/railway stations or throwing your sleeping bag on the road, then definitely don’t travel with us. We believe that the most hygienic toilets are the open toilets in the jungles, I mean wherever you have open space. Many times we are not lucky and hence while using a toilet at bus stations we had to cover our nose with a cloths piece to ward off the stink. We can sleep anywhere within a space of 6 feet by 2 feet. Once we slept on the beaches of an isolated island in Mauritius and on another occasion spent 1 entire day on a rugged fisherman boat at Halong Bay.
5. He talks about romance: We love talking but about people, culture, places, etc. Thats the only subject we have loads of context. For us, romance is always with nature and not with girls. Our discussion is always related to travel; so if you want someone who appreciates your curves, well talk about the curves of the roads. We need peace to indulge ourselves when we travel. We want to be left alone to appreciate Gods own beauty. We love feasting our eyes on the exotic views. You will be with us for ever, so we can appreciate you later on.
6. He has a great career and highly ambitious: We might have an engineering degree and a management degree from one of the prestigious institutes of the country but that has become useless now. Our most sought profession has changed from Analytics expert at Wall Street or Management Consultant at Silicon Valley to Travel photographer at NatGeo or Wildlife photographer at Discovery. With so many job breaks in between, placement consultants have started avoiding us. And even if we get jobs, we end up reporting to our college juniors. So if you are looking for a great career oriented person, we are the worst cases.
7. He will treat you like an angle and will pamper you: We believe firmly in gender equality and independence. You wont find a person like us who will treat girls equally. So please don’t expect us to open the cab door or restaurant door for you. We believe you know how to pull a cab door. We believe that you have equal strength to lift your backpack, handbag, water bottle, etc. Hence don’t expect us to carry your fully loaded backpack even when our hands are free, we will not offer you any help. We believe that you are equally intelligent to book movie tickets, reach to a common destination and find restaurants that serve good food. So please don’t depend on us in planning and booking those details.
Now if above 7 pointers still don’t make you rethink, then do get us checked by a clinical psychologist. We have been termed as ‘Psychologically Unstable’ and diagnosed with ‘Excessive high-risk taker’ and ‘Compulsive disorder syndrome’. Still if you want to try, mail Sankara :)
Disclaimer: This article has been written keeping humor in mind. It does not reflect anyone’s feelings / philosophy / culture / views and does not co-relate with any person living or dead. No where it is intended to offend anyone living or dead.
