What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding: A Memoir

Vacation romances are so sweet because they’re finite. Every moment together is one of your last. They’re the one bite of dessert you’re allowed on your big diet, the fifteen-minute nap stolen by an exhausted new parent. The world is a thing that exists only to tear the two of you apart, which brings you very close together. And the fact that you f

The greatest thing about vacation romances is you don’t have to break up, or say hard things to each other about what you are or aren’t feeling. You don’t have to talk about what isn’t working, or why. You get to just tell yourselves that it would have lasted forever if not for the geography. You don’t have to break up.

“In Judaism, the way you learn to love someone is by giving to them,” she said. “The more you give to a person, the more you end up loving them. If love is just a feeling, and that feeling changes, then what? Love has to be something you choose to build.”

life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally. And you have to evaluate and determine which awesome thing you want infinitesimally more, and then give up that other awesome thing you want almost exactly as much. You have to trade awesome for awesome. Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a littl

Furthermore, the world hadn’t paused. The good ones had been snatched up, just like people always said they would be. I had always scoffed at this, because I knew so many fantastic guys who were single into their thirties and forties. But chasing some of those fantastic guys unsuccessfully for years had shown me what everyone was talking about when

Like, maybe enough already. Remember when Robin went to Argentina and brought back a hot Argentine on How I Met Your Mother? That’s a trip paying for itself.

He got it and left, again apologetically. I kicked myself for sullying our experience together the year before by coming back again. I had replaced the endless ellipses in our relationship with a period. No more possibility, just a final chapter. I thought I’d never see him again. But I would. You just can’t plan these things.

You can’t control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you.

It was the kind of travel chemistry that doesn’t happen all the time, and it all happened because I lost my passport and my plan. If I had gone on the trip I originally booked, I would have been with older, rich, married couples. It was a reminder for me that reinforced my travel rules—don’t overplan, and don’t book expensive trips if you want to m