But in the past year, a whispering prod from somewhere deep and honest has been asking me to take stock of who I really am and what I really want from—you know—life.

While infatuation can rumble in like a like an elephant in steel boots playing Dance Dance Revolution, romance has a much coyer way of slithering in—like the sidling steps of kitten after a nap.

As roosters began cock-a-doodle-dooing, after a five hour jam session in Granada, Nicaragua’s Backyard Hostel, the guitar was finally set aside and Michelle, a German/Cuban who had taken a liking to me, began showing me her various tattoos and telling me the stories behind them. She was petit and cute with a protruding smile. In the course of conversation she showed me a picture of the seven-foot boa constrictor and related to me the unique set of cultural circumstances that comes with being half Cuban half German.

“I had such a difficult time trying to find someone to take of my boa while I went on my trip,” she told me as she settled into my shoulder.

Travelers, we have all been here before, in the romantic milieu of hostel travel—that meandering moment when a fellow member of the road and opposite sex lies a head on your shoulder beneath a canopy of early morning stars. There is beauty in this—a beauty we spend our young lives seeking and our adult lives trying to understand.

But beauty is just one item in the package of the dating/hooking/whatever-you-call it scene. This, and my relationship to it, is something I’ve contemplated quite a bit in the last year. Having just clocked in my 29th year on the age clock, I’ve been privy to contents of that package—have fallen in love, been broken by the fall out of it, have been in fleeting romantic relationships, played the bar game as instructed by the governing cultural traditions, and have found myself deciding where I should go from there.

“The Game” is often a silly game that in my opinion really only exists as it does because of all the possible intoxicatants our culture could legally sanction, we have chosen the wobbly libation of alcohol, which serves us by shutting down the sensible parts of the brain.

Little explanation of “The Game” is needed, since you all know the basic rules of barroom dating game: 1) Everyone gets drunk 2) Everyone tries to go home with the most desirable person who is open to an exchange 3) From there you exchange/numbers and of the course of any subsequent entanglements gauge whether the other person has a demeanor worth dating—a big step because it temporarily takes you out of the game (straight to jail without passing Go).

The game has its variations. For some of my brethren, step three involves never calling and attempting to never see the other person again.

Being human, the straight male variety, often single and possessing the usual fondness for the fairer sex, I have both watched the game from the sidelines, the bench, the coach’s seat, box seats, from the rafters, as the mascot and as a participant wearing jersey 69 and driving my way through the lane where a competing guy the size of Shaq has just bought the basket a Sex on the Beach and a box of chocolate hearts.

There is plenty of encouragement from both peers and elders to practice the dating game in its shallowest waters. The mantra essentially is, “hook up with as many people as you can, because if you can, you should.” Plenty of elders encourage this while complaining about their less intoxicating entanglements with partners and remembering their own heydays with a gold-painted nostalgia.

All this is well and good, and even if it seems otherwise, receives no judgment from me. But in the past year, a whispering prod from somewhere deep and honest has been asking me to take stock of who I really am and what I really want from—you know—life, and what that means about my participation in “The Game.”

Frankly, like my well-intentioned attempt at raising ducks in North Dakota’s winter, sometime last year, fueled perhaps by past entanglements and new meaning filled friendships with centered women who have taken themselves out of the game, I had to accept that if I played the game it was out of peer pressure or lust, or both—neither things I wanted deciding how I lived my life.

So where did that leave me?, I wondered last year in Iceland, walking daily past a duck pond between my apartment and Reykjavik’s city center.

At the end of my twenties, with my accumulated causal romantic rendezvouses, fallings in love, this casual scene had lost most of its allure.

So, deliberating, I decided that the thing for me to do was the things I loved with fervor, with passion and with the unrelenting desire of followed dreams. My dating plan was to not have a dating plan, or agenda—just to live my life as best I could and be as me as I could and see where that took me.

“The Game” I felt, was not just a distraction, but was fundamentally detrimental to ever finding someone who’d make my heart sails soar. More than a few times, my underlying reasons for traveling have fallen prey to the temptations of the hostel party scene. These are wonderful in their own right, but if they cause you to lose focus of higher things sought on the road, then they can compromise one’s overriding ideals and agendas.

With only a few lingering stars in the morning sky, Michelle and I kissed. We embraced. We looked up those fading morning stars infiltrating the open roof about the pool. This was beautiful. This was two free souls sharing something intimate and nice. This was lovely. This was music. This was sharing a night. This was enough. So when I was invited to share her bed, I opted instead to retire to my own. She was an enjoyable person to spend an evening with, but she did not spark any surreal ruminations of romantic enigma within me.

 

From the perspective of lust, she may have been just the droid I was looking for. But from the perspective of sharing the impermanence of life, sharing in its most intimate exchange, it would have just been sex for sex’s sake and such exchanges is exactly what I’ve decided is contrary to what I am about—we know what we are about in our innermost, where wishful thinking can’t get a table and bedrock honesty is filling every chair. And besides, she had described my guitar playing as “incredible,” which made a strong case that consumed libations had compromised her ability for moderate discernment.

Read my other Travel Nicaragua Posts:

1. Travel Nicaragua: Unrelenting Overnight Bus Hangovers 

2. The Rum Infused Meanings in the Music on the Road