There are two schools of thought when it comes to travel and love: too much travel will render you permanently alone, and more travel means more opportunities to meet someone.
Those in the former camp tend to be people who are already unhappily married and aren’t in love with travel, so those of us in the glass half full camp aren’t really worried about what the glass half empty people are on about.
Besides, there’s a new study out that says one in 50 travelers meet the love of their life on an airplane.
To me, that sounds like more travel should be in the cards for those of us who are unattached. And it definitely beats thumbing through Tinder or whatever’s the hot new (but surely equally disappointing) dating app, because if you meet someone and it doesn’t work out or you don’t meet anyone at all, at least you went on a trip!
Either way, there’s research to prove love is literally in the air. The new study by HSBC asked more than 5,000 travelers around the world about their in-flight experiences, and one in every 50 surveyed about the connections they’ve made said they’d met the love of their life up in the air.
If you ask the oracle of modern times (also known as Quora) there are 102,465 flights a day, on average, so that gives you lots and lots of opportunities to start the process of getting your groove on or back or whatever stage of the game you’re in.
And none of these odds even factor into actually being on the trip, which increases your chances manifold.
You could meet someone when you’re in Japan and a friend connects you to her other friend that’s in Japan too (this happened to someone I know), you could meet someone after a reading at a literary festival in Jamaica (this also happened to someone I know) or you could meet someone on a beach in Tobago while both of you are on vacation and the odds of meeting were seriously so slim it could only have been coordinated by fate or destiny or whatever you believe in (this happened to my parents).
The point is, go travel. Maybe you’ll find the love of your life. Maybe you won’t and instead you’ll find the trip of a lifetime. Either way, it’ll all be well worth it.
You’d be surprised who the love of your life turns out to be. After all, adventure fell in love with lost. —Erin Van Vuren