Nine days into 2025, I stood at gate G7 in Amsterdam waiting to board my flight to Cape Verde to build a nomadic life on my own terms.
A year and a half later, strangely enough, I’m still here. The temporary adventure turned into a life, complete with friends, routines, and a man who, after nine months, still isn’t ready to call me his girlfriend.
None of it was exactly planned.
I needed a new path
After another dating failure, a stalled job, and a roommate moving out, I felt stuck on the traditional path that includes a career, a mortgage, and maybe marriage, and more. It was a path I wasn’t even sure I wanted.
Meanwhile, friends around me seemed busy making things permanent: getting engaged, buying houses, merging lives and bank accounts, and having kids.
Naturally, I choose the opposite: unsettle. I quit my job, moved out of my apartment, ditched many of my belongings, and left. I was after an adventure, but somehow I ended up staying at the first stop I made: Cape Verde.
Courtesy of Carmen Esselink.
Over the next 18 months, I dated four people. Despite changing my coordinates, career, and cultural context, I still find myself drawn to the same emotionally unavailable partners I had back home. Only now with different passports.
I was in a textbook situationship
The situationship I was in by month three of my nomadic life could have come straight out of a psychologist’s textbook. When he pulled away after two months, I noticed immediately: less time, shorter text replies, and plans that stay plans rather than actions. I was anxiously looking for clarity where there often was none.
When we were about to become intimate for the first time, he suddenly felt nauseous. He blamed an expired yogurt he had eaten on his way to my place. I’m not proud to admit it, but I checked the container that was lying in my bin. The expiration date was a week away.
I knew the yogurt wasn’t the reason. More importantly, I realized the reason didn’t matter. A lie, even a small one, is a red flag. But I rationalized every red flag with “this time it will be different”, instead of accepting what was in front of me: minimal effort. And it was not the yogurt, but our situationship that had reached the expiration date.
Then he said he had to move to another island for work within a week. When his plane left, I told myself I was fine. Sure, fine looked a lot like me crying on my pink yoga mat, trying to meditate my way out of another heartbreak.
A month later, I learned he was in a relationship with someone else.
Was I building a life or avoiding one?
My original plan was to experiment with nomad life, to move around, meet people, experience new things and locations. Instead, I found myself staying: not only for the place, but for the idea of an “us” that wasn’t there.
Courtesy of Carmen Esselink.
For years, while friends were moving toward settling down and procreating, I ran as fast as I could from that script, instead focusing on my career, autonomy, and adventure. Now I’m unsure whether I’m building a life or avoiding one.
Maybe my move wasn’t only about chasing freedom or happiness, but also about being convinced I’d find it in adventure and reinvention. Maybe I was partially postponing something I wasn’t ready to face: I dream about being someone’s someone — no matter my location. I didn’t cry on that yoga mat because I wanted adventure. I cried because, deep down, I am so scared I won’t get my happily-ever-after fairytale. That was something I wasn’t even sure I knew I wanted.
I came across the concept of self-handicapping, creating conditions that protect us from confronting our deepest fear. Perhaps chasing unavailable partners and going abroad served that function, as external obstacles I can blame. As long as things remain uncertain, it’s not my fault when things don’t work out. But I have my flaws, too, and this blame game doesn’t prevent me from getting hurt.
Things look different now
Today, I’m building something more committed with someone sweet, funny, hardworking, and — yes, again, a bit avoidant. So am I self-sabotaging? Repeating patterns? Is it bad luck? Or simply the risk of letting someone in?
Here I am, trying not to repeat that anxiety-driven template.
The difference today? I no longer guess, but ask the difficult questions, recognize patterns, and communicate needs, boundaries, fears, and triggers.
Time will tell whether this new relationship becomes part of a path forward or a pattern from the past.
