Magic Happens. Just Not on Dating Apps.

Do you want to know why dating apps suck? It’s not the flakiness, or the animal selfies, or the inane chit-chat, or the misogynistic bios, or even the boring bios.

It’s because there’s no magic.

***

A few years ago, my mom discovered a box of her great-aunt’s old love letters. Audrey, my great-great-aunt, died more than a decade prior, unmarried with no children in a nursing home. She had been widowed as a young woman and never remarried.

When I was in my early 20s, dying alone would have been the end of the world.

I mean, HELLO, dying is the end of the world regardless of whether you’re married or not. But when you’re young, dying is a totally foreign concept, and nothing to be feared. Being alone is not; it is something to be very, very afraid of.

In your early 20s, you are 100% certain that you will meet the love of your life, you’ll have happy, non-drug-addicted children, and you will grow old with your happy, non-cheating husband. End of story.

Then you turn 30 and you try to find love on a dating app.

And everything changes.

***

Audrey’s perfectly preserved letters dated back 60 years. They were thrown in a box, out of order, so it was hard to make sense of the timeline of her life.

But there was one pen pal, a Danish ship captain, Svend, who wrote to her over and over and over. The letters spanned a 13-year period. 13 years!!! Imagine persisting with someone on a dating app for 13 years? You’re lucky if you get a 0.13-second glance.

From what I could gather from the letters, Svend and Audrey only met up a handful of times around the world when their travels coincided.

In one letter he wrote: If only you and I could meet there, it would be vonderful.

Aren’t love letters just vonderful?

Svend was one prolific love letter writer. He had cute, cursive handwriting. His command of the English language was… well… also cute…

To have you in my arms again — to dig into the sky of love that is about you when we are together and enjoy every moment you stay with me.

I’m not entirely sure what that means, but nevertheless, it sounds very romantic.

I became obsessed with piecing Audrey’s life together through Svend’s love letters. She had this entire life I knew nothing about. Had she been happy? Lonely? Did she regret her choices at the end?

In the absence of children, had she, on her own, been enough?

Would I be enough?

***

Through her letters, I realized that Audrey and I had a lot in common. Mainly travel, romances, and travel romances.

I caught the travel bug during my first big trip to South America. I was 20 years old and I arrived with just my backpack and my Lonely Planet.

It feels strange to think about it now, but I did not take a mobile phone with me. Almost three months without a mobile phone! Instead, I would sporadically rejoin the digital world at internet cafes.

Long bus rides are a rite of passage for backpackers. Within days of arriving, my friends and I took a 22-hour bus ride to our next destination. No iPhone with cheap local data to access the world wide web. No pre-downloaded Netflix movies on an iPad. Perhaps more alarming was no stopovers for our bus driver to have a power nap.

22 hours staring out of a bus window sounds like actual torture now.

Back then, you had to get your Brazil visa at the border; there were no eVisas. I remember arriving at the visa office in a small town on the border of Argentina and Brazil. We were desperate to get to Brazil so we could drink caipirinhas, kiss cute boys, and dance all night.

We were ten minutes too late and were told we would have to wait until Monday when the visa office reopened. We would be stuck there for five days.

Five days in a small town with no Netflix sounds like actual torture now.

So with nothing much else left to do, we struck up a few romances with fellow travelers.

The entire trip was chaotic, with a lot of time spent staring out of bus windows. But looking back, it was truly a magical time to be alive and traveling the world.

***

Audrey died one month before I left for South America. And it would be over a decade later that I would learn about her own travels around the world.

Despite air travel becoming more common, Audrey traveled by sea throughout the 1960s. In 1965, she traveled by ship for six weeks — SIX WEEKS! — to Hong Kong.

What the hell does one do for six weeks? Remember, there was no Netflix back in the olden days.

With nothing else to do but stare out to sea, she did what I would’ve done; she struck up a few romances with fellow travelers.

In a letter she wrote on board the ship, I found it hard to follow how many romances she had during those six weeks at sea. Despite writing, “There are no interesting males,” (such a me thing to say!) at least three seemed to spark her attention.

I have been invited by the third officer to go to dinner… he’s English, nice looking, very flirtatious, but twenty-eight and up to my shoulder!!!

Then there was the weirdo Dutchman:

I’ve had some long and quite interesting conversations with him and feel sorry for him too. Everyone hates him and when I say how I feel about him, they all say, “For god’s sake don’t start feeling that way — you’ll regret it if you do!!!”

And then things got interesting. There was a young Englishman trying to protect her from the Dutchman!

He is a most handsome young Englishman and he spends his time trying to protect me from the Dutchman. I wish he was fifteen years older and so does he! He is so tall and rugged with the most superb voice.

When I first read this letter, I imagined Audrey was in her 20s, maybe 30s. She just sounded so… fun.

But this part of the letter caused me some confusion: I wish he was 15 years older. I compared the date of the letter to her birthdate. She was on the precipice of turning 50 during that trip to Hong Kong.

I had been scrambling for so long to meet someone on a dating app to avoid the dreaded “dying alone”. Even though, deep down, I never wanted the adventure and the travel romances and the boring bus rides to end.

Maybe they didn’t have to?

***

After arriving in Hong Kong, Audrey received a letter on a Grand Hotel Kowloon letterhead with “Still in Room 1207!” scribbled on the back. A very presumptuous man named Austen wrote:

I do sincerely hope that you will learn to settle down and discover that life just traveling alone is not the thing to do, because you need constant affection and this is the only type of life for you my dear, so take my advice and do as I suggested!

Some things never change. Kinda sounds like an olden day version of, “Awww, don’t worry!! You just haven’t met him yet!”

I found another letter that Audrey wrote during her trip to Hong Kong. She had met a woman on the ship named Billy, who was staying at The Peninsula. One night, Audrey went to meet her for dinner at the hotel restaurant.

She wrote:

In this gorgeous dining room, there is a cocktail bar, which I had my back toward, and Billy was facing. She suddenly said to me “There’s a very nice man sitting on his own at the bar and he looks so lonely.”

So I turned around to look and who do you think it was?? Svend. And neither of us could believe our eyes!!!

Yes, it was that Svend, the Danish ship captain, and 13-year-long love letter writer. Of all the bars and all the ship captains in the world, there he was, sitting in the same bar as Audrey. In Hong Kong.

He wanted to get away from all the noise on the ship and so went to The Peninsula. He might have gone to a hundred other bars and didn’t know why he chose that one. He of course didn’t see me dining and he was about to leave, when Billy made me look around!

And there it is.

No swiping, or Instagram stalking, or Whatsapp video calls, or Facebook messages, or dropping of location pins.

Just magic.

—

This post was previously published on Medium.

***

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