In the age of social media, where a swipe decides whether your love story will take place or not. Making and breaking relationships are so easy that at the slightest distress we run away from love, not wanting to go through the lover’s quarrels and dilemmas. What does that mean for travellers who are always on-the-go, finding love can be easy and difficult both. One may find a wider and more exciting dating opportunities yet the uncertainty of a fleeting relationship on your travels can be discomforting! So how does travel love stories takes place in the real world?

Why do we fall in love easily while travelling?

Seeing and experiencing a new place stimulates your brain and can give you an adrenaline rush and a sense of thrill when you are travelling. This can nudge you towards the initial romantic attraction you might feel for another human being. Most travel love stories start because of this sense of freedom and elation one feels while travelling.

According to a study done by Donald G Dutton and Arthur Aron, the flush of excitement and the mystery of the unknown can make two people feel attracted towards each other. They made female interviewers to ask male passerby on a terror-arousing suspension bridge to fill out a questionnaire containing pictures from TAT test. They found a great positive correlation of the male passerby to have post interview communication with the female interviewers. The conclusion is that, when you are in a presence of someone who is decently attractive and you face a fear stimulating stimulus it provokes you physiologically. The emotional reaction to fear is often misinterpreted as romantic love. Thus, begins the series of misperceived travel love stories!

Perils of Travel Love Stories

Even though the titillation of finding love on the road can be super stimulating yet we all know how most of the times these romances can end in a jiffy. The problem starts when you immerse yourself in the pool of love and the harsh realities of the world chase you down. The carefree girl or the handsome guy you locked your eyes with at the bar, the co-traveller who has been super helpful or the girl/guy being extra caring towards you on the trip might just be a mirage and short lived. What happens when this illusion breaks?

“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.”

— Shirley MacLaine

The melancholy associated with travel love stories is not the part where it ends. It is the part when you forgo the person with whom you created the most intense emotional attachments, and you know that you are not fated to be together to spend your lives along with each other.

6 Travel Love Stories from people who found love on the road

Bringing to you six of my favourite love stories from travellers who found their soulmates while travelling!

“Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”

— Pico Iyer

1. You’re The Sunshine That Greets Me Every Day

So, a lot of people ask me how Doulos and I met. The story started over a Facebook post where I wrote that I was going on a recce trip to Kasol alone and would love some company. Divya Shree and Doulos reached out to me and we three decided to travel together. Before the trip, I thought I should at least meet this guy once before travelling with him.

A week before the trip, we met on a Sunday afternoon in the month of May and as usual he was late and I waited for a while (hate waiting, I am usually on time). And, we ended up spending a few hours talking (he did the talking and I listened) at a chai shop.

Taking A Chance On Love

He seemed like a good guy and that was that. On the day of our travel, the first thing he told me when we met at Kashmiri Gate bus terminal was that my slippers resembled like a bumble bee. I thought, who says that kind of funny thing to people they just met!

Two days in Kasol we all had a good time. It was on a night where I decided to stay in kasol and he carried on to Tosh. After a Whatsapp chat and some flirting we met the next day. The very first day he told me that if we continue this then it’s going to be for ever. I didn’t take him seriously initially but each day with this wonderful human being has been a blessing to me. After dating for two years, we married in 2016 and its been 4 years of marital bliss.

2. Color The World With Love 

Amogha met Steve at a ‘Mini Bloggers Meet’ to watch the last Harry Potter movie on-screen. They both loved to read, write, travel and were diehard Potter-heads, but they realised the love for each other only after they travelled together to Hyderabad. Amogha recalls how it all started back in 2011, “I sat across a total stranger making small talk and unsurprisingly, the small talk turned into a full fledged travel-talk. He had been to Leh-Ladakh, biked to the foothills, jumped into the Zanskar River – all before travel was mainstream and I sat with utmost envy having only a tiny list of travel accomplishments”. 

“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”

— Mark Twain

“Somehow, a week later, we found ourselves playing tourists in Old Hyderabad. Both of us were new to the city and we were keen on discovering the hidden secrets of the city. As we were walking the busy streets of Laad Bazaar leading upto Char Minar, while everyone around us were moving at a fast pace, it seemed like we were the only two people simply standing and looking at the structure, wondering out loud (almost at the same time) as to how many people the minarets must have seen over the years. When we climbed upstairs and took in the view the streets below, it become evident that there, in that moment, there was a more colorful chaos in our hearts than the market stretched out in front of our eyes with all the emotions that came surging out for each other out of nowhere. 
We went to multiple places and ended up in Golconda Fort for the evening, just as dusk was setting in, the sky bright with the sunset hues”.

A Wild Ride Called Love

“The light show had been canceled because of less number of tourists at that time but he convinced the authorities to run the show, pointing out to his camera, saying he was going to write good reviews about them. We then personally asked a couple of other people there to attend the the light-show telling them it was a must-see so that there were atleast 8 people for the show to go on”.

“However, when the show started, I didn’t hear a thing because all I could hear was my thumping heart as I sat wondering as to why I had the biggest possible smile on my face. The moon came out from behind the clouds, we looked at each other and we just knew what we felt for each other without saying a word. So what started as two travelers exploring a new city ended up as a 12-hour-long “date”. 

“No road is long with good company.” –

– Turkish Proverb

“We have seen some of the best and worst years of our lives ever since – from living in different cities and meeting up midway to explore different places together, to traveling separately, to living in different countries with me undergoing serious travelers’ envy when he was backpacking all over Europe, to convincing my parents with rural background to accept a person of different religion into the family, to living on opposite sides of the world even after our marriage, to living together and discovering an all new country little by little. It’s been a wild ride”. 

3. Love Is A Dream For Two Lives To Share 

Nancy Agarwal, a law officer with a Public Sector Bank from Delhi fell in love with a stranger who became her best travel mate, after travelling together for two years they decided to tie the knot.

She fondly remember, “He was from Himachal Pradesh and I from Delhi. He used to read my travel blogs and I used to like his travel photography. He was a biker and I had special flair for bikes. We planned a trip to Kasauli together without meeting each other first. There is a concept of blind date. I call our meeting as ‘blind friendship’. It was in February, 2016 when we first met in Chandigarh, centre point between Delhi and Dharamshala, to further go to Kasauli.

After many bad trips with friends, she decided to travel with other people, she mentions her reasons for not travelling with friends, “I usually end up breaking up with my friends after travelling with them. It is on a trip that you completely understand a person, their nature and attitude, your compatibility with them”.

All Things Grow With Love 

She further elaborates, “I don’t like friends who on a trip sit inside the hotel room and watch television or those friends who turned out to be very unhygienic. I usually liked to travel solo”. It was then she met this guy from the mountains. “It was only with Ashish that I could do 30 trips before we decided to get married. We never started with an intention to enter into marriage or for that matter in a relationship. I was 28 and he was 24 years old when we first met. And with every trip our friendship grew. We travelled to many places in trains, buses, flights and took lot of bike trips, with me always as pillion rider. He says that I am the best pillion rider he has ever got.  It was because of him that later I also learnt bike. He encourages me to grow.

“What we find in a soulmate is not something wild to tame, but something wild to run with.”

– Robert Brault

It was September 2018 when we got stuck in the floods at Manali. Roads were broken, our car got stuck at Rohtang Pass but  somehow we managed to reach Old Manali. We stayed there for ten days. A person is best judged in time of problems and scarcity. In those ten days I realized that I could spend my life with this man. I told him what I felt and in December 2018 we got married. This is my short and sweet love story, a story which is very dear to me.

4. An Everlasting Bond Of Love!

Love comes in all shapes and types, intimate love is not the only kind of love. The bond of friendship surpasses all the other types of love. Meghana Sanka who is a die-hard wildlife lover met her perfect travel love in college. She recollects the sweltering heat of Chennai in July 2015 when she crossed paths with Shruti. “The librarian looked sternly at both of us and told us that we needed stamp size photos. I asked her if she wanted to go together, she shrugged her shoulders and  we walked down to the photo booth. That was the beginning of our friendship. We were expecting a big fat orientation the next day but alas, it lasted only 30 minutes; we had the entire weekend to ourselves. Not knowing what to do, we booked tickets to Pondicherry on impulse and caught a bus an hour later.”

“Both of us didn’t realise how overbooked Pondi could be on weekends and we spent 5 hours on the road, walking and talking, just trying to find a hotel in our budget. Those 5 hours made us both realise how much patience we had for the same things. It has been a rollercoaster ride ever since. From Hampi to Indonesia to Rishikesh to Ranthambore,  we have always chosen each other for trips.”

Friendship Is The Thread Of Life 

“You know how you have that one person, who likes the exact room you do, who wants the opposite side of the bed, who wants to do the exact thing you want to do, who is ALWAYS in sync with you. This girl, Shruti Menon is that person. As a solo traveller, I get worked up in group travel or planning travel with a lot of people but with Shruti, it’s just like reading a newspaper. It’s that relaxing to plan.”

“We are so close my mom often jokes, if one of us had been a boy, we would have gotten married. And that’s true, I do call her the love of my life. 
Ours isn’t a conventional love story, we are just two inseparable girls. It doesn’t mean we don’t fight, we are both headstrong. But our love wins over every nasty fight we have had. If there was someone I would want to spend the rest of my life with, hands down it would be her. To friendships that are deeper than the Mariana trench! So grateful for this human being.”

5. A Moment In Time…A Reminder Of Hope 

After a life changing experience in Nepal, Dave begun documenting his travels in his blog Dave’s Travel Corner. Dave survived a 4 years long distance relationship with his wife whom he met at Koh Saket in Thailand. The path of long distance was not easy initially in the formative years of their relationship but they made it through with the help of Skype and emails. He says, “Love on the road can lead to beautiful things, most often it is ephemeral excitement. One don’t have the limitations that you would have with a traditional romantic relationship – you are short on time and living in the moment without stressors that weighs you down. Having a permanent location and profession can hamper your chances of finding love but when you are travelling and meet someone with whom your chemistry clicks, love inevitable.”

Dave found his soulmate on a trip, the strong degree of trust and communication between them helped them pull through the long distance phase with ease. They live in California and the love has only grown stronger with each year.

6. And The Story Begins…

Madhurima found her partner when she moved to a new city, she fondly recalls those days, “Sayantan and I met in the world wide web while discussing a political issue regarding a controversial movie released back in 2014. We were both Bengalis living in Bengaluru. He was fresh out of college, landed himself a job. I left my job in Delhi and came to Bengaluru to pursue masters.”

“We were homesick and hard-pressed to find a friend who will speak the same language. Besides, Bengaluru is an amazing city if you have money to spend on dainty cafe and malls and bars but the novelty weans out soon. We needed to visit one of those lush green parks, sit hand in hand and speak for hours which was amiss in Bengaluru but a norm for any Kolkata born for the initial days of love!”

“It was the republic day holiday of January when we escaped to Pondicherry. Pondy as they call it lovingly. The beachside erstwhile French town cast its spell as we walked till midnight in the town, filled us up with grilled prawns in lemon butter sauce, awaited sunrise by the beach alongside a few strays and a bunch of local fishermen, spotted a dead tortoise washed ashore during high tide and discovered bliss! For love, it is incumbent to laugh without reason, bounce in the palpable heightened sense of euphobia and discover the mundane in a new light! We did the same in Pondy. “

“5 years down the line, we laugh saying if we fell in love with each other or we fell in love with Pondicherry? Needless to say, we make it a point to go back t the beach town every now and then and rejoice in the waves of Bay of Bengal!”

Travel Love Stories In The Era Of Social Media

Finding the love of your life can be excruciating to say the least specially while travelling. To help travellers to find love on the road, there are many social media apps that gives opportunities to travellers to meet new people and experience of the joy of bonding when travelling alone. Check out the following apps:

• Xoxo Tours
• Planely
• btrfly
• Fairytrail
• Backpackr

Did you fall in love while travelling? Share with us your romantic travel love stories and we will feature it on our Instagram and Facebook page.