Iceland Redux: Is Bicycle Touring Romantic Doom?

I have a lifelong habit of continuing in uncomfortable situations that are predictable and safe, rather than changing the situation in some uncomfortable way to pursue a greater happiness that is not guaranteed. I’m sure we all suffer from this habit to a degree, but I feel like it’s really messed with my life. It’s too easy to reinforce, because playing it safe today is more likely to get you to tomorrow.

At many points in my life I have also used the possible inconvenience of other people as an excuse to delay my actions, without consulting the people involved. This is the worst kind of selfishness, based on the conceited idea that you know better than other people what they would choose if they had all the facts.

In the depths of this kind of self-imposed purgatory, I’ve often asked myself the question, “If I keep doing it, what am I doing it for?” After all, if I didn’t derive some strong benefit from this pathology I would have ditched it long ago. Over time I’ve realized that the reason is subtle, but powerful: I keep trying to play a role, of someone who is as stable and committed and undemanding as the masculine role models I aspired to early in life. And while there definitely is a part of me that is remarkably stable – you need to have nerves of steel to deal with many aspects of long range bike touring, complex software development, and living in Oakland – there is also a part of me that is intense, difficult, boundary-pushing, and swings between craving solitude and craving disruptive, creative mayhem.

Without hard-won wisdom to temper it, this disposition has the following outward appearance: I find something that works really well and do it happily for long stretches of time, running it into the ground, and then with little external warning or apparent reason, I abandon it and make a lateral leap into something else. Sometimes I leap a few times very quickly. Then I find the next thing that works really well and burrow into it, for another long stable run.

The tempering wisdom is this: Being entirely stable is not the goal to aspire to, despite what the role models – of cowboys, and suburban husbands, and workaday dads – were insisting to me when I was young. The goal is to safely integrate change and adventure with the rest of your life, and the people in it. And that includes advocating for what you need in relationships, with a mixture of insistence and empathy, instead of being quietly discontent. And knowing the difference between what you really need, and what just sounds good because it would make you feel better. (Or eventually, feel anything.)

In the recent past I have not been particularly good at applying this wisdom, so I feel like I need to nail it down in words right now, and re-read it a few times to myself for good measure.

Now it’s time to take a left turn into a major part of my life: Bicycle touring.

For a long time I believed that my desire to go on long-range tours was pathological. I believed I was either obsessed with the idea of touring because it was a convenient distraction from other problems in my life and a good excuse to avoid “settling down”, or I believed it was a kind of curse because if I went on long-range tours I would be logistically unsuitable as a partner for a committed romantic relationship. And for almost all my adult life, I’ve always either been in, or been eagerly pursuing, a committed romantic relationship. So it’s either a case of: I’m avoiding my problems, or I’m screwing myself out of what I want.

Over the last ten years, without really understanding what I was doing, I tried multiple times to make a specific compromise to this: Having my romantic partner go with me on these journeys. One time I outright pitched the idea, and helped her shop for a bike, but she was physically unsuited to such long rides and found it miserable. Other times the idea arose organically, but got derailed by my own lack of experience guiding people comfortably into it. The most recent time I approached it with a healthy skepticism: My partner was already interested in touring before I met her, and as we got to know each other she casually set about buying a touring bike and gathering gear and discussing potential trips, and I soft-pedaled the pursuit because I needed to be sure she wasn’t doing it because she thought it was necessary for getting closer to me. Meanwhile, whether these relationships were going well or going poorly, the desire to go on bike tours remained.

In fact I began to be plagued increasingly by a grand vision of going on a bike tour around the entire world, which would charge into the front of my mind and thoroughly distract me, then vanish for a while. It got the most intense a few years ago, when I found myself newly single, and with the financial and logistical means for the first time to actually attempt such a thing. I traveled for three months and then deliberately set it aside to attend to other matters in life, involving my family and career, and though I was not entirely at peace with the decision, it felt like the right one. I realized I could pick up the epic journey where I left off, and do it in segments. I planned the next segment with my nephew, and folded it into a foreign vacation with a big chunk of my family. We did practice rides and I made an itinerary and bought plane tickets. It was going to be awesome! Then COVID blasted those plans apart.

I shrugged my shoulders and planned some smaller trips. I was exploring a long-term relationship during COVID times anyway, and put most of my attention into that and my job. At the end of last year I went on a pretty epic trip with my nephew, then jumped through a series of exhausting COVID-related logistical hoops to get myself to the East Coast to visit my significant other, but when I arrived I was exhausted and uncomfortable and she was distracted, and then some absurd drama piled on top of that. I suddenly found myself entirely alone on the wrong side of the country with a bike and a pile of gear, three days from my birthday, with a massive storm approaching. It was another logistical nightmare getting out of that, with repercussions that took months to sort out.

The foul taste of that experience informed my most recent span of dating: I became convinced that any attempts to combine my bike touring plans with my romantic life would turn into a disaster, and the only sane option was to put one on hold in favor of the other. That worked for a good while, then the “grand tour” idea ran rampant in my mind again and I decided the only way to be rid of it was to clear everything else from my life – developing romance included – and just do it. I put a plan together, and then it was immediately derailed by a family emergency that made me reassess what I was doing. Instead, once things were under control again back home, I assembled a much smaller and easier trip, a return to a known quantity I wanted more time to explore: Iceland.

In this era of my life, after so much experience, I can confidently say that I am not pursuing bike tours in order to avoid problems at home. I go on bike tours, and I have problems, but the two don’t correlate any more than other parts of my life. Still, they are great fun to think about, and I am guilty of obsessively planning the next one when my attention would be more useful elsewhere. It’s taken a lot of effort to move away from that habit. It helps that I’ve accumulated a big list of potential trip plans I can just dip randomly into when there’s time for a journey. Many of those are suitable for casual bike tourists, and perhaps I’ll start a relationship with someone with that level of interest, and we’ll explore those together. But I don’t need that to feel fulfilled.

Now I’m happily single, and embarking on another bike tour, and the other potential pathology comes to the foreground: Am I no good for a long-term relationship with all this traveling? Does a hobby like this really factor me out as a desirable romantic partner?

I don’t believe that any more. I found a pretty good compromise in my last long-term relationship, with frequent enthusiastic sharing and check-ins and the engineering of visits along the way, and in retrospect that relationship died on its own terms, for its own reasons. That said, I do know I’m not in a position to start or nurture a long-term relationship while touring — without some pretty specific coloring outside the lines of courtship. And I’m okay with that. What matters to me right now is the adventure I’m having, the work I’m doing, the stories I get to share with my family and the plans I can make to involve them, and so on. The bike touring is not the lateral leap; it’s not the unstable question mark, it’s not the vision quest or the segue into something else. It’s a part of who I am long-term, and it can fit into other things without crowding them out. It provides a measure of both the solitude and the creative mayhem that I need in my life to complement the stability I desire, and that is extremely useful. I don’t sleep around, I’m not emotionally distant, I don’t escalate conflict, I don’t get drunk and carouse, I don’t blow through my money, I don’t have ridiculous expectations … but I do this. It’s a pretty good package.

I look forward to the next romance, and aspire to make it long term. I’m looking forward to all the sharing, and jokes, and dancing in the kitchen, and the adventures. But dang if I’m not also happy riding around, building software and hanging out with cats.