Meeting someone when you are never in one city

People who travel constantly tend to have wide lives and narrow romantic options. They know interesting people in six cities and are never in any of them long enough for anything to develop. The pattern is familiar: a good evening somewhere, genuine interest on both sides, and then a calendar that makes the second meeting impossible.

The usual advice is to stay still, which is not advice so much as an instruction to have a different life. A more useful question is what a search looks like when geography is a variable rather than a constraint.

It begins with being honest about where you actually are. Not where you are registered or where you pay tax, but where you spend your weeks. Someone splitting time between Los Angeles and Jackson has two home cities, and treating either one as secondary produces a worse search.

It also means the search can go where the person is rather than where you happen to be. A search confined to one market is looking at a fraction of the people who would suit, filtered by an accident of postcode. When the right person is somewhere else, the sensible thing is to look there.

Distance early on is not the obstacle it is assumed to be. Two people who both travel are, in one sense, unusually well matched: neither is asking the other to be somewhere they are not, and both understand why a month can pass between one dinner and the next. What kills these connections is rarely the distance. It is the absence of a reason to plan around each other.

Which is why timing matters more than proximity. Knowing that two people who would suit each other will both be in the same city in three weeks is a more useful piece of information than either of their home addresses. It is an ordinary logistical fact, and it is the difference between a connection that develops and one that does not.