I have a theory that travel is a test of whether your relationship is a ticking time bomb. A few days on vacation is a condensed form of your future life together: What sort of space you'll make your home (the hotel), whether you'll be high rollers (the budget), what time you'll get up in the morning (the wake-up call). Travel details are a proxy for personal values. So as I watched Alexy plan our trip to San Francisco, what I really wanted to know was: what will our life be like when we're married?
The blueprint for our future wedded bliss began on a promising note.
promotion
He sat on the hotel bed and leaned over the tour book with a highlighter, cross-referencing a map. A half-hour later he nudged me. "Okay!" he announced. "So today, we'll start at the maritime museum. And then we can do the cable-car museum. And then we have to ride the cable car back to the hotel!"
Less promising. I had been hoping for something romantic, maybe a hike or a culinary tour. Anything other than a day centered around semi-obsolete forms of mass transit.
I should've known before we'd even boarded the plane that we weren't on the same page. Alexy is the sort who reads biology journals for fun, the sort on whom subtlety is lost. A week before, he'd thought that a movie date at his place meant we were going to watch a movie at his place; he seemed genuinely surprised to find me getting naked during the opening credits of Notes from Iwo Jima. So when he asked me to accompany him to San Francisco two months into our relationship, I should have realized he didn't know that romantic trips have meaning. He just wanted to go to San Francisco, and figured two people are better than one.
I agreed to let him have his afternoon transportation-museum boner while I wandered Fisherman's Wharf, but first he made a peculiar request. He pointed to his digital camera on the dresser. "Hey, would you mind taking my photo?"
"You want a photo in the Comfort Inn?" His hotel choice — small, dingy and remote — did not bode well for our future home.
I recalled his Facebook page — true to the site's nomenclature, his profile was a virtual shrine to his own face.
"It's where we're staying!"
This, I couldn't argue with. I looked through the viewfinder: polyester curtains, television welded to the wall, factory-produced artwork, florescent bathroom lighting, Alexy goofily grinning: Click.
Fifteen minutes later, as we strolled over the hill to get a glimpse of the bay, Alexy wanted another photo of himself. Five minutes after that, we reached the beach via a hair-raising scramble down a rocky embankment. "Let's take a photo here!" By which he meant, let's take a photo of him. He flashed the exact same smile as he had in the previous two photos. Click. Then we reached the walruses. "Ooooh! Lets definitely get a picture of this!" Alexy with marine mammals: Click.
The nearly continuous requests for more pictures of himself continued throughout the morning, and I recalled his Facebook page — true to the site's nomenclature, his profile was a virtual shrine to his own face. If you've ever visited a social-networking site, you're familiar with our culture's relentless tendency to document ourselves, something bordering on self-worship: look where I live; look where I've been; look who my friends are; look at me. Though Alexy would occasionally ask me if I wanted to be in one of the pictures with him, most times he was happy to be the only one in the frame (at the end of our trip we had thirty-four pictures of him, four of me). And even when he would ask, I'd generally decline — a silent protest against his insatiable desire for more self-portraiture, which I couldn't help but find somewhat repulsive. And so, just as certain cultures believe that every photograph steals a bit of a person's soul, every banal Alexy snapshot snatched a bit of my hopes for a mutual future.
