Every boy on Bumble seems to have taken a trip to Thailand this summer. Was it a group thing; did they go in shifts? And every girl was apparently cruising off the coast of Santorini. I guess I missed the memo.

Spend 30 seconds on any dating app and it makes the world seem like it’s packed with well-traveled singles. On Hinge, prompts like “Best Travel Story” encourage users to dredge up some unique adventure. Tinder’s sparse bios are littered with plane and beach emoji. And, of course, on any app there is the inexplicable-but-always-included skiing photo where four goggle-wearing men pose on a white-capped mountain. Who is the boy you’re supposed to be evaluating? Who knows! Whichever one he is, he’s super adventurous.

Travel is integral to how we market ourselves while dating. There is no doubt that we take some of our best pictures while traveling, but dating and travel are connected beyond the photo ops. People find others who value travel more desirable, despite the fact that vacationing is usually a tangential part of our lives. Why is an activity that most spend upward of 350 days a year not doing seen as an attractive expectation and not a preference of the privileged? And what does the prioritization of travel say about who we are and whom we want to date?

According to a 2017 study by Hinge, travel photos receive 30 percent more likes than the average photo. Research from Match Group, which owns Tinder, found that 62 percent of men and 74 percent of women want a partner who shares their travel interests. Research for a joint Delta-Tinder marketing campaign found that 50 percent of singles say travel is their favorite thing to do, and Sam Dumas, co-founder of the dating app Chappy, says those who include travel photos in their profile are more likely to get matches than those who don’t.

Travel makes a person seem adventurous, rich, and interested in their own self-development, a.k.a. an ideal mate. With a travel photo, we can sell the very best idea of ourselves to whoever may be swiping by.

Travel is romantic in the same way dating is

Dating coach and founder of Growing Self Counseling and Coaching Lisa Marie Bobby says most people don’t think of their everyday lives as a true reflection of themselves. “People feel locked into a job and a routine that they just show up and do and it isn’t really meaningful,” she says. “When they are able to be their real selves is when they’re outside of that day-to-day system.”

The idea of being a different person when you travel can be seen in the very things you pack. When I shove four sundresses, two pairs of heels, and every scarf I own into a suitcase, that is not to dress my everyday self; that is for my Travel Self. No one imagines their day-to-day self wandering the markets of Morocco or hiking Yosemite — we imagine the self we most want the world to see.

Bobby explains that when people are doing things like “trekking around Iceland,” that’s when they feel the most sexy, interesting, and fun. And couples who travel together often recall the experience as the happiest time of their lives. “What I hear in couples counseling is [traveling] is when people have the best sex, that’s when we have the most vivid memories of life, that’s when things really are the most fun,” she says. Travel photos may be predictable dating profile fodder, but ultimately, everyone wants that euphoric couples vacation.

Many people choose partners in the direction of their own aspirational growth, Bobby says. So even if you’re not well-traveled, there’s a belief that a well-traveled partner can pull you into their beautiful life.

There are also similarities in the ways we romanticize both travel and dating. “Romantic love begins very much as a fantasy that’s based on just a little bit of information,” Bobby says. When we imagine ourselves on vacation, we omit the anxiety of flying or frustration of a language barrier. We don’t know what a vacation will actually be like, so we predict it in rosy vignettes, much how we predict a date with someone whom we’ve only seen in a few pictures.

Travel talk is low-hanging fruit

Dating coach Kevin Murray has helped online daters converse for years, first at eFlirt, a company that managed online profiles, and now at Icebrkr, a startup he founded that sends users matches and helps them home in on the best topics of conversation.

Murray says that when creating Icebrkr, travel was the No. 1 topic he knew he had to include. “It’s easy, low-hanging fruit to start a conversation with,” he says. And as a professional profile maker, his top priority is creating avenues for conversation. He says that including travel photos makes the other person’s job easier, something crucial for those dating on platforms where even the slightest bit of effort can be a deterrent.

Travel photos also allow people to start a conversation without doing any reading, Murray says. “If they don’t want to read and [they can] just see the picture, they can be like, ‘Oh, when did you go there?’” he says.

But what if traveling isn’t part of your life? Include it anyway. “If they’re not well-traveled then it’s like, ‘Shit,’ and you try to find that one trip to showcase,” he says. Even though it feels like “grasping at straws,” it’s worth it to include the suggestion that they enjoy vacationing.

Another way he coaches non-travelers to engage with the phenomenon is to list where they would like to go and invite others into a sort of daydream. “Whether you’re talking out of your ass or actually well-traveled, I certainly like to make a point of talking about travel,” Murray says.

Travel is an indicator of high-income interests

But some people aren’t talking out of their asses. Users at eFlirt paid $4,000 a month for full management of their dating profiles. “If someone had a Match.com or eHarmony profile, we would run everything,” Murray says. “Part of that process was writing messages and also writing their profile. One of the things we’d often start conversations with was travel.” Someone with the income to pay for this service may actually have the ability to travel often and want a partner who could keep up with them.

But there are levels between the frequent jet-setter and the perpetual homebody. Bumble sociologist Jess Carbino says travel photos can indicate where a person lands on this spectrum. “Travel for many is a signal of cultural capital,” she says. “The ability to talk about having been to certain places displays class privilege that isn’t displayed by being into another activity, like sports.”

Say you’re living in Chicago. Is your idea of travel driving to a beach house on Lake Michigan, road-tripping to Austin for a music festival, or flying to Portugal for a week? All of these indicate an interest in travel, but each comes with a different price tag, which could reveal one’s socioeconomic class.

But it’s not only the price that insinuates higher socioeconomic class; it’s the desire to spend money on intangible things. Financial stability can be indicated by a picture of an expensive car or expensive jewelry, but according to a 2017 study of social class and purchase satisfaction, whether a car or a vacation makes you happy is an indicator of class in itself. According to the study, those in lower socioeconomic classes gain more happiness from material purchases as opposed to experiential purchases.

The term for deriving happiness from experiences more than material goods is called the experiential advantage. The experiential advantage more often applies to those who are in higher income brackets, but also to those who value “self-development, self-expression, and uniqueness.”

A 2014 study investigated the link between experiential purchases and happiness and found that as time passes, satisfaction with the purchase of experiences increases while that of material goods decreases. We can candy-coat memories in a way we cannot candy-coat an outdated television.

The study also states that the satisfaction gained from purchasing experiences is related to the perception that our experiences are closely tied to our self. The study notes that “we are not the sum of our possessions,” and that people believe their experiences as most reflective of who they are.

But perhaps the most compelling aspect of the experiential advantage is in the way it facilitates relationships — the exact goal one has when puzzling together the perfect dating app profile. The study found that an experience’s enduring satisfaction is caused by its ability to “more readily, more broadly, and more deeply connect us to others.” Experiences were rated higher on the enjoyment scale because of their “relatedness.”

In one experiment, pairs of unacquainted participants were given 20 minutes to converse freely about purchases. Half were told to only talk about material purchases, and the other half was told to talk about experiential purchases. Results proved that participants liked the conversation and their conversational partner better if they talked about experiential, not material, goods.

Melding the two points together, sharing an aspect of your life that you believe is most demonstrative of who are, can create a “greater feeling of kinship and connection than something more peripheral.”

But for most people, traveling is peripheral. Regular experiences like going to a concert or playing kickball would be much more illustrative of who you are. Still, it seems many believe that travel is an integral part of who they are and, more importantly, who they should be.

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