Love Letters | Travel Dating Diary - September 2025
In September, I fell in love!! …with the mountains of Austria. I didn’t want my time there to end! I had a great dating experience and only wish I’d pushed to go on more dates. The month included dates with four men, a fun weekend with a girlfriend, gorgeous trail running and hiking, cycling, yoga, gym workouts, sprawling out in grassy parks with good books, cute cafes, and lots of quality snuggle time with one super cuddly cat.
I was lucky enough to find a cat-sitting gig for 5 weeks in Innsbruck, Austria. I felt grateful for the opportunity. The apartment was mere blocks from miles of forested hilly trails. A dream! I truly could not have loved this leg of my trip more.
Blog Outline:
Comments and reflections from Part 7 (August 2025)
September Travel Dating Diary - dates and reflections on love and dating
Romance x Rail - Part 8 - September 2025
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Romance x Rail - Part 8 - September 2025 //
August Debrief:
Check out Part 7: Tender are the Hunters, here.
To get an overview of the whole Romance x Rail travel dating project, go here.
Most commenters loved the part about my warm roommates the most, and I’m so glad thatit had the intended impact. I had checked with my roommate, IH, before publishing, since I shared a snippet of his recovery journey. I needed to get permission.
“I love it. Don’t need to change anything.”
At the end of August, I had pledged to IH that I wouldn’t get depressed, and that pledge kept me accountable. Every time typical dark thoughts started to creep in, I remembered my pledge and reversed course—no wallowing, not today! I’m happy to report that it was my least depressed month in years. Having an accountability buddy can really work, guys.
A favorite comment in response to August’s blog was from my long-time friend DF’s mom:
“I really enjoyed your writing and insights. I look forward to future posts and dating updates. It has been 27 years since my divorce and I have not found my soul mate but I have found peace being myself. You are very brave to be traveling the world and looking for love, thanks for sharing your journey.”
I love thinking that my search for love transcends generational differences. We all seek connection and meaning throughout our lives. I felt seen and appreciated through this note.
My friend CB said:
“I love your writing. And your tenderness.”
Good to know that my attempts at tenderness are being acknowledged. It was a tough topic to write about!
My friend GA told me that the “women in chadors kicking each other meme” is very commonly used in the Middle East, and yet we still could not seem to track down the original GIF.
LH, who had encouraged me to bring tenderness in, approved of my treatment of the feeling:
“Wow, the song you shared and then how you wove it in—absolutely obsessed with that assessment and it was deeply anthropological to me, loved loved loved it!! I didn’t catch the overlap with Tend Collective but then was like….of course. ‘notice who brings tenderness and rewards mine’ Um what!?!?! Just hanging out all unassuming at the end….like no big deal, just gonna tuck the key to all of this here at the end.
It was weird that that particular group of men [70s/80s softrock singers] hid from my honest reflection until you wrote about that. I guess both of us were nostalgic about those types of artists because both out Dads introduced is to them.”
I’m not sure if you’ve heard this term, reader, “male manipulator music,” have you? Male Manipulator Music is singer-songwriters who sound soft and sensitive, but in real life, they’re known as bad boyfriends/lovers/husbands. The classic examples are John Mayer and Ryan Adams. When Mandy Moore divorced Ryan Adams, she exposed him as a manipulator, and several other women came forward with accusations as well. Sensivite dude, John Mayer has been accused so many times that there are multiple blogs listing them out. Stay vigilant out there, ladies. Don’t fall for sad bangers.
Okay, actually, I’m a sucker for sad bangers. Here’s a favorite, and I’m positive that Lennon of Kid Bloom is a male manipulator. There are too many shirtless, tattooed photos of him looking forlorn on Instagram for him not to be.
Innsbruck
I was in Innsbruck for the whole month which was wonderful! I’m pretty bummed I didn’t find anyone who asked me to marry them so I could stay there forever, tbh. Waking up tucked in between two mountain ranges was a dream! I went trail running nearly every day and on off days I walked 2 blocks to a gorgeous gym with full window views of mountains on every side and lifted weights, took yoga classes, read a book while on a stationary bike, or sat in their little sauna.
A cute thing I discovered about Austrians is that they say hi to everyone when they enter a room. At the gym in the locker room, women coming in would always say hi to those of us already in there. My reaction was skeptical! “What is happening?? Am I supposed to say ‘hi’ back??” I’m not used to this level of friendliness! When I would enter yoga classes, everyone would make eye contact and smile at me. I didn’t know that Austrians are so friendly, and indeed, Vienna just got voted the friendliest city in Europe. Based on my experience, although I spent much more time in Innsbruck than Vienna, I would have to agree!
One date I really wanted to try but didn’t do was a board game bar, Das Brett (the board). They have every board game and people select a game, order beers or other drinks and sit and play board games. I love board games! But none of my dates advanced far enough for this activity.
Look how snuggly Pepe the cat was:
The Vibes
Breathe, Rest, & Digest. Oh, and Lovebomb.
Deliberate Parasympathetic Practices
At the end of August I watched this TikTok that hit me hard.
Here’s the text:
You don’t the money, you want the freedom.
You don’t want the partner, you want the connection.
You don’t want the success, you just want to feel like you matter.
The thing won’t give you the feeling until you become the frequency of it.
Manifestation doesn’t start with a vision board, it starts with the nervous system.
You don’t manifest from thoughts, you manifest from embodiment.
Because the universe isn’t listening to what you say, it’s listening to who you are being.
When you jaw is tight, when your breath is shallow, when your gut is clenched in fear, you can chant “I trust” all you want but the signal you are broadcasting is survival.
You wanna receive love? Be the space that love wants to enter.
You wanna attract peace? Be the stillness your future is looking for.
You don’t have to wait. You can access it now. Every feeling you want is already inside you waiting for permission to be felt.
You don’t want the thing, you want the feeling you think will give you.
And that feeling is one breath away.
I have a feeling, due to the cadence and structure, that this text was written with the assistance of ChatGPT, but still, he would have had to prompt it to get here, and the message is a good one. I also love his delivery—full of presence.
I keep coming back to some version of this message over and over for the past few years. Earlier this year, I talked with a former colleague, CS, who got a great new job. “The advice someone gave me,” she told me, “is that you have to work hard on overcoming fear, embodying nervous system safety, and the opportunities come to you.” If this sounds woo-woo, think about how different people feel to our nervous systems when we interact with them. We still each have to do the work to “attract” opportunities by networking, building our resume, applying, and asking around, but somehow the right opportunities seem to find us when we feel better—ie, safer—inside. Fear and insecurity or safety and security—we can feel these in others. If someone feels a lot better to be around than how we feel inside, we tend to admire them and when they feel worse than we feel inside, we avoid them. When someone feels around the same level, we might end up becoming great friends.
When we want better relationships and opportunities, we have to embody more of what we admire or the energy that feels good to experience in others. How do we do this? It’s not as impractical as it may sound (and in fact, I coach people to better manage their emotions and fear response. You can learn more about working with me here.) We can start by doing cortisol-lowering and parasympathetic-activating activities. In Septembe,r I found a new one: legs up on a chair! View the video here.
“Box breathing” in which you inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, and hold for 4, never made me feel better so I’ve always been skeptical of breathwork for getting calmer. But then I heard that it’s important for the exhale to be longer in order to stimulate the parasympathetic system so I tried 4-7-8 breathing, breathing in for 4, holding for 7, and exhaling for 8. This breathing style works for me, I found!
How do you know if a parasymphathetic-inducing activity is working? Most of the time, the stomach will make a gurgling sound as soon as the switch happens. This is because the parasympathetic system is the “rest and digest” system—the opposite of fighting a tiger in the jungle. It’s the time our bodies need to rest, restore, fight pathogens, and absorb nutrients from our food, helping our bodies work in a way that promotes our fullest health.
So, I started doing legs on a chair in September every night before bed, along with 4-7-8 breathing, also taking a probiotic supplement that the nice Turkish pharmacist lady insisted I needed (review my encounter with the Turkish pharmacy in this blog). The first time I did legs on a chair, the gurgling started right up…and so did such a strong sobbing cry! Omg, how long had I been holding that in??
One thing about me is that I have “cortisol belly,” where my body stores fat at my stomach, which is a reaction to having high cortisol, the stress hormone. The reason, I learned, that legs up on a chair works is that the psoas muscle, which connects our core to our hips, is the first muscle to activate when we go into fight or flight response, tensing up and getting ready to fight the tiger or run away, saving our life.
With more body awareness, I’ve realized that my psoas muscle is just-about-always tensed up, ready to fight or flee. Geez Louis, right? [Long sigh…] So, I’ve also been working on releasing that muscle every time I can remember to notice. Every time I do remember to notice, it is indeed flexed. This may be a long journey… I have the feeling that the near-daily yoga I did from 2016 to 2023 helped release this tension quite a bit. Since becoming a digital nomad and breaking two ribs in 2023, my yoga practice has been less consistent. I look forward to a stable, in-one-place life again soon with several yoga classes a week.
When it comes to dating, I’m curious if I can change the tone of who I attract by working on coming out of chronic stress holds in my body. We’re constantly sensing each other and we attract those with whom we have similar energy.
One of my very favorite trauma-healing books is A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, et al. In it, the authors, who are UCSF psychiatric researchers, write:
“All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another’s emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.”
We have an energetic force, and others have a force, all of which are contained within concentric circles of the forces of others. We are constantly influencing and being influenced. If we can try for a little more inner-created safety, we can attract a little more too.
Lovebomb Yourself!
At the end of August, as I reflected on how I could fall for another avoidant man, starting off strong, pretending to want commitment, only to disappear once things got real, I asked myself: what if you could never fall for lovebombing by someone else again because you’re already lovebombing yourself?
Way back in 2014, I went through a personal accountability revelation/revolution. In a story I’ve been writing and re-writing and will probably share soon, a summer trip to Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, quite possibly the largest rave in the world with over 300k attendees, in which I made every man I spent time with cry, made me suddenly find teachings that helped me 1) see how my poor behavior was hurting others, resulting in my undertaking an amends-making process and 2) start setting firm boundaries with past and present love interests.
I sent something like maybe 5 or 6 emails to past boyfriends and lovers apologizing for always having blamed them for what was wrong with the relationship, owning my 1/2 of the dysfunction, and letting them know what I had so loved and admired about them.
The former partner who was the dearest to me, who I’d spent four years of my early adult life loving, wrote back to me:
Hi Alison,
Thank you for this incredibly courageous and thoughtful email. Its brave to put yourself out there like that. I had two immediate thoughts after I read this. The first is complicated and painful, therefore difficult to put in an email right now. The second was "did you write this email to yourself yet". I would like to see you do that if you haven't already.
I apparently wrote a version of that letter to myself after his prompting, which I stated in an email reply to him. I’m sure it was helpful but why did I stop with just the one?? I was long overdue for another one! I was long overdue in making this a regular practice. So, on September 2nd, 2025, I found a cozy coffee shop in Innsbruck, sat down, and wrote a new one. I took my time and did my best to feel the words in my body as truth.
What if I wrote a letter like this to myself every week or every morning? I tried it for a few days but didn’t manage to keep it up. Setting the intention now to get back on the lovebomb-yourself-wagon!
Here is that love letter. I was going to share excerpts, but what the hell! Here’s damn near the whole thing.
I typed it out from handwritting listening to this Spotify playlist, Beethover Piano Classics. Please listen along while reading for the full effect.
Dear Alison,
This is a love letter. I hope to see everything wonderful about you, acknowledge where you may be hurting, and express everything I hope for you in the future. Let me make amends for all the times your softer, quieter parts were betrayed by the louder parts of fear.
I love the way you have always prioritized personal growth. I love your compassionate heart. I love that you seek to learn and understand. I love that you connect people. I love that you see beauty in small things and moments. I love your wandering spirit.
I sometimes worry that you shrink yourself, your shoulders caving in, and keeping your heart protected. You’ve always known your most magical moments when your spine is straight, and your heart is soft and open—your vulnerability and truth shining through.
Please own your full Goddess energy. Each woman is a Goddess, and we must reclaim this birthright. We are worthy of so much, but we have to claim it. As Lou Andreas-Salomé said, “Believe me, the world won't give you any gifts. If you want to have a life, steal it.”
Was your regal birthright stolen from you, as it is for so many girls, through violence and patriarchal belittling? You have been clawing your way back ever since. I’m so proud of you for never shying away from facing your fears. Which fear, which shadow, will be the next to be illuminated? What is your hunch, dearest?
I think…its’s the fear of a secure partner who knows you deeply (knowing themselves deeply as well), who has the capacity to care about and for you, sees you…is on the same warrior path of healing and self-awareness. Not someone intimidated by you. Mutual devotion and adoration.
You have been moving in the right direction despite missteps. Some things we cannot know until we put ourselves out there. It’s okay to make mistakes. You are whole even with all of your imperfections, Dear Alison. Your imperfections make you gloriously human. These faults are the things that connect us to the web of life, engendering compassion and giving life meaning.
We don’t know why we were put here only to suffer. Seems like The Bad Place sometimes, doesn’t it? Somehow there is a sense to it all. We tap into the web and we send reverberations or shockwaves. Tap in and add strength and hope. Sanity. Clarity. Take out fear. Add safety. Inner stillness is the force. It is always available to us. We become still, and we reach out and grab it. Then we have magical Self energy.
I know you want a true, deep love, lover. Reach out into the web, the force, and take what has already been deemed yours. Your partner waits for you too. I know you want him to reach for you. “Reach, my mad mind. Don’t hide.” [From a poem that the former partner who wanted me to write this letter to myself wrote to me 20 years ago]. Your reaching will prompt him to reach as well.
I’m sorry you’ve had so many trials and tribulations so far, without much seeming reward. But I promise you, from deep within the web of inner knowing and galactic connected energy, the rewards have always been there. The hardships have created you, beautiful, radiant, wise you. The web of collective consciousness is breathing and evolving with you. We’re all doing this together. Together, we will work to move society away from domination and towards partnerships. Your strength and intention along this path matter. Every little thought and action matters. Keep going. Keep taking time for stillness, presence, connection of depth and courage, play…stay open to the blessings that are yet to come.
Amends? How did my dismissive attachment cause you harm? I dismissed your need for softness and tenderness. I often put you in harm’s way. Pushed you to inhumane edges. The sex, the drugs, the meaningless flings…not being able to say no. Not nurturing your full worth all of the time. You did great with the tools you had, though. You chose great partners…
[Reflection on past partners].
[Grief around specific losses and feelings of betrayal].
Do you remember that moment, when you were 26, you and he, jumping up and down on his queen mattress, breathless but still singing “Electric Feel” at the top of your lungs? “You’re fun,” he said, gazing into your eyes…into the abyss of childlike freedom. He was fun. We were fun.
This year, the medicine showed you that you were ever only seeking a playmate. Your inner child and his, reaching. “Come play with me!” But also, “come see the ways I’m hurting.” The ones who want to play the most often have the deepest wounds. You couldn’t stay there, jumping and singing, free. And he couldn’t go with you where you were going. No, I don’t exactly know why. It’s never seemed fair.
Tell me where it hurts. “I can’t, Ali. I just can’t.”
And still you’ve been affirmed. You’re fun. You light up rooms and dance parties and text threads and workplaces. You are so many people’s safe space. You are kind, discerning, clever, playful, witty, well-read, hot, present. Able to play with intellectual energies and sexual energies alike. Able to dedicate your attention to learning and trying new things. Magnetic. Charismatic. A leader.
Protect your sacred energy. Protect, guard, safeguard, honor. Honor your sacred nature and worth. Not everyone gets access to you. When you have felt desperate, you have run to those who could not, would not see you. Who could dismiss you. Disgard you. There’s a wound there but maybe we each chose our current incarnations. Maybe you chose this exact wound.
Remember that recurring childhood dream, my love? Where you were wrapped up as a Christmas present under a tree. But they couldn’t see you. They kept wondering where you were, and you were worried they would never find you. “I’m right here!” And now your work is to see yourself as the gift, my beloved. No one is coming to do it for you.
Tend to your gifts and then turn to see the gifts all around us in each other. I’m sorry it had to hurt so badly but look at how you’ve done it! Look how you walked through the fire and felt it all. You’ve made it!
I love you so much, dear girl and radiant woman.
Yours forever and unconditionally,
Alison 🤍
If you decide to write yourself a long love letter, please let me know how it feels! Be generous.
The Dates
September saw dates with four men, each with wonderful qualities—a high point in this journey to be sure. In keeping with my theme this month, I’ll write them each a love letter that includes:
What I admired about them
How I felt with them and
What qualities in me they brought out in me
Sending each one off with a wish for their healing journey because one of my unique gifts is seeing the places where people are hurting and where people are lying to themselves
“No operating on wounds” is a new intention to add to my list, care of friend LH (see my last blog), but this is a tough one for me! Can I notice and name the wound without operating on it?? Let’s see.
Reminder: every date in my blog is called “John” but in their home country’s language. The number is the number in which they’ve appeared in my blog.
Johann 36 | German | Late 30s | Hinge
Johann 36 picked a gorgeous date location in Innsbruck: a rooftop bar, along with the perfect hour to watch the sunset. I appreciated that he so firmly set up the date, handling the time and place. Men—we love it when you set the time and place! And if there’s another thing ladies love, it’s rooftop bars at sunset!
Motel One Innsbruck bar specializes in Gin Tonics, a drink I love, which was an added bonus. They handed us a whole binder of gins. Our server recommended a local gin—trying local spirits is a fun part of traveling.
Here is my love letter to Johann 36:
Dear Johann 36,
You impressed me with great communication and setting up a fun date. I admired that you were well-read and could talk about a lot of interesting ideas. You were pretty cute! You sent me a really nice follow-up text the next morning, and the timing of that was just right—you didn’t leave me guessing. That’s so wonderful for reducing anxiety. Your dating etiquette is 10/10.
I felt comfortable with you, and the parts of me that could come out were intellectual, playful, and curious.
But listen, babe. If three of your past girlfriends shared with you that they worried that you lacked empathy…don’t you think it’s time to get a little help for that? That’s like the #1 thing the ladies want! I could see that there was this part of you who was curious what it could feel like to get some help, when I mentioned it in person, then the part of you that shut out the vulnerable part—clamped down on the softer part. I know that vulnerability can feel scary when we’re not used to it, but I promise, healing our childhood wounds feels liberating once we get started. You mentioned some hard things. We may have normalized saying “it wasn’t so bad” in our societies, but I promise, it was bad, and you were hurt. You owe it to your inner child to acknowledge that there were some things that hurt.
There is a whole world waiting for everyone who is curious, full of a wide range of emotions, and it’s a beautiful world, rich and colorful. I hope you take the leap.
With love, Alison
Johann 37 | Italian/Tirolian (Austrian-German speaking) | Mid 30s | Bumble
Johann 37 is technically from Italy, but from a German-speaking part, so he gets the German version of “John”. Our first date was accidentally challenging because we popped into a cute wine bar in a sort of cave room, and there was no Wifi, and his English was not 100% and I speak about 2 words in German.
We shared that neither of us drank alcohol very often, so we were both pretty sloshed off of one glass of wine. I ordered Austrian wine, naturally. We seemed to hit it off quite well, regardless of the language barrier, maybe with the help of the wine. I’m not sure how we pulled it off, but vibes were vibing. Chemistry is a magical, elusive force that transcends language, and we had it.
We left the cozy wine cave a little tipsy and walked around Innsbruck along the river, which is called the Inn River and is a tributary of the Danube. "Innsbruck” translates to “Bridge over the Inn”. It’s a very romantic town in which to date! The sparkling turquoise water flows through the middle and there are pathways and lots of green spaces, and historic buildings.
Johann 37 was very tall, and when we had chatted on Bumble, I saw the centimeters but hadn’t taken time to convert it to the imperial system, so I actually wasn’t sure. While standing overlooking the beautiful river running through town, I told him I needed to do the conversion. I gasped when I saw that in imperial measurement, he was 6’8”. “Oh my god, you are so tall,” I said to him, laughing. “I saw the centimeters, but I didn’t realize!” “You’re the only date who has ever laughed at my height,” he said. But he was laughing with me and my reaction. “There are only about 3 stores I can buy clothing from,” he shared.
He asked if he could kiss me, and I wanted that. I had to stand on a curb to reach, which, at 5’10”, was a completely new life experience for me. It was a slow and thoughtful kiss. He pulled me in close and gave me a head and back massage that was so tender, I started crying into his soft wool sweater. Just the presence, attention, and care…I could relax into him. It felt so nice.
Our second date was a bit unfortunate. I picked a dinner spot, and after we sat down, he watched 1/2 his work colleagues come in and sit down on the other side of the restaurant. He shared with me that this made him feel anxious, and the conversation, although aided this time by our good app friend Google Translate, was more stilted. Neither of us ordered alcohol as it was a “school night”. I ordered a Coke Zero and was informed by our server that they only had the German brand Fritz Kola. Later, when the server came back to ask how I liked it, I said jokingly, “It’s good, but it doesn’t taste as much like cocaine as regular Coca Cola.” This…uhh…didn’t quite land. I got raised eyebrows from both the server and my date. This date, the vibes were decidedly not vibing. It felt awkward and mismatched.
As we exited the burger place out into the crisp Autumn Innsbruck air, our date did not have the same soft and warm feeling as the first one. I felt compassionate for his anxieties. Due to the language barrier, it didn’t feel as though we were really getting to know each other, and due to his high anxiety on this second date, I wasn’t sure this was a barrier we could overcome through diligence, patience, and sheer lust.
Dear Johann 37,
You grabbed my heart from the beginning when you used a feeling word. You said, “I’m feeling nervous because we’re on a date, and that makes my English worse.” Swoon! I’m so sorry I was in your place without your language, and I so appreciate the effort you made to speak my language with me. I admired your presence, your passion for your work, your impressive hobbies, and your love for your family.
You had such a kind, sweet, and gentle disposition. Just the presence, attention, and care…I felt relaxed with you. The version of me that came out with you was softer than with most men I date. I still have some regrets about ending things and I’m curious if we could have spent more time together without as much anxiety, if we could have gotten to know each other better. In the back of my mind I felt worried that the version of me who jokes about past drug use wasn’t a good match for you—you seemed wholesome.
My healing wish for you is that you find some help for your anxiety, because it did seem to shut you down quite a bit, which was tough for me. You deserve a great love. Often, before the love we deserve can find us, we have to work on self-regulation so we don’t burden others with the task. I think on the other side of healing this anxiety, you will find beautiful things.
With love, Alison
Ivan 32 | Bulgarian | Early 30s | Bumble
At the start of the month, Ivan 32, who I introduced in Part 7, initiated a spicy week of back-and-forth with the ol’ “About to take a shower, wish you were here” postcard of a text message. I’m going to talk about sexting now, mostly an intellectual exploration of the topic with a tiny bit of graphic detail—skip if you wanna (or if we’re related).
Sexting
So, I’m not much of a sexter. I’ve done it. Never with someone I’ve never met IRL. “I don’t really get the point of it,” I shared with my friend GA, “It’s empty calories. The sugary snack food of the romance world.” But I wanted to try it, for the challenge of trying something new and uncomfortable. So, I joined Ivan 32 in his imaginary shower. This turned into a week-long back and forth with an interesting cadence: I would wake up to spicy text messages that moved the plot forward and would decide that I needed a lot of coffee before I could even consider responding. I would read them again around noon, but then needed to get ready for my work day full of meetings, which would typically end around 10 or 11 pm. Then I would make myself sit with the messages—really imagining them and letting myself feel the sense of arousal in my whole body—kind of an embodied mindfulness exercise. Then I would write out my response with a paper and pen (not unlike my love letter to myself), type it into my notes app, then copy/paste as a response. I knew it was a little strange not to be able to send something rapid fire right back, but I took it more as a poetic and imaginative exercise. So then I’d respond finally around 12 am and go to bed, waking up to his response in the morning. Rinse and repeat.
Throughout the week, I felt a little anxious about how to sext. “It’s a choose your own adventure but like, with another person,” I told my friends. “How am I moving the plot forward??” One evening I asked my friend KK (male) over facetime for some help. “Where are you at now in the story?” “Umm…I think he has put two fingers inside me…?” KK responded, without missing a beat, “Should you go for a third finger?” Me: “Is now the time to try fisting? Why not the whole fist?” We errupted in laughter.
Way back in 2008 I’d hosted a Christmas party for all of my old high school friends (we graduated in 2003) and had one of those gift exchanges in which you can steal an open gift from someone who went before you. The gifts were great that year and included the ingredients for White Trash Mimosas: Miller High Life and orange juice…and…a fist sex toy. I’ll never forget the laughter as we passed this toy around and my friends posed with it. One image of my friend TT sniffing it suggestively while CO put it in the sleeve of his sweatshirt as though it were his own hand.
It was easy to turn sexting into childish high school humor with my friends, intellectualizing it. But the thing about sexting and real sex is that in order to sustain its magic, is that you must not, under any circumstances, kill the vibe. Some of the biggest relationship fights I had with my mid-30s boyfriend were about my propensity to kill the vibe. I did this because I didn’t know how to say what was really on my mind, so I deflected by joking or laughing, ruining the sanctity needed for an intimate connection.
“Why are you sexting with a stranger if it makes you anxious??” my friend GA (male) implored. “I just want to try it! It’s a challenge. And it does make me feel turned on—not just sexually but sort of…alive! In general.”
I did feel friendlier…happier…more excited about lots of things…but I was mindful: this had a drug-like feeling, tasting more like cocaine than original Coca-Cola. “This is not a sustainable high,” I kept thinking, “There will be a come-down.”
I was curious about some moral implications around sexting. “If you’ve created an imaginary scenario and it lives in the ether, the non-physical, non-actual realm, does it matter if you do things you would normally do in the physical, actual realm?” I polled my friends. They all said some version of, “We don’t think it matters. That’s one of the fun parts of sexting because you can do imaginary things you might not do in real life.”
But I disagreed. Let’s say with rough or verging-on-violent sex…in real life, I’d have to have an awful lot of trust built up with someone to play with these types of edges…it seemed irresponsible to pretend I’d be okay with something imaginarily that didn’t match my values in real life. I’ve spent most of my professional career in violence prevention, and sexual dominance is one way that men subjugate women. I’d grown much more to prefer calm, tender, and present sex, influenced by readings such as Slow Sex: A Polynesian Pillow Book and the Taoist guide The Multi-Orgasmic Couple, among others (my sexual healing reading list needs to be its own blog—I’ll work on it!). It seems like violence, even imaginarily, would perpetuate more violence. And on the other hand, many consenting couples enjoy pushing edges through BDSM practices, which stands for bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, and masochism.
I’d first started considering the moral ethics of imaginary sexual scenarios when I read the book Kafka on the Shore by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It’s been ages since I read it so I hope I’m remembering it right but one of the main characters, a young man, has a sexual encounter with a young woman, and he asks her permission if he can think about her when he masturbates. At the time, I’d never considered that we might want to ask permission! “But how would they even know??” Our thoughts are private. And not real. But later, when I read The Tibetan Karma of Dreams and Sleep about lucid dreaming, I learned and experienced through the practices that the line between imaginary life and waking life is blurrier than I had previously thought. “This is a dream,” author Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche suggests saying throughout the day during waking life. This primes us to say it when asleep, allowing us to become lucid. In the classic, best-selling spiritual book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, he also refers to waking life as a dream, a collective one. We’ve all made agreements on what the dream is and how to engage with the dream. So it seemed to me, if the physical space and the dreaming space and the imaginary space were all versions of reality, that imaginary thoughts should all count for something.
But here I go killing the vibe again by intellectualizing…
At the end of this high-inducing week, he said, “wanna talk on the phone?” I could sense that things were heading that way.
Something serious
We talked on the phone for 4 hours, into the early hours of the morning. The conversation was electric, fueled by our week of choosing the sextiest adventure. The conversation was easy and fun, but also witty and challenging. Ivan 32 asked great questions and then really listened to my answers. That felt refreshing and rare. Felt nice.
He wanted to meet up in real life.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m looking for something serious.”
“So am I.”
But this didn’t feel “serious” to me. Why? Why is opening with sexting a red flag?
I thought about it for a long time, and it comes down to dopamine-fueled infatuation vs slow love, fueled by a combination of serotonin, vasopressin, and oxytocin.
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for pleasure seeking. It’s all about desire. In a cruel twist, dopamine ensures that wanting something gives us more of a high than actually getting it. One reason I delayed my sexting responses is because I knew that I could increase the high by increasing the wanting and slowing down the getting.
The red flag is that early on, if someone initiates something more dopamine-fueled than that which would create long-term bonding (solving challenges together, doing hobbies together, listening/sharing stuff that doesn’t make you super high, etc), I would imagine that they’re a person who will be inclined toward more reward-seeking behaviors rather than long-term bonding behaviors, the stuff of addiction.
“But what even is addiction, when we get down to it?” I thought. I went back to university in 2018 to get a master’s degree in public health so I could pursue my dream to explain trauma science. I landed my dream job in 2019 doing just that. Explaining addition was often a big part of explaining trauma science, but even having been doing this work for the past six years, I realized I needed a better understanding of what’s going on in the brain.
Neuroscience can be tough to simplify. There are so many areas of the brain that do things simultaneously—so many interacting parts. Models that simplify things are useful but run the risk of oversimplifying, always.
Allow me to oversimplify. I think it can be useful.
Dopamine wants, wants, wants. It wants to want more than it wants to have.
But it does this for every brain. All brains have the same dopamine that wants to want.
So what makes an addict an addict? What makes us use a substance that increases dopamine, such as cocaine, and then keep using it? What’s happening for a normal brain that’s not happening for an addict's brain?
I thought of a past boyfriend I had who struggled with substance addiction. I would say about him, in life and drugs: he has no brakes! His life was a fast race car, and sometimes he could stay on the track, but mostly he would constantly drive his dopamine addiction right off a cliff with zero ability to stop.
No brakes is part of the addict part. We’re all wanting to want, but normal brains have brakes. The brakes come in and go, “I should stop. I’m stopping.”
So, what are the brakes?
The brakes are the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that’s distinctly human and responsible for rational decision-making.
And why don’t addicts have working brakes?
This is due to something called “amygdala hijack”. And it’s not off/on. Different types, levels, and frequencies of trauma impact the brain differently, namely, they create situations in which the fear part of the brain brings the past into the present to protect itself, going into a fight or flight response.
So, again, oversimplification, but…when the amygdala is bringing past scary experiences into the present, it’s to keep us alive. “That past thing sure was scary, so let’s make sure we remember it so we don’t almost die ever again.” When this happens, we lose access to the rational part of the brain—the cortex (this word means “bark” as in tree bark—the outer layer). The rational brain is the brakes. The rational brain says, “You know what, nah, I need to work at 9 am tomorrow so I’m not going to have a second drink,” or “this activity doesn’t really align with my identity or values, so I won’t do it agai,n” or “I have other bigger goals that require my focus and attention, so I’ll prioritize those.”
Typically, when we do self-soothing behaviors and habits, we’re trying to soothe the fear-brain—quiet it down. And for addicts, due to having more trauma and stress as a child and fewer examples of healthy soothing from caregivers, there are a lot more fires to put out—a lot more triggering moments that need soothing. And a lot less practice at slowing down and letting the rational brain come back online before making decisions.
Another reason I slowed the sexting exchange way, way down, making it last all week, was that I took deliberate time to check in with myself and make sure it wasn’t an automatic addictive reaction—the proverbial lab rat pressing the lever for more cocaine water—and that I was doing it, yes to feel high, but also to explore something new and interesting.
But when it comes to creating “something serious", ie a long-term healthy relationship, these can’t be built on dopamine-stimulating activities alone. I found a great blog that explains the neuroscience of falling in and sustaining love but what these blogs often miss is just how altered a lot of brains are due to chronic levels of high childhood stress, which is the norm in so many households, mainly from how we’ve designed patriarchal societies that are dominating (like some sexting scenarios, hmm?), punitive, and isolating.
If you really want to nerd out, I found a great paper on The Oxytocin–Vasopressin Pathway in the Context of Love and Fear that helps explain some of the nuances of nature and nurture’s variances on how we fall in love. “Adding to the complexity of this pathway is the fact that oxytocin and vasopressin receptors are variable, across species, individuals, and brain region, and these receptors are capable of being epigenetically tuned. This variation may help to explain experience-related individual and sex differences in behaviors that are regulated by these peptides, including the capacity to form social attachments and the emotional consequences of these attachments.”
There are a lot of systems and pathways that get disrupted through early childhood stress, resulting in insecure attachment in adult romantic relationships. Ultimately, what I’m trying to say is that sexting, being drug-like in nature, is inherently short-term and not “serious,” as in, it doesn’t work to build a long-term connection. Having been a dopamine addict and having dated dopamine addicts, I’m exceptionally vigilant now. No more addicts, please!
So wait, did we really “date,” Ivan 32 and I? We talked again by FaceTime the following night for several hours, joking that it was our second date. Since travel dating is challenging as I hop from place to place, I’ll count the phone and FaceTime connections as dates. But we did not meet in real life.
The love letter:
Dear Ivan 32,
Thank you for your intensity. You made me feel seen in ways not many others have. Your questions challenged me. You pushed back against my surface-level answers. I so rarely experience that! So, despite the drug-like quality of our encounter, there was a lot of depth. I felt seen, heard, and at times, deeply known. Thank you for those gifts. Felt good. The parts of me that could come out were edgier, sexier, and more playful. More direct. More excited. More alive. Firstly, I admire your sexting competence—that’s an area I hadn’t explored, but you seemed quite comfortable. I admire your confidence, your directness, and how you could hold the space without making it awkward. Thank you for sharing some of your vulnerable personal story with me as well.
If we choose our incarnations each lifetime, your soul signed you up for some interesting challenges in this one. How do we best use our gifts? It’s obvious that you were destined for great things, but somehow I think we have to go after such destinies lightly. The dark nights of the soul are part of the path to humility and self-discovery. My healing wish for you is to lean into what you need to shed to move forward, even better than before.
In many ways, you feel like a kindred spirit. I’m not sure we’ll ever be “serious,” but I sincerely hope we’ll always be friends. Our souls seemed to recognize each other. I’ll be cheering you on always, regardless of how much we stay in touch.
With love, Alison
One weekend, my girlfriend EM came to visit, and we went to the Dolomites in Italy. See all those photos and a trip summary here. We swapped dating stories and preferences in men, realizing we have very different tastes. “I just want a medium ugly man with good lore,” I told her, only half joking. [Lore is the common parlance for “trauma” or “a good backstory” these days]. Soon, she was onto my wild taste and was poking fun at me. We boarded a gondola to ride up to the top of a Dolomite mountain ridge, and the employee who was in charge of closing the doors and making the little floating car ride up the cables got in the car to push the button. This was a particularly not-so-savory mountain man with wild hair—think Lana del Rey’s new alligator-wrangling blue collar bayou husband, but scragglier and with missing teeth. He looked 25 going on 50 and was…possibly still drunk from the night before. “You think that guy is hot, don’t you?” she side-eyed me. I clamped my lips together, curling them shut. I looked down at the floor. She got me. I nodded before a laugh escaped containment. “Yes, damnit!” She shook her head at me.
Johann 38 | German | Mid 40s | In the Wild
My Innsbruck time, unfortunately, had an endpoint, although I felt I wanted to stay forever. I needed to figure out how I was spending October. I happen to have a surprising number of friends who live in Austria, many of whom reached out when I was here in 2023, inviting me for a visit. I spent an evening messaging all six of them. One was an old lover from way back in 2008. I’d met him in, of all places, my own cute little hometown of San Luis Obispo, California. I’d just gotten out of the aforementioned long relationship with the beloved ex-partner who encouraged me to write a love letter to myself (the inspiration for this blog) that summer when I was out at a bar with some friends in my hometown. I saw Johann 38 standing somewhat apart from the friends he was with, so I approached him to harass him about his loner status (my attempt at flirting). It worked, I think. A few months later, he took me on a night hike. At the time, I remember being impressed with his hiking preparedness. I hadn’t moved to Europe yet, which I would do a year later. I’d only ever been to the UK and Peru, so I was unfamiliar with German hikers’ game. He had a headlamp for me and an extra jacket, if I remember correctly. He visited me in Berkeley, where I was starting my final year, and we had someone take a photo of us at the top of the Campanile, the large clock tower in the middle of campus. The photo is sweet but represents only the quickest of flings—our whole affair lasted from June to September of that year.
Though we’d kept in touch a bit here and there over the years, I wasn’t exactly sure what he was up to, but thought he lived near Innsbruck. Could be nice to catch up. He got back to me that he’d taken a job in Germany and no longer lived in the area. Oh well! But then he messaged and suggested coming down to Innsbruck to visit for a weekend. I had to think about it. Was that a little bit of pressure with the travel distance? What were the romantic implications? This wouldn’t be a mere catch-up chat. What would it be like to see someone after 17 years?? Would we still seem the same to each other? In what ways had we changed? After thinking it over, I said, sure, come on down!
We shared year-by-year life summaries over coffee under the Golden Roof, a gleaming section of a building in the historic quaint, and tourist-filled part of Innsbruck. He had done a deep dive on our communication over the years on Facebook Messenger and email. Digital footprints, man. Everything is saved now! “There was a lot of being busy in our messages. One person would say, ‘I’ve been so busy,’ then later the other would say it.” Lol, so we had kept in touch but at arm’s length? Nothing says, “I’m not going to tell you the really good stuff,” more than, “I’ve been busy!”
What I had remembered about our brief romantic encounter before was that I felt very comfortable around him—no nervous butterflies. This time was hardly different, but my stomach did a little flip when we first saw each other again at the train station. This is someone I’ve always been very attracted to, and I was curious to know if that would change with time—apparently not! I felt a little stunned by how handsome he looked, which is how I’d felt about him before.
The weekend was really nice. A slow breakfast. A mountain excursion. Dinner at a place with Austrian traditional food. At dinner the first night, I reached across the table to grasp his hand, and then we never really stopped holding them (read about my hand-holding obsession in this piece).
Saturday morning, before going up the mountain, I showed him the Wordle game I play every morning as we sat enjoying coffee and açaí bowls at a cute cafe. He followed along, taking in the rules and the letters I had available. “Fritz!” he guessed. “What? No, that’s not a word in English,” I shot back. I guessed something else that was most definitely even more not a word in English, losing a row, only to have to plug in his original guess and find that it was correct. Fritz Kola, I realized, was haunting me. I looked down and saw that the cafe’s glasswear was Fritz Kola branded. I was drinking out of a water glass with the Wordle word on it. To be fair, I think it still barely counts as a word in English. Here’s the definition:
Fritz • /frɪts/ •noun • dated • informal
a German, especially a soldier in the First World War (often used as a nickname).
on the fritz
phrase of fritz
informal•North American English
(of a machine or device) not working properly.
On top of the mountains, we flagged down a stranger and asked her to snap a photo so we could recreate the photo from the clock tower from 17 years prior. Later, over dinner, I lined them up side-by-side. We were still the same people at heart. I only knew how much I’d grown and changed in nearly two decades—I couldn’t speak for him. And yet, isn’t it funny how a person’s essence remains essentially the same? One of the mysteries of the universe. How could we still feel a kinship and attraction to each other despite speaking only a handful of times? What was it we were drawing on—seeing and feeling about the other? Something seemingly fundamental.
He departed very early in the morning after night two—a quick day and some change of a visit—and I was left savoring the feeling of our time together. There were some rational-brained sticking points, sure, but the overall feeling was safety, comfort, and just the right amount of chemistry and excitement. Ease, playfulness.
The vibes were kinda just perfect, so naturally, when we checked in about it later over the phone, he said he wasn’t ready for anything serious. 🙃
I let myself have a really good cry, texted the update to my girlfriends who were diligently checking in, and set my sights on my next destination: Albania. This round, we’re not wallowing in disappointment. We’re fully feeling our feelings, we’re proud of ourselves for trying and bringing our whole, authentic heart, and then we’re moving on.
Sometimes we’re also watching TikToks of people dancing through difficult moments.
Dear Johann 38,
What an enchanting dream of a time we had together, up among the clouds, even! I felt so incredibly safe with you—safe to just be, safe to joke and laugh, safe to share my whole self…safe to scramble up a steep mountain trail in high winds.
There was this moment when I told you that I was glucose-depleted and my mood was going to reach hanger levels soon, and you didn’t miss a beat. “Let’s get something sweet to restore and then figure out dinner.” I think I’ve only ever had partners where I had to do the caregiving and planning, packing extra granola bars in my purse to prevent meltdowns. I could follow your lead. You cared about me. Or maybe you just didn’t want to be around me when grumpy, which okay, I get it. But it felt like care.
When we met 17 years ago, you had started a new dream. I admire how you pursued that dream with your whole heart, building a career on an uncertain path. I admire your careful hiking preparation with gloves, hats, and first-aid kits. I so admired all of your thoughtful questions, most especially when you asked how you could better support women and women’s rights and how I came to be a social-justice warrior. Thank you for seeing how much I’ve worked on my personal growth in the years since we’ve seen each other. I felt fully valued and appreciated. This journey I’m on can feel lonely. Thank you for being someone to lean against for a moment, though brief.
When we last talked, you said you weren’t sure where you wanted to live. Maybe here, maybe there, maybe halfway around the world. Of course, I can relate to that feeling! Look at my life. But I implore you to let this be an era of staying. Healing happens in the staying. I told you I’ve been writing a book about my own healing journey. When it’s done and you read it, you’ll see the times I had to tell myself, “Stay. Just stay,” so I could finally address what I’d been running from: only my own feelings of grief. Except I didn’t know that until I stayed and sat with them.
In 2013, someone asked me what I was running from for the first time. I had no clue. But the question felt like a punch in the stomach. Later, I would learn about fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses, and this chronic flight response of mine. Something would trigger my buried feelings of grief, and I would need to leave the job, leave the partner, leave the city (leave the country…). But, as the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. My grief came with me from California, to Amsterdam, to New York City, to Austin…finally, I said to myself, “Just stay.” It was the start of a new life. Weekly therapy, support groups, healing books, webinars, having the conversations that would always seem to get stuck in my throat…it takes a lot of work to be happy! And we need so much support from others. I shared in this blog a line of poetry that struck me in that healing era: “Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.”
Somehow, I’m sure we’ll continue the conversations.
With love, Alison
