One Life One Encounter

How Travelling the World Didn’t Save My Marriage, But Changed Everything

When people hear that I spent nearly a year traveling the world, they usually say something like, “That must’ve been the adventure of a lifetime.”
And it was — in some ways.
But mostly, it was an escape.

At the time, I didn’t call it that. I told myself (and anyone who asked) that it was about exploration, curiosity, expanding my worldview. But underneath all of that was a quiet desperation — to get out, to start over, to breathe again. Our marriage had barely survived the year before; we were trying to repair something that had already cracked in places too deep to see.

We framed it as a shared dream, a romantic leap of faith. But for me, it was a way to outrun the ache I couldn’t name.

There was a sense of freedom in it — this feeling that we were doing something most people only dream about. Yet beneath the glossy surface was a year of frustration: tracking budgets and logistics, carrying the invisible weight of planning each leg of the trip because that’s what I had always done — served others at my own expense. I didn’t yet know that was a pattern. That not asking for help was another one.

It was a year of coming together and being pulled apart at the same time — two people changing rapidly, but not together. We didn’t have the deep conversations I craved. I didn’t know how to ask for them.

I felt disillusioned with life back home — with our excess, our waste, our constant wanting. I saw how people elsewhere lived with so much less and seemed happier for it. I felt awe at how vast the world was, and how small my own life had been.
Southern Europe, Turkey, Morocco, Vietnam, Indonesia — each country held its own kind of mirror.

But the moment that stays with me most didn’t happen on a mountaintop or a beach. It happened in a small Airbnb in Florence.

We’d been circling the same conversation for months, — and that night, it surfaced again: divorce. I remember begging him not to do this now, not while we were still in the middle of what was supposed to be our dream. I wasn’t ready to face the end.
It wasn’t even the idea of losing the marriage that terrified me — it was the idea that if we split here, in the most romantic city in the world, we wouldn’t finish what we’d started.

My priorities were skewed. I was looking for validation in the wrong places — posting every highlight reel on Instagram, soaking up the likes, convincing myself it meant something. I told myself we were fine.
We swept that conversation under the rug for two years, acting as if it had never happened.
That was what our marriage had become — a quiet avoidance of truth.

In the months that followed, I moved through the world with a kind of guardedness I didn’t yet recognize. I didn’t open myself to meeting new people the way I could have — too afraid, or maybe too comfortable with the companion I already had. I clung to what was familiar, to the illusion that he could be everything I needed.

But that was its own kind of lesson.
That one person — no matter how much they love you — can’t be everything. They can’t hold every version of you, meet every need, or fill every empty space. Expecting that of another is the surest way to lose yourself.

It took me years to understand that truth. I see it now — how desperately I wanted to be chosen, to feel seen, to be enough. And how, in chasing that, I forgot that I already was.

By the time we reached Indonesia, I understood something I hadn’t before: that the year wasn’t about escape. It was about awakening. About seeing myself — and us — with new eyes. The world had been my teacher in ways I didn’t expect.

And while the story of that marriage would eventually end, what began in its place was something far more enduring: the slow, steady return to myself.

That year changed me in ways I didn’t yet have language for. It cracked something open — a hunger to understand the world and my place inside it. I learned that freedom can be both exhilarating and lonely, that wonder and ache often travel together. That even when something ends — a marriage, a season, a version of yourself — it leaves behind the quiet promise of becoming.

Now, as I ready myself to set out again — this time alone, this time softer, more awake — I find myself thinking of that woman I once was, tracing her steps through Florence and Hanoi and the streets of Istanbul, trying to outrun her uncertainty. Maybe what she was really seeking wasn’t escape at all, but the first whisper of return.

Because this time, I’m not chasing anything. I’m simply answering the same call — to move, to listen, to meet myself again somewhere out there in the world.

-A