One dress, 21 days. Could you do it?

As far as stressful situations go, it is said that travelling with a partner is up there with moving house and getting married.

So imagine travelling with someone you are only meeting in person for the first time.

Just for an added degree of difficulty, imagine doing this with absolutely no luggage. And I mean none. Just the clothes on your back and the passport in your pocket.

Do you think you could do it? Do you think you could put the very life you live on hold for someone that is essentially, a virtual stranger? Clara and Jeff thought they could. So they did:

“Jeff and I travelled to eight countries in 21 days without changing clothes. It sure beat meeting for coffee. In some ways I blame Jeff. The warning indicators were flashing red-alert red from the moment I saw the oversize Mexican mariachi bow tie in his OkCupid profile picture three months ago. This guy was trouble of the best variety.

On the surface, we appeared to be sure candidates for “World’s Most Unlikely Pair.” He’s a wildly energetic university professor who is always on the move. I’m a reclusive writer who spends hours identifying new constellations in the ceiling paint…

Never one to waste time, Jeff set an experimental trap weeks before he knew my real last name or whether I actually looked like the pictures in my OkCupid account. His third email was coy: “Do you have any ideas for travel experiments? I have a few things I dabble in, and I’m going to push one of these experiments to the nth limit in June.”

So “dabbling” as Jeff put it, meant buying two one way tickets bound for an international destination and that was pretty much it. He also liked to travel light.

As in, the clothes on his back and the hands in his pockets. There was no itinerary, no hotel room booked and certainly no capacity or intention to plan ahead.

So what would make a woman, a woman that supposedly had all of her faculties, decide to uproot her life and accompany this man, this man who could and would be considered, quite the eccentric, out into the virtual unknown.

Curiosity. Curiosity and the potential for love. Exactly one month and two weeks after meeting on line, she agreed to accompany Jeff on a luggage free, three week trip that started in Istanbul.

As Mark Twain so aptly put it, “There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”

Clara says:

After a few days of wearing the same dress I realised that my initial fears of dire uncleanliness were unfounded. Soap is a fairly universal concept. If I was dirty, I took a shower wherever we were staying…

We ended our journey after eight countries, 3,500 miles and 21 days in the same clothes. Our romantic relationship intact, Jeff and I boarded the Heathrow return flight as closer friends than ever (despite the questionable state of our undergarments).

Materially speaking I was as empty-handed as the day we started, but I actually carried a great deal back home across the Atlantic. Traveling with no luggage and no plans was much more than a minimalist lesson in living well with less.

I think what I love about this story is that it proves that you can find your ‘person’ on the Internet.

How else could this have happened? Would it have mattered if at the end of the three weeks they shook hands and said ‘thanks, it’s been real but I’m not entirely sure we’re compatible”? No. Because at least they still would have done SOMETHING. It’s hard to regret an experience like that.

I have a workmate that has just quit her job. A good job, an awesome job. One where she gets to interact with rock stars and the industry and one in which she finally gets to apply her hard earned Accounting degree to do so. She openly admits that she not only loves her job but that she will be so very sorry to leave the place. She has quit to move to Ireland. For a boy. I say a boy, but he’s essentially a man with both of them in their late twenties.

They have found that beautiful thing called love. Unfortunately they have also (to quote Rihanna) found it in a hopeless place. A place in which neither of them permanently live and as such, they’ve been enduring a ‘long distance’ relationship for a little while now.

She is about to move to an entirely different country despite not ever having lived with him before. I consider this both brave and if I’m honest, utterly frightening. But just like Clara and Jeff, maybe sometimes that’s what life needs, a leap into the unknown to wake yourself up.

Also, if you are wondering, Jeff and Clara are still together. Which goes to show that sometimes crazy starts can be brilliant preludes to beautiful relationships.

Have you even put your life on hold to chase love?