I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: long-term travel makes relationships hard.
Not impossible. But hard. When you’re the kind of person who’d rather be on a night bus to somewhere new than watching the same four walls close in around you, the pool of people who genuinely get that is smaller than most dating advice would have you believe. And if your faith is central to who you are on top of all that — not a weekend thing, but an actual lens through which you see the world — it gets smaller still.
I’ve met people on the road who I clicked with immediately. Sat in a guesthouse in Chiang Mai or a hostel bar in Tbilisi and had the kind of conversation that made me forget what time it was. That happens more when you’re travelling solo than at almost any other point in life, because you’re surrounded by people who also chose something difficult and interesting over the safe option. The shared context does a lot of the work.
The problem is what happens when you go looking for that at home, or on your phone, or through the platforms that are supposed to help you find it. Standard dating apps are built for a world where proximity is the main filter and a decent photo is the main currency. For someone who spent last year across four continents and doesn’t particularly care where the next person lives, that’s a pretty bad starting point.
This is something I’ve thought about more as I’ve gotten older and gotten clearer on what actually matters to me in another person. It’s not shared taste or compatible travel styles or even similar life goals, though all of those help. It’s values. The stuff underneath the surface that tells you how someone will behave when things get genuinely difficult. How they treat people who can’t do anything for them. What they’re not willing to compromise on, even when it would be easier to let it slide.
That’s the filter that actually matters. And it’s the one that most platforms don’t even try to surface.
It’s why I’ve seen more people mention SALT lately, particularly among travellers and expats who take their Christian faith seriously and are done pretending that’s a minor detail about themselves. It’s a Christian dating app built and run by a small Christian team, available in 50 countries and translated into 20 languages. That global reach matters for the obvious reason: if you’re not sure which city you’ll be in next year, a platform that operates across borders and connects people through shared belief rather than shared postcode is going to be a lot more useful than one that surfaces people within a five-mile radius. It’s built differently to mainstream apps too — values-based filtering, profile badges for personal beliefs, an intro message before matching rather than a reflex swipe, in-app video calling and voice notes for getting to know someone properly before you meet. Human moderation, selfie verification, fraud detection. Real infrastructure, not just an algorithm. Its success stories include couples who found each other across different continents. It’s been covered by the BBC, Vogue, and GQ. For Christians who’ve been around enough to know what they’re actually looking for and aren’t willing to pretend otherwise, it seems to get it right.
There’s a version of personal growth that’s only about you. The solo achievements, the challenges beaten, the places ticked. I’ve lived a lot of that and I don’t regret it.
But the more time I spend on the road, the more I think the real upgrade — the one that actually compounds over time — is finding someone who genuinely shares your vision of what a good life looks like. Not someone you have to convince. Not someone who tolerates what you care about. Someone who already gets it.
That’s harder to find than most people admit. It’s also more worth looking for than almost anything else on the list.
