Three Trips, Three Steps Closer to a Breakup

Engaging. Thoughtful. Closure.

Favorite line among many: "It was like sleeping in the heart of a jogging giant."
Beautifully written.

So well written. I can place myself precisely in each of the situations the author finds herself. Well done!

this is an amazing piece, perfectly balancing humor and poignance. thank you so much for sharing

Clever, quite writerly.

I adored this. Thank you, Sloane. So relatable and sad but a healthy outlook. And FUNNY. Maybe I will think twice about the couples I idealize on island beaches from now on.

This made me spit my coffee out and then the last paragraph was a gut punch. Great piece!

I am a big Sloane Crosley fan and loved seeing her in this section. I only with this had been longer, as she covered three cities and not one. But as someone who has recently been through a divorce after 10 blissful years of marriage -- learning they were not as blissful as I thought! -- I found such comfort in Ms. Crosley's humor and insight about travel. The irony is that the vacation my ex and I took to Aruba where we he brought up the conversation that turned into the Big D conversation was also where we had our honeymoon. Brilliant article.

This and the Alexander Chee were such delights to wake up to. So heartfelt and evocative of the journeys we take to find love. And this one is refreshingly realistic because it so often takes many incidents to break a couple up and is not the dream AH-HA Oprah moment.

Shallow, narcissistic and self centered people have relationship issues. Who would have thought!

More than a little flaky....

All of these read as though they were typed on a tight deadline by Hannah Horvath.

So boring! I confess, after the nth mention of her Chuck Taylors I couldn't go on. This isn't about travel--it's about the author's unremarkable-to--anyone-who's-not-her-friend (though sad!!) romance.

It's as if you wrote this for yourself.

Travel distracts one from the negatives in a relationship.

Instead of discovering that the relationship isn’t working out while reading the piece it appeared to be doomed from the start. Why try so hard to make something work when the easy part is already done, you know it isn’t going to work? I guess the hard part is saying it out loud.

I loved this piece! Light yet insightful.

I am most definitely not enjoying this series. The pieces read like satire. The series needs more variety in social class and race of authors. I realize that many writers come from upper middle class white backgrounds but you need to consciously break out of that trap. NYT readers want their horizons expanded. And in this time of Trump, pieces with this privileged tone are especially unwelcome to many of us.

Fantastic essay. So true about the intricacies and secret places, both mental and tangible, of which only those in the relationship are aware.

This was so funny and beautiful. Like many readers, I have been in both situations, been both people, and it's never easy. But I loved how you articulated how destinations make things worse (or better in some cases, I'd like to point out!). My favorite of the section, tks.

Thank you Sloane. This touching story made me smile and feel wistful for those awkward "romantic" trips when I was younger. My love/travel memories seem extra vivid -- the sheer delights, and the sharp (but instructive) disappointments. As they say, hindsight is 20 - 20. This piece reminded me to cut myself some slack and laugh at the mistakes.

Can relate to this. Two decades ago my high school/college boyfriend and I went on our first real trip together to Greece and while it wasn't a complete disaster (we did see some nice things) it showed all the cracks in the relationship and we maybe lasted another half or year or so together after. There were crazy long silences during the trip, semi-embarrassments (a guy came around selling flowers at a restaurant and my then boyfriend shooed him away in the least romantic gesture ever). He got a cold, I got some sort of heat rash on my hands. Lots of other small instances that showed the distance between us. Years since we broke up we have mutual friends and still see each other occasionally, emails on birthdays, that kind of stuff. There is nothing in person when we see each other that is awkward or weird. But when I think of Greece and ever possibly visiting again I get an icky feeling, like a crime scene I don't want to revisit.

This was the weakest of the stories in this series; written as though unaware it was to be part of a travel issue. Isn't what it felt like to be in LA, SF or Miami while experiencing the increasing isolation/heartache the narrator did meant to be central to the essay? I learnt nothing about those citiies. Perhaps this essay would make sense somewhere else, but I imagine this was solicited by NYT. Placed in this issue, I agree with Arthurstone's comment that this comes across as little more than navel-gazing.

Please let this be the last "Love Issue" in Travel. Reading of interesting destinations which end up serving merely as backdrops to hipster romances is excruciating. Travel writing as navel gazing.

Sloane, I really enjoyed your story.
The last paragraph summary is beautiful in a very special way; some people and some places are meant to be forgotten. Be it friends, relationships, hometowns or university cities.

It takes guts to be able to acknowledge the bitter truth that your trips have uncovered; that you and Max were not meant for each other. Imagine having not boarded on that plane to go to Los Angeles or San Juan or Miami. Surely, the discontent would be there but had you not taken the trips, the elephant would still be in the room albeit hibernating.

Thanks for your wonderful story.