TRAVEL|TAKING OFF
I Swiped Right in Serbia — My Wildest Travel Story
It’s like Tinder Swindler except nobody had money to lose, only their kidneys
I don’t trust technology and I don’t trust strangers.
I wouldn’t open a surprise PDF attachment (um, Pretty Dangerous File?), let alone fly halfway around the world to meet somebody I never saw in real life before.
And yet, that’s what I did.
(I mean flying halfway around the world to meet my Tinder boyfriend — not the PDF thing, God forbid.)
But wait, let’s rewind, because the story starts waaaay before that and it’s not even the wildest part:
It was fall 2014 and I had come to Serbia to study abroad. Tinder was fairly new at the time; back then it wasn’t so shamelessly about hooking up. But, it did seem sketch.
I don’t remember how I found out about the app, but for some reason my friends and I decided to make an account “together.” You know, just to see what the big deal was and, more importantly, to take a peek at who was out there.
The account had my name on it, but no photos of me — no photos of any of us. Being bored and probably drunk, we thought it was funny to put pictures of anything but our faces (one friend’s pinky finger, the other one’s love handle, then that chair in the corner…). We thought we were so, so clever. No one would ever swipe right; we could see them without being seen. The perfect crime.
I don’t know what this says about Serbian guys, but no small number of them swiped right. Was it the chair that caught their interest? Or the chunk of flesh my skinny friend pinched above her waistband while I took a photo of it with my iPad? I’ll never know. A few said they found our profile “mysterious” and that’s what drew them in (ladies, take note!).
As you can see, the description clearly said, “Don’t talk to me.” So the ones who messaged paid dearly for it. We thought it would be funny to send one of them to the city fortress in the middle of the night, where we would be “waiting” to meet him by the life-sized dinosaur statues.
Oh, how we cackled into our wine, knowing he would text us again any minute to say he was there by the Brontosaurus. (He deleted us afterward, but somehow popped up again in the suggestions and when we swiped right on him a second time he also swiped right back! Poor thing.)
And then there was another guy we toyed with, a total douchebag who was standing at a Metallica concert in his profile picture with a smug grin and green lasers shooting out behind his head. He had “frat boy” written all over.
I was determined to really mess with him, even in the wee hours of the night when it was just me in my bed and my friends weren’t there to egg me on. Every come-on he had, I had a make-believe counter:
You want to take me out for ćevapi? Too bad I’m allergic to meat. You want me to write you a romantic poem? Then I’ll describe my undulating rolls of fat as pronounced as the ćevapi you tried to woo me with.
But no matter what batshit replies I sent him, he just couldn’t take a hint. And thank God he couldn’t, because that man would one day be… my husband.
I dodged every attempt to meet him in real life, thinking, Haha, I’ll be gone in a month and forget all about this. When my semester abroad ended and I flew back to the States, he sent me one last text on December 25th: “Merry Christmas!”
For some reason that warmed my heart a little, but soon I stopped using Tinder altogether. I even uninstalled the app because, tech-savvy as I am, I thought that was the same as deleting my account. (It’s not.)
Little did I know that Mr. Green Laser Douchebag almost deleted me, too. Over the next few months, he would miss our nonsensical back-and-forth but could see I was thousands of miles away, inactive. Later he told me how he held his thumb over our chat in the inbox, preparing to delete it — to delete me — but couldn’t bring himself to do it… just in case.
Long story short, I went through a bit of a tough time back at college. I was in some weird sort of toxic relationship with my ex and had nowhere to turn in that small, hick town. Eventually, for God knows what reason, I re-downloaded Tinder. All my old IMs were still sitting there. Mr. Green Laser was still sitting there. Only, he had a new profile picture: the green lasers on his head were gone. Naturally, I texted him out of the blue:
Somehow one thing led to another. Soon we were texting on WhatsApp and Facebook. Our conversations gradually got more serious and I found out he was struggling with depression, too. He opened up about all kinds of things he had gone through, not least of which were war and abject poverty. Against all odds, he was one of the sweetest and most sincere people I had met.
In about six months, it turned into a real relationship. We would Skype each other every day, despite the time difference, even if it meant all we could do was sleep side by side, my little iPad propped up next to my pillow. Sometimes he would read really weird fan fiction to me because we had run out of things to say but couldn’t stop talking.
When spring break of my senior year rolled around, it was time for a leap of faith: I booked a budget flight back to Serbia for two weeks. We would finally meet in person.
But, remember:
I don’t trust technology and I don’t trust strangers.
It was then, leading up to my flight, that I realized, Holy shit I’m flying halfway around the world ALONE to meet a stranger. He’s 100% without a doubt absolutely positively a serial killer — or at the very least, an organ trafficker. I mean, hello, he’s SERBIAN. This is how dumb white American girls DIE!
So we struck a deal: One of his lifelong Internet friends would send me an email vouching for him, and my college friends would do the same in return. This way, we both had witnesses to our character and somebody would know if either of us killed each other. SOLID PLAN.
He promised my friends he was a good guy and would only take one kidney at the most. (heh heh, is Serbian humor!)
Anyway, when I came back to Serbia, he was waiting with a rose at the airport. If he was going to kill me, at least he would be the first boy to bring me a flower.
We spent two weeks together, and I’m pleased to report that he never tried to take my kidneys, not even once. In fact, it was one of those crazy things that just felt right. Walking the streets of Belgrade with him, I would think to myself, This is it, this is where I should be. Never had I thought that way in America.
By then I had already applied for the Fulbright Award to come back long-term; but, being one of the country’s most prestigious awards, it was a long shot. Even slimmer were his chances of getting a visa to the U.S. We didn’t know if or when we would actually be together for real.
For whatever reason, that never cast any serious doubt over our relationship. We just kept going. We couldn’t go a single day without talking.
Eventually, I did get the award and moved to Serbia for good, or shall we say for now, and that was the beginning of many other wild travels.
Six years later and here we are, married. He proposed to me at the airport where we saw each other for the very first time. To think: It all began with me trolling some random jerk online, and in the end the cosmic joke was on me.
Our goal is to someday move overseas so I can be with family, but the U.S. immigration process will take years. (Uncle Sam, are you reading this? I hope so, so you can see that our story is true!)
Then it will be my turn to show him where I come from and his turn to worry about those kidneys.
Thank you to KL Simmons and Warren Patterson for organizing the “Wildest Travel Story” challenge! I never thought of this as a wild travel story, or even a story to share, until now.
It’s been fun reading everyone’s submissions and I’d like to give a shout-out to one in particular that made me laugh, by Crystal A. Walker: I Was Almost T-Boned by a Fighter Jet | Globetrotters
