Do you have a library card and a passport? It is a simple question, yet it yields so much information. A library card suggests someone who is rooted in their community. It reveals someone who needed or wanted to borrow something tangible in today’s information technology age. Something that they could grasp and hold.
Some people use the library for movies or music. Others might want to borrow a book. Then there are those who want to attend one of the many classes or lectures that are offered at our local libraries.
The insight one can glean from someone having a library card is endless.
Passport ownership is more binary. If someone does not own a passport, they have never left the United States of America. It also declares that they have never had any plans to travel, which they put in motion.
Everyone has dreams. What separates people are those who take at least one step to manifest those dreams. In order to leave the United States and enter any other country, you need to have a passport. It is the foundation of international travel. It is even more significant than having money. You can research the perfect vacation. You can say that you are saving money to go on the trip of a lifetime, but if you have not actually done the menial work of obtaining your passport, are you even serious about your dream?
A passport is not a promise that you will leave our shores. The passport makes the possibility that you can leave real. A passport moves the mythical someday closer to today.
One of my dear friends is my age. He is single and tries to impress women after he has summoned the courage to interject himself into someone else’s conversation. Somehow he will steer the conversation toward his dream trip of visiting Europe and going to France to see the cemetery where the lead singer of The Doors is buried (Jim Morrison). This bluster might be impressive to some people, but after listening to his itinerary for over a decade, it has lost its luster. I find it depressing.
Nonetheless, the flavorless game he is trying to spit is not for me but for the women he thinks he is impressing. Hours spent watching Youtube videos on destinations he would like to visit allow him to speak with confidence and a hint of sophistication.
Travel is something that makes people appear to be sophisticated, and he yearns to be sophisticated without doing the necessary work. For example, he devours Cliff Notes of books that well-read people should have read. He is that guy.
He can carry on with this gambit to boost his ego because people never ask: do you have a passport? If a woman he was trying to impress would ask: when did you get your passport? He would become flustered. Ultimately he would say he does not have his passport. Then she could follow up with why?
This why means more than why he does not own a passport yet. It also seeks the answer to why you are trying to impress me by being something you are not: an international player. This why can mutate into why do you think your song and dance would impress me? It attempts to understand why this type of ploy would work on me. This why ultimately asks why do you think that I would not like you for who you are?
That why is one of the most poignant questions anyone can ask. It is the ultimate gauge of how serious he is, not just with his travel plans but with life. It ferrets out his intentions for her.
To all of my single men who feel they are in a rut, let your uncle Garrick share some game with you for free. Allow me to get you out of this situation.
When I was dating, I would use this as my profile header: Do you have a library card and a passport? I met my wife via Match.com in 2011. The transition from married life to dating life was disquieting. I found myself back in these streets at the tender age of 36. I had been single for about eight weeks before I went on my first date.
If you want to become a good dater, you need to be serious about who you are and what you bring to the table. That means to be honest but not overly critical of yourself. I am a short man, about five foot four. I wear glasses, not contacts — law school disabused me of that particular strain of vanity. I am bald, and I am not in peak physical condition. Furthermore, I was divorced. Accordingly, checklist dating was not made for men like me because I can be screened out before I can make my pitch.
Moreover, I also realized that I was not emotionally prepared to start dating immediately, but I knew I would soon be ready. I started researching who my competition was to prepare myself for this eventuality. I want you to consider this the most important market research you might ever conduct. I needed to know whether I had a chance in this alien dating world.
I poured through the bland and impotent profiles and realized that I did have a shot. Some of these men who boasted they were making loads of money had pictures that revealed they were just 30K millionaires who were incompetent at flexing. The tell-tale signs were apparent: common fixtures and appliances for apartments, never any photos of them driving their car, just standing next to it, and they were never at any of the haunts populated by the well-monied folk, which they claimed to be.
I saw pictures of attractive men followed by inscrutable text plagued with typos, fragments, and incomplete sentences. You could not find any hint of grammar in some of their profiles. Or you found acceptable-looking men with acceptable profiles, but they were boring. Their profiles were low energy. There was no hint of mystery or edge contained in the words they droned on in their about me section. They were what you might call nice guys.
Once armed with this market research, I went about constructing a profile that would be irresistible.
I have read that 20 percent of men on online dating platforms get 80% of the dates. Despite being 5 foot 4, divorced, and in my late 30s at that time, I was able to get myself in the 20 percent. I took dating seriously.
I will talk about the one thing you can do to make your profile stand out immediately.
One thing I gleaned from all of the other men’s profiles is that I could not compete on height or physicality. I was an attorney. I owned my own house and did not have any children. Yet, if a woman wanted a six-foot man who looked like an Acombcobie & Fitch model, it was over for me. So I came up with one simple line of inquiry that succinctly sums up my life, desire, and future: do you have a library card and a passport?
Many men wrote vapid and moronic profiles. These insipid and low-energy explanations of who they were and what they wanted were prescient harbingers of what the first and only date would reveal. These men were insufferable.
My competition would exclaim they like to travel but travel to them was a trip to Vegas or San Diego, two destinations that are approximately five hours away from Phoenix by car. I knew I could do better, so I did.
I booked a trip to Japan to see my college roommate. I knew he would hype me up and restore my confidence after my divorce. From there, I traveled to Thailand. Not to be one of the many Western creeps there for a sex safari but to see the various Buddhas and temples. Finally, I went to Bali.
I took many photographs and had photographs of me taken at each of these different locations. I did not talk about someday going to an exotic location I actually went. A picture of me next to the Reclining Buddha, and you knew I was no longer in Kansas. Compared to our arid desert climate, the lush tropical landscapes of Bali engendered wanderlust. Photographs of my roommate and me with the neo-future Tokyo as a backdrop conveyed that I had friends around the world.
I love to cook, so I took cooking classes and expanded my knowledge and palate by eating different types of foods in places few of us will ever visit. Jack Walsh, the former CEO of GE, argued that if we spend so much time eating, we should get good at cooking. I agree, and I used cooking as a creative outlet when I had a demanding legal career.
One of the most unattractive things in other human beings is their inability to eat a wide range of cuisines. If you have an allergy, that is one thing, but being pensive about eating food from different cultures is embarrassing.
If I ever went on a date with a woman and she ordered chicken fingers…that would be our first and last date.
These pictures of me wearing an apron with a chef next to me while handling exotic ingredients were excellent conversation starters. In Bali, I developed my love for the cooking technique known as sous vide.
Once I was back from my trip, I was ready to post my newly acquired photographs to my profile and ask my question: Do you have a library card and a passport?
I also understood I was a woman’s capitulation date. Women who were new to the platform had not been beaten down by the endless parade of fuckbois and manchilds. I needed them to experience these dudes before they could figure out what was important to them.
One of my strongest assets was that I had manifested someday with tangible results. I said I liked to travel, and I had actually traveled. I have been to every state west of the Mississippi. I am only missing five states in the South and most of the New England region of the United States. There are many places that I want to see in America, but traveling to most people means leaving North America.
If you are a man who is not getting the results you believe you deserve, I implore you to travel. I am not advocating for you to become a passport bro also known as a loser back home. I am urging you to leave North America and visit anywhere that is interesting.
This advice goes against the prevailing obsession we currently have with hustle culture.
Traveling is expensive, and you will sacrifice some of the money you could use to buy a house, car, the latest drop from your favorite designer, or fully fund your various retirement accounts. Yet, this investment in yourself will make you more desirable to anyone you want to attract and make this large world a little smaller.
You will find out different things about yourself. You will learn that you are braver than you think you are. One of my fondest memories of traveling was crossing a busy street in Tokyo. I was near the middle, and we lined up in giant rows. There were more than twenty people on either side of me, and facing us were 50-plus people lined up in a row with two or three rows behind them. We charged each other like in a scene from Braveheart or a Civil War reenactment when the light turned green. I was energized by something so mundane as crossing the street.
I have flown in a helicopter over Tokyo at night and swam in the Indian Ocean, where the water was the same temperature as a relaxing bath. I have watched snake charmers play flutes to make cobras appear from wicker baskets. I have watched monkeys travel through the jungle in a single file line. I have played in the snow in Dubai. Gotten drunk with Aussies in Bali. Dined on street food in Tapai. I have visited sandy white beaches in Thailand. I have paid my respects to those murdered in concentration camps. I have explored the tiny cramped space where Anne Frank and her family hid from Nazis. I have been to 22 counties, many of them more than once. Yet, my favorite memory is crossing the street in Tokyo.
Travel will allow you more opportunities to connect with someone.
My advice, which served me well, is to use the time you have while you are still young to see the world.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Garrick McFadden's work on Medium.