Holidays Kill Web Traffic – Good

Christmas worst time of year for traveling webmaster —

“Holidays really kill web traffic,” I complained to my wife Chaya, “ever since this Christmas season came around traffic on our site has plummeted.”

“Good,” Chaya snapped, “people should be with their families and having fun rather than reading your website!”

As usual, the words of a wise woman balance out a man’s tilt on the world.

Traffic December 2009

I hear a lot of people talking about looking for partners that they have a lot in common with, that they are similar to, that true love is just a euphemism for finding yourself reflected back at you in the face of another person.

This is hog wash.

Too much similarity in a relationship is pathological, it breeds competition and contempt.

I remember a statement made by an old traveler that I met once in the Amazon. He was in his fifties and had spent a life on the Road pretty much solo. I asked him if he was ever interested in finding a partner. He said calmly, “I have not yet finding someone going my way.”

You never will.

It is the thrill of chasing someone running in the opposite direction and meeting somewhere in the middle while still rolling onward that is the great affair.

I suppose the trick is to find someone that does not mirror you but complements you. A workable balancing act of opposing opposites that dance upon the same plane: finding a partner who is similar enough to walk with, but different enough to real you in when you walk too fast, that balances out your character extremes.

Two complementing parts can make a whole.

I am an extreme person. I go after that which I desire without rest, I am prone to putting my head beneath water without a thought of coming up for air. Sometimes I drown if left to my own devices. Sometimes I am pulled down farther into the abyss if I am will a partner whose make up is not a complement to my own.

But once I found a partner who was on the same planet as me, but had character differences that pulled me in rather than similarities that repelled me. She is a little restful where I am active, she likes to hang out and ponder the lilies where I would rather raze the entire field. Her extremes in personality were enough to counter act my own extremes. I find her rounding me out, calming my over active personality, and I find myself encouraging her to act, to create, to reach out and take what she wants. I encourage her to stand up in the face of my onward rolling bulldozer, bull headed personality and knock it to the ground.

On the ground is where one partner should aim to keep the other. Our extremes found their complements.

So I married her.

And now she pulls me back down to the ground by the beard hairs, yanks me off of the computer, to enjoy Christmas with my family. I feel reeled in, balanced, complemented.

“How do you like being married?” my best friend Erik once asked.

“I won,” I replied.

Read more about love and the Open Road

• Vagabond Engagement at Petra
• Vagabond Journey to a Wedding
• Vagabond Wedding