Love, Romance and Being a Musician
Today’s question comes from Steve who’s about to leave for a cruise ship gig with Celebrity:
I will be leaving behind my girlfriend and I was wondering how you deal with the ‘isolation’ from the real world? Are you able to regularly contact your other half, is the internet connection aboard ships reliable etc? I’m off for 6 months but the closer my leaving date gets the more I feel it’s gonna be a long haul without my girlfriend and friends.
What a great subject!
My better half will tell you that this is something I whine and complain about non-stop. Isolation from the real world is a central problem to working on a cruise ship, and I’m not alone in that assessment. Sometimes it seems like that’s all crew members talk about.
Here’s the problem generally, then I’ll get into romance and relationships after. Typically, different positions on ships have different lengths of contracts. Somewhere between 1 and 10 months is usual. And all of these contracts are staggered, so when you come on for your 6 month contract, everyone else is somewhere in the middle of theirs. This is good for the ship, because if the whole crew changes overnight, there would be nobody left that knew what they were doing. It would be the blind leading the blind.
Good for the ship, fine, but socially this is what happens: You board the ship. You don’t know anyone. You meet your roommate. You meet the other guys in the band. Eventually other crew members start talking to you. Maybe you meet some more. Perhaps you make a friend of someone that works in the spa. They leave 2 weeks later. Then you find a friend from the giftshop. They leave 1 month later. More people come on. You meet the golf pro, and he’s cool. He leaves the next day. Then maybe you meet a girl you like…but now you’re leaving in a month. And she’s from New Zealand. More people come on, and by now you don’t even want to meet them! Just forget about it!
Obviously, you’ll get a long a lot better if you are more casual about your friendships and contacts (and that’s usually what ends up happening). But having a real, deep friendship with another human can take some time to develop, and it difficult in such a transient culture like you find on ships.
(That said, I have 3 or so friends from my first ship that I still talk to. We were lucky enough to have nearly the entirety of our contracts together. I’d bend over backwards for them – they were like family to me.)
Ok, now the messy stuff. Romance. There’s two categories here – romance started on ships, and what I call ship-to-shore romance (AKA, having a girl/boy back home).
An officer and dancer from my first ship just got married last summer. They were a cute couple from the beginning. I also have a very old friend that married a bass player she met when she was an activities staff member on a ship. Both the officer and the bassist were from England, the others were American. I had an English drummer I used to room with who married an American dancer right after their contract ended.
Imagine that. One of them gave up their country to be together!
When it ends up working out like that, it’s great. But more often than not, the romance you find on ships will be a fleeting substitute for the real thing. That might not be a bad thing – depends on your perspective and where you’re at in your life. It is what it is.
Now for Steve’s question specifically. My better half, L., is one-of-a-kind. You could look day and night for 25 years, as I did, and never find another like her. We are committed in a romantic, practical, stable kind of way and I love her.
But get this – of the 18 months we’ve been a couple, 11 of them have been apart. She’s on the east coast and I’m all over with tours, regional theaters and ships. We try to visit each other at least every 4-6 weeks, but that can be difficult. She’s a busy violinist, and I’m the writer of a hugely successful blog that BILLIONS of readers visit every day. (Just kidding.) You know who I am. Our schedules can be tight. One day we’ll find a solution to our geographic woes and that’ll be a real relief.
When I first got the call for this cruise gig, I turned it down flat. L. and I are a flexible couple, but I thought working on a ship would be too much even for us. To be honest, I’d never seen a ship-to-shore relationship work out before. It always fell apart.
But you can make it work! We have. Inevitably we both have some hard days now and then, but it can be done. There’s a few things you MUST do, though.
- Talk everyday – I think this is really important. I can think of 1, maybe 2 days that L. and I haven’t talked since we’ve been together. If you stop talking, even for a few days, you just start to go in different directions. This is very hard on an international ship, and I have to say – if my current contract had been on an international ship, I would not have taken it.For those of you that are on international ships…I’ll give you a tip that I really shouldn’t: All cruise ships have a special toll-free number that your girlfriend could use to call you. It’s top secret, and no one can know you know it or use it. If you get in good enough with the right person (hint: ask whoevers dating the chief officer), you might be able to find out what it is. Ask around about this after you buy a few rounds at the crew bar.
- Email pictures – I think it’s important to keep your significant other in the loop about your new life. Which leads me to…
- Buy a cruise – Believe me, this is necessary. Especially if you are on a long contract, get your significant other out on the ship. I had L. come out in June for a 12 days. It was great. And because she was here, now I can talk about the ship, or people, or ports, and she knows just what I mean. You need to find a way to get them involved with your every day life. The best way is to make them a part of it.
- Use all communication options available – this is about communication, communication, communication. Use email, chat, webcams. Long-distance relationships are so much more manageable than they were even 10 years ago. They used to be just impossible – now you can see and hear the people you miss and it’s a big difference.
- Don’t cheat on them – If your relationship is going to end while your on the ship, this is most likely how it will happen. I’ve seen it over and over and over. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can, like, cheat just this one time…or it’s not cheating if it’s out of the country…or it doesn’t count if they don’t find out. You’re going to blow it if you cheat.I’ll tell you the secret to fidelity on ships, or tour, or anywhere else. Don’t put yourself into situations where you’d have to make the choice. That means don’t go get wasted with Miss Susie Hot-Pants who’s been flirting with you, and then trust you’ll make the right moral decision at the end of the night. You won’t. Who would?But moreso, the important thing for fidelity, and I probably don’t need to even say it, is that you are committed to staying true to your other half. And if you aren’t…then what are you doing with them? For everyone’s sake, just don’t be one of those dudes that cheats on his girlfriend, then brings her on the ship and everyone has to feel uncomfortable about it, then goes back to cheating once she’s gone…then goes home to his girlfriend…etc., etc., etc. I think guys like that should be fed to the sharks. If you want to mess around on the ship, at least have the decency to come single.
That’s about it – romance on ships. Obviously with crews ranging in size from 400 to 1,000 people and typically in their 20s & 30s, you’ll probably see a lot of it.
Thanks Steve – great question.
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