1 – We agreed: Careers first. No Commitment

I once crossed Africa with a woman I was trying very hard not to love.

In April 1986, I relocated to Munich to start a software company. I was an ambitious thirty-one-year-old physicist, but completely naïve about the country I was moving to. I didn’t even speak German, which quickly became a problem.

Coincidentally, on that same April day, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Vivian Falkenberg moved from the German colony in Argentina to Munich. Her goal: be independent, especially of men. The way to do that was to build a business around the five languages she was fluent in.

In late April, an attractive young woman stood in the doorway to my office. Wavy reddish-blonde hair tumbled over her shoulders, framing a face with high cheekbones and a narrow nose. A bachelor’s reflex, I glanced at her hands. No ring.

She began as my German teacher, but I soon discovered that she had an uncanny sense for negotiation. She quickly became my mentor for navigating the complexities of European business.

All the while, I worked to keep a professional distance. My top priority was building my career, and I needed to learn German more than I needed a date.

One day, I impulsively asked her out for dinner. She fired me as her student and began lecturing me, at length, as if I were a child caught stealing cookies: I had failed to respect her as a professional, treated her like a piece of fruit to be plucked from a tree for my pleasure, viewed her as an ornament for my ego.

When she was done, she crossed her arms, leaned back, and let out a harrumph. I expected her to gather her things and storm out, but instead, something remarkable happened. She stayed and said I could call her Vivian.

Over dinner, we agreed: careers first, no commitment. Love was something we had seen go badly for others.

But we kept breaking the rules.

Months later, my small software operation in Munich was dismantled by a British private equity firm. Because my residence permit disappeared with the company, I couldn’t stay in Germany, and she wouldn’t move to the US. Suddenly, the careful balance we had built began to come apart.

A friend whose wife had died young said something neither of us expected:

“Find a third way. Sometimes problems that look big when you are near seem small when you’re far away.”

We followed his advice and did something that made little professional sense. We put our careers on hold, bought two backpacks, and set out to travel overland from Cairo to Cape Town on twenty dollars a day.

We met serious fourteen-year-old soldiers with AK-47s who would suddenly smile when offered a Marlboro, backpackers who told us about places they called Eden on the Cheap, Africans who warmly offered us food, shelter, and hospitality because it was all they had.  Before we knew it, we were thousands of miles down the road, and nearly a year had gone by.

There’s a famous David Foster Wallace parable about two young fish swimming along when they meet an older fish going the other way. “Morning,” he says. “How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on when one turns to the other and asks, “What’s water?”

For a year, we were Swimming in Air as Africa taught us to question nearly everything we thought we knew.

I’ll share the journey every Thursday. Join us.