One Nomad's Cape Verde Reset: New Country, Familiar Patterns

Nine days into 2025, the author of this essay left a job, an apartment and most of her belongings in the Netherlands and flew to Cape Verde to build a nomadic life on her own terms. Eighteen months later she is still there — with friends, routines and a year-and-a-half stretch of dating that she says looks suspiciously like the one she left behind.

The piece traces the arc of a classic situationship that began roughly three months after she arrived. The man pulled away after two months — shorter text replies, plans that stayed plans, and an odd physical complaint he blamed on an expired yogurt he had eaten on the way to her place. She checked the container in her bin; the expiration date was a week away. He then announced he had to move to another island for work within a week, and she learned a month later that he was in a relationship with someone else.

The author's larger point is not about him. Between her Amsterdam life and her Cape Verde life, she says, she has kept choosing the same emotionally unavailable partners, only with different passports. She is now building something more committed with someone she describes as sweet, funny, hardworking — and, yes, again, a bit avoidant. The difference, she argues, is that she now asks the difficult questions instead of guessing the answers.

What the Essay Reveals About Reinvention and Self-Handicapping

The Situationship That Read Like a Textbook

Start with the signals the author catalogued: shorter replies, plans that never became actions, an illness excuse she fact-checked against the bin. Her own verdict — a lie, even a small one, is a red flag — matters less than her admission that she rationalized every flag with "this time it will be different." That gap between what she observed and what she accepted is the essay's most useful data point.

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Self-Handicapping and the Escape Route

The author found a name for the mechanism she suspects she has been running on: self-handicapping — creating conditions, from unavailable partners to an entire new country, that can be blamed when things do not work out. "As long as things remain uncertain, it's not my fault when things don't work out," she writes. The most honest part of the essay is the question she ends up asking herself: whether she has been building a life or avoiding one. She concedes the two were tangled for most of her 18 months in Cape Verde.

New Destination, Same Template

As a lifestyle story, the essay's wider resonance is that its setup is no longer unusual. Quitting the career-and-mortgage script to try a nomadic life abroad is a well-worn post-pandemic path — and this account suggests the relocation itself changes nothing about the emotional patterns the traveler packs. The author's test now is whether a partner she already describes as a bit avoidant — and her response to him — becomes part of a path forward or a pattern from the past. She notes it is, at this point, impossible to tell.

Asking Instead of Guessing: What the Author Did Differently

Taken as a lesson in recognizing patterns rather than a dating column, the essay offers three concrete tactics, all drawn from the author's own account:

  • Ask instead of guess. The author's earlier habit was inference — reading shorter texts and cancelled plans as clues. Her new approach is asking direct questions about needs, boundaries, fears and triggers, removing the ambiguity she used to fill with anxiety.
  • Name the pattern before entering it. She only recognized her template — emotionally unavailable partners in two different countries — after writing out the sequence. Naming it turned a vague sense of bad luck into something she could test.
  • Separate the move from the motive. Before quitting a job and leaving, she now suggests checking whether the goal is building a life or avoiding one; she admits that for most of her 18 months in Cape Verde, the two were indistinguishable.