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This story is brought to you by Dr. Robi Ludwig via the USA Herald Platform

Traveling has become the new status symbol for a well-curated life. In fact, the word for this concept is called conspicuous leisure. Today, family and friends are likely to post photos of their visits to exotic beaches, glorious mountains, and enviable resorts.

Social Media has expanded our lives allowing us to glimpse into the private lives of those we know and learn more about people’s experiences, who they spend time as well as the travel destinations they enjoy.

Some of the clear advantages of traveling are widening our understanding of the world. The more we learn about diversified cultures and lifestyles, the more capable we are of developing a more sophisticated understanding of the world.

This is all great if you have the right person with whom to travel. The problem is, many of these "want to be explorers" don't always have the right companion to accompany them. 

As a therapist, I speak with many clients who want to travel the world, but they don’t want to go alone. Sometimes these goal directed singles try to coordinate special trips with like-minded friends, only to find that their timing is off or their challenging work schedules make traveling together impossible to coordinate; all of these factors prevent lofty travel plans.

For those who like to travel alone, these occasional setbacks don't have to be holiday deal breakers. But for those who have the kind of travel personalities who want or need to travel with a companion (especially when they don’t have one), it can create strong feelings of frustration, sadness, even transient feelings of being victimized and treated unfairly by life. 

The advantages for this type of travel personalities who prefer to travel in pairs is that they feel safer, will have more fun, and feel less lonely and less displaced while they are away from home.

But even for the travel personalities who prefer to travel in pairs finding the right person or travel buddy to go away with, can be a very serious hurdle to overcome. 

Travel anxieties are a common psychological condition that can make choosing to travel, especially with someone they don’t know, another source of great discomfort.

Travel anxiety is triggered by life anxiety. If someone gets anxious by simply going about his or her activities of daily living, this only increases the chances that adding someone new into the mix could be experienced as a great source of discomfort.

People who are anxious often have scripts running through their head that quickly skip to the worst case scenario. Anxiety can be triggered by anything from stranger danger to a friend’s personal horror story. It can also be influenced by stories they’ve heard in the news or a scary yet plausible movie they’ve seen.