Romance, the Ultimate Souvenir --Modern Love THIS summer, during a conference in Berlin, a fellow attendee told me about the kind of summer love that arises in his profession. He was a military officer who had been posted in Europe, and not infrequently a soldier would come back from a furlough in Croatia confessing he had fallen in love with a stripper. Not in lust, in love, the soldier would insist, and he wanted to marry her. A fellow officer had developed a question to test the depth of a young man's passion, though the officers still rolled their eyes at the idea that enduring love could be born in a pole-dancing joint in Dubrovnik. "Do you know her parents" names?" he would ask his love-struck charge. If not, you can't marry her. I laughed. Not because the soldier's feelings were ridiculous, but because they were so recognizable. I've always fallen in love on vacation. Who hasn't? There's a distinctive intensity to vacation romances. The object of our affection rises from the crowd like fireworks, simultaneously illuminating the unfamiliar landscape of our travels and obliterating its interest. Why do we fall so hard on vacation? I have my theories. The first is that the vacation, as a setting, imbues a crush with a heightened sense of meaning. Although conventional wisdom says we have flings on vacation because they won't have to mean anything, this couldn't be more wrong. We have flings on vacation because they seem to mean everything. You know the feeling, when away, that the new and magical environment you are in is trying to send you a message about how to live? A week in Paris reiterates the power of great food; a month in Joshua Tree National Park admonishes you to wedge time out of your work flow for the contemplative and the holy. We're primed, on vacation, to recognize such messages in what we see, hear and eat, and in the people we meet. These strangers often seem to carry important information about what is valuable in life, and this makes them incredibly alluring. I remember my first summer love as such a prophet. He was a dancer at an arts camp I was sent to. I was 12, the shortest girl in my class, with pimply skin and Coke-bottle glasses, profoundly uncomfortable in my body. The camp was in northern Michigan, and many days it rained. That made me desperately anxious because it imperiled the fragile hairdo I'd devised to tame my natural curls: bangs blow-dried around a huge roller and sprayed so they sat in a stiff, perfect, artificial hoop on my forehead as long as I didn't move fast or encounter moisture. I first saw him from the bleachers of a performance hall, practicing his part of a duet alone on an empty stage. He was tall and lithe, with a shock of Baryshnikov hair and dark circles under his eyes that made him look deep. Moving fluidly with and around the partner who wasn't there, his body looked so at ease, so natural, so like a single unit, not like the pastiche of "good" and "bad" features that I inhabited. He was living on a higher plane, one in which the body wasn't the obstacle to pleasure but the vehicle to obtaining it, a plane to which I newly aspired. In the context of the middle-school boys I knew back home, in their flannel shirts and cargo shorts, the image of his body in a leotard was a revelation. When we're away, we allow ourselves to be drawn to people who are thrillingly different from us, even inappropriate. A half-dozen summers after the dancer, I fell for a German Lutheran pastor in Brussels. I'm Jewish, but even more significantly, I was 13 years younger than him, not even 20. We were both in Brussels temporarily; I had an undemanding internship at the United States Embassy, and he had an equally forgiving stint at a theological institute. We took afternoons off to roam the city's jewel-colored Art Nouveau bars, he puffing on Gauloises, me sipping the beer I still wasn't allowed to drink at home. I thought he had a poetic soul. Indeed, he loved poetry, sending me reams of Hölderlin over e-mail during the days we were apart. At night, we lay in bed and prepped him for his sermons by reading the Psalms aloud. Eve Fairbanks, a writer living in Johannesburg, is working on a book about South Africa.