I sold a thousand honeymoons and never took one

I worked at a travel agency for seven years, the old-school kind that still exists because not everyone trusts booking a package tour through an app, especially parents planning their kid's honeymoon and wanting a human to yell at if something goes wrong. I built my whole career on selling other people's romance. I have personally arranged more honeymoons than I can count, to Da Lat, to Phu Quoc, to places in Europe I've seen only in the hundreds of photos clients sent me afterward out of politeness.

I got married during my fourth year there. We didn't take a honeymoon. Peak wedding season overlapped exactly with peak travel-booking season, and I was the one holding together forty client itineraries, so my husband and I had a nice dinner near home and I was back at my desk two days later, booking someone else's ten-day trip to Bali while wearing the ring from my own wedding I'd had zero days off to actually celebrate.

I told this story at parties for years like it was funny, and it is a little funny, the kind of funny that's actually about something else if you look at it straight on. What wasn't funny was doing the same math every year after that — should we finally take that honeymoon we owe ourselves, and every year the answer was no, because someone's Tet holiday booking needed handling, or a client's flight got cancelled and I was the only one who could sort out the refund before the airline's window closed.

The job itself was fine, genuinely — I liked the clients, mostly, liked being the person who fixed things when a booking fell apart three days before departure. What finally moved me wasn't a disaster, just a slow accumulating tiredness of being excellent at building other people's dream trips while mine sat in a drawer, theoretical, for going on six years.

I quit last spring. My husband and I are going to Japan in the autumn, actually booked, actually paid for, by someone else's agency, which felt both fitting and a little bit like betrayal on my old employer's behalf. I don't regret the years. I regret how long it took me to notice I'd become the shoemaker whose own kids go barefoot, except it's honeymoons, and the kids are just us.