What I Know About You: Travis, the Possible Boyfriend of the Woman Sitting Next to Me on the Train

What I Know About You is a new feature in nothinggoingonhere.com where I discuss what I know about someone who I’ve never met before, based on information that I’ve inadvertently accumulated—usually without effort on my part. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, and there’s very little likelihood that anyone in my limited audience will know the subject or other persons mentioned in this article.

Background

While riding on the metro, my assigned seat happened to be next to a conventionally attractive blonde woman in her late twenties or early thirties. During what I can only assume was an entirely one-sided telephone conversation with a friend of hers, I learned the following about her possible boyfriend, Travis (not his real name).

Extrapolated Profile of Travis

1. Travis is a total badass at what he does.
2. Travis is about to go on a trip to Los Angeles for work.
3. Travis says he’s at the point with his girlfriend (the speaker) where he wants her to know what his plans are. “You know, so that I don’t think that he’s just going on this trip to hook up with a bunch of actresses.”
4. The speaker feels that Travis is trying to establish this new protocol because he got “freaked out” when the speaker (his girlfriend) told him that she was going on a girls’ trip to Atlanta. The speaker thinks that Travis doesn’t want her to think that it’s all right for her to run around because she thinks he’s running around. It’s all very nuanced.
5. Travis is going on this trip because he wants to better develop his people skills. Apparently, if he’s talking to a human being who doesn’t have the potential to provide him with a direct business benefit, he has no interest in that person and it shows.
6. This trip that Travis is taking is costing him $8,000. He will stay in a mansion with a bunch of other guys where they’ll work on their social skills. At night, they’ll go out and try to use what they’ve learned. For instance (and this is the example that she gave), “there are these challenges, like go meet someone who owns a golden retriever, but they can’t just go around asking, ‘Do you have a golden retriever?’ They have to talk to people and see if a golden retriever pops up in the conversation.” (According to the notoriously flawed Golden Retriever Forum, there are between 500,000 and 750,000 golden retrievers living in the United States.)
7. This isn’t as much about Travis as his relationship with the speaker, but she apparently would actually consider getting married because she feels that if Travis were to marry her and have a child with her, he’d be much less likely to bail.

©All rights to Travis’s life reserved.