Living and working on a ship, as you might imagine, can be very intense. I work with the same people that I live with, eat with and socialise with. If you think of the gossip that goes around the office or between your friends, times that by 10, and that’s what it is like on a ship.
Living on a ship is like being on Love Island (the television show). The less glamorous version of course but, everyone is watching your every move. You share rooms with people you have never met before. You spend all of your days with them. You end-up dating some of them, and people who you get close to finish their contracts and leave. If only at the end of a contract you got to walk away with £50,000 like the winner of Love Island does.
It’s a bubble that you can’t escape from until you finish your contract.
Relationships are formed very quickly on a ship because you are able to see the other person so often. You have probably met their friends before you have met them, and friends on board are your family. There is no reason not to see each other because chances are your cabins are a stone’s throw away from each other, so as soon as you finish work, you spend your free time together. B because of how frequently you are able to see each other it can feel like you have been dating a person for 3 months when in actual fact you have only been seeing them for 3 weeks.
The only issue with this is you can get to know someone on a ship really well and think you know them fully, but in the real world, you don’t know them at all!
It’s so easy to be with someone onboard. You know their friends. If they go out for the night, there is only one place they could be, Crew Bar, so you don’t have to worry. A lot of people have a cabin steward to take care of their cabin so you may think they’re a neat freak, but are they really that clean when the cleaners are taken away?
Yes, you can get to know a person. You can know what makes them laugh, and what makes them annoyed, how they feel about their family, what they are like to work with.
You don’t know whether they are good at paying bills. Do they get on with their family? Are they a reckless drunk when there is no drinking restriction? Are they really untidy? These are just little things, but I have known people have this problem but on a much bigger scale. For example, when they are with someone thinking that all is well and then out of the blue they find out the other person is married and has 3 kids at home. of course, this could happen whether you were seeing someone on land or on a ship but the difference on a ship you have no connection to his world on land so you have to take there a word for it. also if this happened to you on land you could just walk away and never see them again but imagine how devastating that would be to find out that your new partner had lied to you and then not be able to get away from them because you will be living on the same ship for the next 5 months.
I know I’m making it sound all negative but, it’s just very important to think logically and take everything with a pinch of salt. A lot of relationships work, so it’s not all doom and gloom, but the people I have seen get hurt are the ones that are too trusting. Myself included.
My first contract I was verynaivebeing only 19, and I got caught up in the bubble to find it popped in my face. Now I am much smarter and don’t let my emotions run away with me, and touch wood, I haven’t had a problem again.
I hope you go on your ship and make amazing friends and potentially meet the love of your life but, be sure to have a good ‘facebook stalk’.
