Try Vision Board Dating To Guide Your Wanderlust

Millennials are travelers. Unlike our grandparents and even our parents, we see moving around the globe as something essential to our mental health. "When it comes to nearly all travel behaviors, millennials are the generation most likely to engage — and they do so often," travel and hospitality analyst Lindsey Roeschke told CNBC. "They see travel as a right rather than a privilege, and consider their travel experiences to be a part of their identity rather than a check on a bucket list."

Millennials also move more often and are more likely than other generations to live abroad, per ARC Relocation. Millennials know the world is their oyster and they're all for it. Aware of this trend, dating apps are increasingly adding features that allow singles to adjust their location to see who's outside their backyard, or maybe even influence some big life changes like moving abroad. Doing this is called vision board dating (VBD) and it's going to be a big dating trend in 2024, according to dating app Plenty of Fish, because after essentially losing a year of our life to Covid, it's time to explore.

Whether you're looking to move to a new city or another country in the name of love, or you simply have your eyes set on a place where you can have a steamy vacation fling, vision board dating can help. After all, if you can envision it, you can manifest it into reality. Maybe.

Vision boards are fairly new. In fact, they didn't really become popular until "The Secret" was published in 2006. In the book, readers were told that they could harness whatever they wanted through manifestation, and vision boards played a key role in that, per WSJ. Suddenly, vision boards for everything under the sun were everywhere and Pinterest, realizing this was a good trend to get in on, launched in 2010 as the digital answer to this type of manifesting, per Business of Apps.

"Looking at images on a vision board primes the brain to grasp opportunities that may [have] otherwise gone unnoticed," neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart told The Motivation Clinic. "That's because the brain has a process called 'value-tagging' which imprints important things onto your subconscious and filters out unnecessary information." As Swart explained, the brain inherently assigns a greater value to dreams and goals that have images attached to them, as opposed to just words and phrases. "And the more you look at those images, the more those images move up in importance," said Swart. In using vision boarding in your dating life with an app's location feature, you're putting in motion the manifestation of your dream partner in your dream location.

First, ask yourself where you want to go and what you want to do. Are you looking to change careers and do so in another city? Are you hoping to meet someone in a country you've yet to explore so you have an extra incentive to go? Or you could just spin a globe, see where it stops, and call that your destiny. Next, decide on the type of person and relationship you want, and put it out into the universe through the location feature on the app and/or with an actual vision board. Then you want to get to manifesting.

"Manifestation is the practice of working with the universe to draw out a desired outcome through a set intention," psychic diviner and certified Reiki practitioner Amber Finney told Cosmopolitan. "You're working with the power of your mind, the power of your actions, and the power of connecting to spirit to turn a thought into a tangible reality."

According to findings by Plenty of Fish, 23% of people have interacted with someone who changed their location to someplace more "desirable" than the one they're currently in. That's almost one-quarter of singles. So, you certainly won't be alone in your manifesting and you might even find someone who's also from someplace else, but looking into the same new location as you.

As you adopt vision board dating into your life, be wise about how you do it. While it's lovely to think you can vision board yourself into the ideal relationship with a partner that's the perfect combination of Pedro Pascal and Phoebe Bridgers, realistic expectations should always be kept in mind. Granted, they don't need to be at the forefront necessarily, but at least prevalent enough so you can avoid conjuring up unrealistic prospects that could break your heart. It's also worth noting that the VBD doesn't always work for anyone. 

According to a 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, when someone puts so much energy into fantasizing about something they want, they're less likely to reach it. This happens because the brain gets confused by all the fantasizing, thinks the fantasy has been achieved, and the energy needed for the will and motivation is sucked out of the equation, causing everything to backfire. But if you're able to be reasonable in your pursuits and exact the right amount of energy and fantasy into your manifesting, then vision board dating can pan out for you. Even if you don't buy into this concept, there's nothing wrong with putting your eyes on a specific prize (love and a new location) to inspire you to get moving.