When being a stranger magnet isn’t a burden, but a superpower

“Any experience with head wounds?” I texted a stranger in Croatia as I blotted the mushy, bleeding dent in my head with a sheet of toilet paper in the bathroom of my apartment in Sarajevo. A few minutes earlier, I had accidentally smacked the back of my head on the sharp corner of an overhanging cabinet. 

I didn’t want my friends or family to worry about me, so I texted someone who probably wouldn’t care whether I died in my sleep. Thankfully, I didn’t need stitches and probably wasn’t concussed, said the black puffer jacket-wearing paramedic in the nearly abandoned ER.

I just needed the stranger, an Australian I matched with on a dating app a few days prior, to distract me from my panic and tell me not to worry.

And this probably isn’t the most bizarre or intimate conversation I’ve had with a stranger online. At age 15 or 16, I began chatting with a one-year-older British guy I had met in an MSN chat room, back before Facebook was even a thing. Over the years, we shared our struggles and dreams through our clunky laptops and eventually smartphones, and I even went so far as to mail him a picture I drew of his beloved dog for his 29th birthday. He’s now 39, and although we’ve never met in person, we’re still in touch.

My chattiness with strangers isn’t limited to the internet. I’ve always been comfortable striking up conversations with people I had just met, no matter their age, occupation, or gender. Whereas others prefer to sit in silence in the backseat of their rideshare, I relish the opportunity to chat. While living in Cape Town, one of my Uber drivers told me about the discrimination and dangers he faced as a Zimbabwean working in South Africa.

I know plenty of people who find my candidness out of the ordinary—maybe even extraordinary.

“Your superpower is talking to strangers,” a close friend once told me, marveling at the ease of my interactions with random members of the general public.

The superpower also seems to work both ways. Strangers are mysteriously drawn to me. I’ve been called a “stranger magnet” by another good friend, who ironically approached me while we separately mounted the top of Lykavittos, the tallest hill in Athens, Greece.

I’m confident that the number of friendly serendipitous encounters I’ve had as a digital nomad, moving freely around the world, is far more than average person. I don’t know why strangers deem me approachable. Maybe I remind them of a friend or relative, or maybe it’s because I smile a lot. I don’t have any other theories.

“I just wanted to say that you have amazing legs,” said a Malaysian woman who suddenly appeared beside me in a supermarket in Kuala Lumpur a few months ago. She proceeded to give me her contact information in case I ran into trouble or needed any tips while I was in town.

Strangers also tend to ask me for directions, even if I’m clearly not a local and usually have no idea how to get to wherever they’re headed. 

To find a Stalin-turned-Darth Vader statue in a hidden courtyard in Odesa, Ukraine, I solicited the help of five or six different strangers, ranging from security guards to a bakery worker. After pinpointing the elusive location of this statue by piecing together their hand gestures and translated vague directions, I eventually found it, but I was more delighted by my interactions with these people than the actual finding of it.    

As a solo traveler, being open and willing to talk to strangers is important. Family and established friends are far away, and feelings of loneliness ebb and flow. By being receptive to strangers, you invite the chance to not only form new friendships but also experience “positivity resonance”, a term coined by the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson. I first read about it years ago, wondering about the “chemistry” I felt while engaged in deep conversation with a person. It wasn’t romantic—more like being on the same wavelength.

Fredrickson describes the phenomenon as “a type of interpersonal connection characterized by shared positivity, mutual care and concern, and behavioral and biological synchrony.” These intertwined experiences, she writes, accumulate over time to have a lasting impact on health and well-being.  

For me, conversation has always been the gateway to positivity resonance. I’ve experienced it countless times during in-person conversations with someone I’ve known for a matter of minutes. This is in line with the description given by Fredrickson, who says it can happen between strangers, friends, or romantic partners.

In a similar vein, I’ve also been the recipient of numerous kind acts along my travels, which I think is at least partly due to my stranger magnetism.

A few years ago, while walking back to my campsite in Përmet, Albania, a downpour started. Likely sympathizing with my drowned rat state, a car pulled over to the side of the road just ahead of me. A student driver was at the wheel, and his instructor in the passenger seat insisted his slightly wide-eyed student drive me home. I smiled to myself in the backseat—a driving instructor would never let their student pick up a hitchhiker or random rain-soaked stranger back home in Canada.

Another time I was treated as an honored guest instead of a stranger. While visiting Ziro Valley, a lush green landscape in Arunachal Pradesh, India, I attended a dance competition held by a local youth association. As the lone foreigner in the audience and stranger to all in attendance (except for my guide, Tallo), the president of the a

ssociation immediately came over to greet me, and before I knew it, I was called onto the stage and given a traditional scarf embroidered by the Apatani, the tribe that live in Ziro.

It’s these acts of kindness that I remember more vividly than anything I’ve ever checked off a sightseeing list.   

I could go on.

The time I was offered a gun in northern Turkey probably takes the cake for best stranger story. While meandering along a dirt road in the small village I was staying in, I passed a man with a concerned look on his face. My “stranger danger” senses weren’t tingling, so I said “Merhaba!” (Turkish for hello), and he proceeded to calmly explain the situation to me in Turkish. I whipped out my phone to translate.

“There’s a bear up there, on my property,” the stranger explained. “You can take my gun.”

When I politely declined to take the gun—nevermind that I had never used a gun and had zero desire to shoot a bear—he offered to accompany me with his gun until I had safely cleared his property. I decided to err on the side of caution and go back down the hill. Some quick mental math—bear plus gun plus stranger—yielded too many possible bad outcomes in my mind, however tempted I was to see how the story unfolded.

Later, with a quick Google search, I learned that brown bears did indeed roam the hills surrounding the Ayder Plateau, near to where I was staying. The host of the little wooden hotel I was staying at for the month, Ayfer—who also became my surrogate mom—already knew the story of the foreigner who wandered up the hill. Word had gotten around the village quickly. 

I realize my willingness to engage with strangers runs counter to what people advise you to do as a solo female traveler, not to mention the childhood parental “don’t talk to strangers” advice. I know the advice is well-intentioned, but as an adult, I don’t want to be fearful of everyone I meet.   

Maybe I’m just lucky that none of my stranger friends turned out to be seedy characters, and none of my encounters have ever gone south. But I also don’t abandon my common sense, and I trust my intuition. Although it’s possible I would change my tune in the event of a traumatizing experience, I’m not too worried.

Superpower or sheer luck, I’ll keep being open to strangers.

Sorry, Mom.