Vacations on a ship might sound like the perfect place for romance, but Lucy Southerton, who began working on cruise ships at just 19, is warning that relationships at sea can quickly turn complicated.
She explained in a YouTube video on her channel, Cruising As Crew, that getting involved with someone at sea is very different from dating a coworker on land.
“Now, the reason is if you’re working a job on land, of course, everyone in the office likes the office gossip and is involved in everyone’s business,” she said.
“But you get to leave the office and go home to your friends and your family who are completely separate from those people that you work with,” she added.
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Worker Says Everything Overlaps
Lucy, from Birmingham, explained that life on a ship is completely different because you leave your friends and family behind, meaning your coworkers become your entire social circle.
“So you’re going to be getting all of your needs met from this one group of people,” she said.
“They’re also going to be your professional team who you want to impress on a professional level if it’s a career and you want to progress. And what this means is there is no escape.”
She said that there’s “no escape” from your colleagues because you see them every day, and they would want to gossip about the “new relationship that’s sparking up between you and so and so”.
When Cruise Romances Go Wrong
While relationships can feel exciting at first, Lucy cautioned that things can quickly become uncomfortable if they don’t work out.
“And this is obviously amazing when everything is going well because it’s fun to tell your work colleagues, ‘Oh my God, we did this, we did this. It was so good. We had such a good time,'” she said.
“And it’s really fun to see your crush at work. It adds a little bit of excitement to the day like, ‘Oh my God, he’s over there’. When the conversations you’re having with your team members are, ‘Yeah, I’m really upset, I’m really disappointed, or ‘I’ve really upset him or her.”
“And you can’t escape him or her. You have to see them every day for the next four months,” she said.
“That is when it gets a little bit sticky. And you know what? If we could control who we got feelings for, wouldn’t life be literally 20 times easier?”
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Strict Rules and Common Misconceptions
Another cruise insider, Megan McGuinness, who lives onboard with her husband, confirmed that relationships between crew members are common, but there are strict rules when it comes to passengers.
“The next thing was all the crew just hook up with each other – yeah, kinda, think of it as a small town – people are meeting, they’re dating,” she said, per The Sun.
“It might be for a short time, they might end up married, having kids, who knows?”
However, she made it clear that crossing the line with guests can have serious consequences.
“Crew will get fired if they hook up with guests? Yes, for obvious reasons, self-explanatory,” she said.
