Ask the Officer: Your cruise questions answered by a former senior ship’s officer

“My son came home from his first cruise ship contract engaged to a girl he met in the crew bar in week three. He is normally the most cautious man alive. What happened?”

Ship goggles happened.

Think of ship goggles as rose-tinted glasses, issued at the gangway on day one, with strength increasing steadily over the length of the contract. By week three the tint is noticeable. By month four, a man you would have rated a solid four is starting to look like husband material. By month six, he is the only thing standing between you and the North Atlantic.

This is not a myth crew tell each other. It is a genuine phenomenon with an entirely unglamorous cause: recycled air, the same eleven faces at every meal, and a social world roughly the size of a village shop. Standards do not lower so much as recalibrate. The pool of candidates shrinks, and the rankings adjust accordingly. It is less romance than arithmetic conducted under flattering lighting.

I have watched it happen to hundreds of people, and I have absolutely done it myself. Anyone who tells you they are immune has either never worked a full contract or is lying to you with tremendous confidence.

Allow me to introduce the evidence.

Giuseppe wore sunglasses indoors. Not on deck. Indoors. He quoted Pitbull lyrics without a trace of irony, in conversation, as though offering original thought. On land I would not have crossed a road for Giuseppe.

But there were ten weeks left on the contract, and my cabin was cold, and reader, I understood.

He was not, by any objective standard, alright. Not even slightly. This is what the goggles do. They do not make you blind. They make you generous.

Where ships differ from land is that the aftermath has been designed, apparently deliberately, to be as public as possible.

Running the length of most large vessels, one deck below the waterline, is a long working corridor that carries everything the ship needs to function: laundry carts, provisions, engineers, dancers, technicians, the entire operational bloodstream of a floating city. It takes its name from a motorway back in the company’s home country. On American lines it is the I-95. On British ones it is the M1. Sail with a German operator, and you are walking the Autobahn.

At seven in the morning it also carries you, in last night’s crew bar clothes, mascara at half mast, moving at speed and praying the corridor is empty.

The corridor is not empty. The corridor has never once been empty. The entire housekeeping team is on its way to roll call, in formation, and they have seen absolutely everything.

Nobody says a word to your face. They do not need to. The glances exchanged in the crew lift do all the necessary work, along with the way they pretend not to look at each other and then do it again the moment the doors close.

Then comes trying to leave together for a date out in port.

Walk down that gangway side by side in Naples, and by dinner service you are not simply dating. You are engaged. You are moving to Canada. Season two is pending a pregnancy announcement.

Which is why some crew couples do not walk off together at all. They agree a meeting point ashore, stagger their gangway times by twenty minutes, and reunite three streets from the terminal like people in a spy film. Not because they are ashamed of anything. Because a shared gangway walk is a public declaration and everyone on board can read it.

You cannot hide chemistry in a place where the walls are that close. People feel it before you have admitted it to yourself.

So, your son. He has not lost his mind. He’s spent six months somewhere heightened, sleep deprived, permanently observed, and entirely without privacy, in the company of a few hundred people all going through the same thing. Under those conditions, feelings arrive fast and arrive loudly.

What happens next is usually decided by a few months at home. The goggles come off in most cases, quietly, without anybody having to say anything awkward.

But occasionally, and I mean this entirely sincerely, they never come off at all. I know crew who met in a crew bar in week three and are still together thirty years later, telling the story badly at parties and interrupting each other about which port it was.

Have a cruise question? Write to contact@sararomera.com. Selected questions will be featured in upcoming columns.

Sara Romera is the author of Inside the Floating City and The Discerning Voyager.