The Place That Made Me

At First, I Couldn’t Wait to Leave

Bar Harbor, a postcard-perfect seaside town in Maine, feels like the kind of place that should inspire romance novelists or landscape painters. But when you grow up there? It’s just where your middle school crush ghosted you after the eighth-grade dance and where the summer tourists steal every decent parking spot. For most of high school, I dreamed of trading rocky coasts for city skylines, of leaving tide pools and tide charts behind for something more glamorous—or, at the very least, something with decent Wi-Fi.

I was convinced I’d find my true self somewhere else, somewhere bigger. In Bar Harbor, everyone knew my name, my parents’ life stories, and that time I tripped while asking a boy to prom (spoiler: he said no). Living there felt like being stuck inside a snow globe—beautiful but inescapable. When I left for college, I didn’t look back. Not at first.

But every detour feels different when you realize how much you’ve been shaped by where you came from—and how it shows up in every part of your life. Even things as unexpected as, say, dating.

The Atlantic Knows What It’s Doing (and So Do You)

Bar Harbor doesn’t do anything halfway, which might explain why I have a soft spot for people who are unapologetically themselves. The tides here show up on schedule and shift without apology. Winter here is like a bad date that forgets to call you back—cold and bitter—but when spring shows up with its endless daffodils, it’s absolutely worth the wait.

I think about that a lot when it comes to people. Charm is great—it’s the candlelit dinner, the daffodils in April, the breathtaking sunset behind Cadillac Mountain. But what stays with you are the real, unpolished, slightly gritty parts. The storms. The rough edges. That’s why I learned to pay attention to the details early on—like how someone handles awkward silences or whether they say goodbye to a waiter after closing out the check.

When you grow up in a place like Bar Harbor, you don’t bother pretending to be perfect—it’s not possible. Instead, you trust that authenticity is worth more than a hundred carefully curated Instagram captions. That mindset? It feeds into everything, including how you connect with others.

Yes, I’ve Brought Someone Home for Lobster Rolls

Picture this: You’re new to dating someone. They’re still in that phase where they’re trying to impress you—dressing sharper than they might otherwise, pretending to care about indie bands, enthusiastically ordering kale salads. And then you introduce them to your hometown.

I brought a boyfriend home to Bar Harbor once, and it was a bit like throwing him into a reality show challenge: “Can Your Relationship Survive Meeting the Locals?” Within 24 hours, he’d met three of my high school teachers, endured a 45-minute debate about the best local clam chowder (never trust someone who doesn’t have an opinion), and accidentally climbed the steepest trail in Acadia thanks to my questionable sense of direction. We both smelled like sunscreen and mosquito repellant for hours afterward. Romance at its finest.

Turns out, Bar Harbor off-season can test any relationship. And that test? It’s amazing for seeing how people actually fit into your life. You learn pretty quickly whether someone can roll with quirks—like making a detour to help a stranded tourist—or whether they’re thrown by the underlying weirdness of small-town life. Spoiler: We didn’t make it, but I’ll give him points for eating the entire lobster after struggling for a solid five minutes with the claw cracker.

Love Is a Rocky Shoreline

I once read that Maine’s coastline is one of the most jagged in the country—over 3,000 miles if you count every inlet, curve, and rocky outcrop. Nothing about it is simple. Sometimes, relationships feel like that: gorgeously complicated, full of unexpected twists and turns. And, just like the shoreline, what matters isn’t necessarily the smoothest path; it’s how you navigate the rough patches.

Growing up in Bar Harbor taught me a few things about that navigation:

  • Put in the Work, Even When It’s Messy. Have you ever tried walking across a tide pool in flip-flops? Relationships are like that—slippery, uneven, occasionally involving what feels like literal crabs nipping at your toes. The effort it takes to move carefully and thoughtfully is always worth it.

  • Celebrate the Small, Stubborn Beauty. Some of the most breathtaking things here—the soft, moss-covered rocks, the glow of the Milky Way above Sand Beach at midnight—are easy to miss if you don’t learn to slow down. The same goes for relationships: a text that says “drive safe” or the way someone laughs at your worst jokes. Those details? They matter.

  • Let the Tides Do Their Thing. Bar Harbor’s tides remind you of what you can’t control. They’re predictable, yes, but also completely out of your hands. Some relationships will ebb and flow. Some will stay. Recognizing that part of connection is allowing space for what’s meant to stay takes away a lot of unnecessary stress.

Every Story Has a Place

These days, I don’t roll my eyes when someone calls Bar Harbor “quaint” or “picturesque.” Sure, they’re right—it’s all that and more. But what they don’t see is how that beauty gets inside you, into every part of how you live and love. It’s in how I approach relationships—with the unshakable faith that the messy parts are often what make them worth it. It’s in how I encourage friends to stop pretending to be perfect in their dating profiles, or how I dive into discovering what makes someone tick instead of obsessing over first impressions.

The place that made me wasn’t afraid to show its cracks: messy shorelines, relentless winters, and lobster prices that occasionally make you cry. So maybe the people who last are the ones who embrace those cracks too. Because, much like Bar Harbor, the right relationship doesn’t need to be polished. It just needs to be real.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lighthouse to daydream about and an embarrassing high school story to laugh about with an old friend.