Traveling With Your Partner

In the classic film Two for the Road, Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney take the audience through the course of a relationship mostly through the travels of its two romantic leads.

That movie crosses my mind often when I’m asked how to evaluate a couple’s chances of long-term success. The fact is that every couple should travel together before they decide to travel through life together. When two people are away from the familiar day-to-day routine their underlying reality shows through.

How do each of them handle travel deadlines, inconveniences, rude personnel, and often the challenging unexpected? A trip can reveal the underlying competence of one or both of the travelers and more importantly, the temperaments of each when stressed in a way that is unlikely to come up in the comfort of home.

Missed connections or disastrous accommodations can be great relationship lessons learned and can also provide a blueprint for handling differences. Travels can also provide an important test of how, and if, a couple is capable of the three relationship musts: cooperation, communication and compromise.

Some of the truly great couples have dramatic stories of their first trips together, which were anything but unmitigated successes. One couple I know, missed the plane for their first trip abroad and had to stay at a nameless sterile airport motel with no assurance that they would get a flight out the next day.

For many, that night alone could have been a “deal breaker” with accusations of whose fault it was they missed the plane, who booked the flight too close to the end of the workday, who spent too much time packing, and of what they would be missing in Paris. Instead, they decided to weave the semi-tragedy into their “Unforgettable Travels” story. They also vowed, somewhat like Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, that they would never, ever miss another flight again. They used the experience as a life lesson, identifying who would take responsibility for booking and scheduling future trips, and who would handle the mechanics of actually getting them to the airport on time.

Sometimes, the reaction of a partner to the travails of travel is neither light-hearted nor admirable and can be a warning sign as to what lies ahead when life itself is less than perfect. This is worth noting if the one you love becomes shockingly unlovable when everything is not like home or not just exactly to their liking. When people feel free to be abusive to their traveling companions or to the help just because they are in other locations or cultures, it is probably just a matter of time until he or she would feel free to be abusive to the ones they allegedly love at home.

Other lessons that travel reveals is what each person would choose to do with free time. If one partner chooses mountain climbing while the other chooses museums, accommodations must be made – or a new life companion found. The variations on solutions for the differences are innumerable: taking turns with first choices on alternate days, spending part of the day separately and the rest together, or even taking a full day apart. These are acceptable compromises, if they are workable for both parties.

Even the choice of destinations themselves can be revealing. If one person wants to go to India and the other is ill at ease outside Indiana, someone has to change – or possibly change partners. Here, too, a couple can alternate first choices of vacation locales, travel separately, or try to find a middle ground as a first step, like Hawaii, before tackling foreign lands.

In addition to new experiences and leisure time, travel can provide two important life lessons for would be couples. First, if one or both of the partners feels the sacrifices or the compromises involved in vacationing together are just too great, then it is better to find out what one would or would not give up for the other before houses and children and careers are involved.

Second, if each person in a relationship is able to stay open to new experiences outside his or her comfort zone, and support each other – whether strolling in the Borghese Gardens sipping cappuccino or running miles in the Frankfurt airport within minutes of a gate closing – they are likely to be a happy and successful Two for the Road for life.

Tagged as: relationship, relationship advice, traveling, marriage and commitment

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Gemma Allen is a partner in Ladden & Allen, Chartered, and has practiced family law for most of her career. Ms. Allen has written more than 50 articles and lectured on topics that include divorce, child support, maintenance, mediation, cohabitation, women and money, and reconciliation. She helps you navigate modern relationships in “Relationship Gems.”