Ah, the first vacation as a couple. It’s a tried and true milestone of a relationship. And the post-first couple’s vacation break up…is less of a milestone and more of a dead-end. But, it’s pretty tried and true.
Relationships are delicate and require a lot of work and TLC to make them successful. This is true throughout the lifetime of a relationship, but I think the TLC part is most important at the beginning of a relationship. You need to know what your relationship is ready for and what steps forward could kill a burgeoning love. Knowing when and when not to take a trip with your new man is a key component of setting that perfect pace for your relationship. Here are some pointers to help you out.
You’ve done a lot of friend hanging
A trip isn’t something you do in the early parts of a relationship. It shouldn’t happen right after you meet his buddies. Ideally, you’ve spent a lot of time with his pals and have learned what he’s like with them. And you want to get to know stories about him and how his crew acts as a gang. Those stories are very telling and so is his group’s mentality. If you’re not into either, it might be a sign that this isn’t the right guy for you and definitely not the right guy to go on a trip with. After a week, or even a long weekend, the guy from those stories will come out. Guaranteed. If you don’t want to meet him, end it now and find a guy who doesn’t have a side you want to avoid.
You do nothing together
The beginning of a relationship is exciting because you’re meeting someone who could be very important to you for the rest of your life. But, it’s also exciting because you’re doing so much fun stuff together. In the first months of dating, the dates are well planned and exciting. After a while, though, you guys just start living life together and there’s a lot of down time. Wait until you get to the down time part of your relationship before you plan a trip together because as amazing as vacations are, there’s a ton of downtime. You know, the part of your relationship that doesn’t make it onto your Instagram feed. You want to be sure that you enjoy doing nothing together before you invest time and money into a spendy trip. Otherwise, you’ll have wasted all those dollars and minutes being bored next to someone you used to like.
You both are planning
When it comes to a first trip together, you both should be equally excited. I’m not going to name names here, but many moons ago I dated a man who I thought was all kinds of perfect. Well, I thought that until our first trip together. He agreed to go away for a long four-day weekend and then I set off planning. I put together an amazing weekend for us filled with great food, massages and lots of romance. But, once we got to our hotel, all he did was complain and watch TV. He didn’t want to do anything that I had planned. It turns out that we had completely different ideas of what made for a good trip. We should have both been involved in the planning and worked out our differences before either of us put down a credit card. If you can’t both get on the same page during planning, abort mission. It’s going to be a miserable long weekend watching a Catfish marathon. Trust me!
Hope you have a lot of fun romantic travel in your future, my loves. When a romantic trip is good, it’s the absolute best!
Photo credit: Global Jet / CC BY
