Traveling Together and Personal Development

Despite the challenges of spending 24 hours a day with someone for multiple days at a time, there is nothing that I recommend more for building relationships than travelling.

At this time in my life, I tend to go away for longer amounts of time whether volunteering on a farm, visiting family in South America or Europe, or just exploring a place. Over the past few years most of my travels have been with my fiance Mike.  Most recently I took a trip to Iceland leading a tour with my sister Emma. When you travel, you are forced to leave behind a lot of your excuses, with no where to run and nothing to do, traveling in a partnership can expose your strengths as well as your vulnerabilities.  

Here are a few learnings:  

Working through the Fighting:

Walking in the Ganges with Mike.

You will probably fight more than you are comfortable with or used to. OH MAN do Mike and I fight sometimes.  We can sometimes fight a lot. Life on the road has a way of surfacing issues much faster than life at home does. You are usually often in more uncomfortable circumstances, no routine, cramped spaces, hunger, lack of sleep can all increase your irritability. 

Don't let that scare you, in the end you get clarity. You let the issue breath, you come around and calm down. Cooler heads prevail and you find strategies for working together to prevent and keep these issues from repeating themselves. We have had tons of incidents, from forgetting the camera on the back of the chair at a restaurant to overpaying at a hotel, that usually constitute a fight.

Bottom Line: Not every fight is life or death. Sometimes it is okay to go to bed upset, when you wake up, you might see things in a different light. If you are committed to making the relationship work, not all fights are a threat to it's existence. 

Problem Solving:

Despite the inevitable panic when your passport is stolen or when your flight is cancelled and your hotel double booked your room on a day when the entire city is sold out so you have to sleep in a sketchy place, despite finding a giant bat eating spider above your head in the Amazon, you will prevail!

I have so many examples of problem solving and it's funny because problem solving could just be the granddaughter of fighting but, she has slept, feels safe and has eaten so she can operate abover her primal instincts and use her brain!

In these moments of having to work together, the focus is on one thing that you can both agree on, staying safe.

It is amazing how when you travel with someone you care about and you encounter a problem that is a threat to your well-being, you somehow seem to care more about keeping the other person safe... Maybe that is just me, but I am pretty sure my sister and my partner feel the same.

In emergency situations there is no time for the dramatic bullshit that a fight will entail. Urgency, strategy and cooperation can be found here. How do we get ourselves out of this? It doesn't matter who is at fault, this is the only question you will be asking. To be able to navigate these situations is an incredible strength of any partnership or friendship.

Bottom Line: YOU CAN NOT CREATE A BETTER TEAM-BUILDING EXPERIENCE. 

The Compromise:

Emma and I at the Skaftafell Glacier in
 Iceland after a fight the night before.

You might not truly understand compromise until you have no other option, I've never truly understood compromise until I started traveling with another person. Travel forces you to evaluate and make agreements on the most mundane and seemingly insignificant parts of your daily routine. You get really clear on who you are and how you operate. You also get really clear on what the other person needs to operate whether you like it or not.

It is in fact annoying, not being able to do what you want to do and see the things you want to see. I’ve experienced this while traveling with just about anyone besides myself. While traveling with my sister I learned that I was a bit high maintenence myself (which I thought I was the furthest thing from)! I like to wake up really early because I am excited to see the place we are in! For her, and to many others- she wants to sleep in. She has to wake up early every day in her "real life" so she savored the opportunity to rest up!

Bottom Line: These are great lessons that you will learn on how to live with another person despite their quirks (which are really just our judgements). Our true acceptance of each other’s habits will help us long after we return home.

Being by yourself.

Taking some alone time to go shopping in India!

When you spend every minute with another person, it doesn't matter how well you work together or how comfortable you feel around them.  You are going to want to get away from them, beginning to notice perhaps more than ever how important it is to have your own space. You will find yourself vying for 5 minutes of alone time. This can be a huge challenge when you are sharing a small hotel room and are in a country where you and your partner are the only two that can communicate.

There are simple things that you can do solve this. If you are in a safe place you could go for a run or walk on your own. Go to a cafe and just chill. Sometimes it means taking a real break and traveling alone for a few days or weeks. Even if all you can do is turn your backs to one another, plug in your earbuds and listen to your choice of music for 15 minutes, you've gotta do it.

We have been in places where it was not safe to go out alone and felt as if we were prisoners to our hotel room. In these instances, we spoke about our inevitable desire to have some self-care time very candidly. Our solution in times like these is usually one of us staying in room and the other going to the lobby for at least 2 hours. We usually will come back together feeling refreshed and ready to work together again.

Bottom line: You become flexible and bit unattached. You see more clearly how you are still two individuals who work well together, but must maintain their independence to a degree. You learn to respect this space and not mistake desire for separation with doubts. 

TAKE AWAYS

In the end, traveling in groups makes your logistics easier. You don't have to try and get into a bathroom stall with all of your belongings, you don't have to try and negotiate with a cab driver who is ripping you off alone. More importantly, traveling with someone else allows you to turn off, you can give your partner a chance to lead, choosing activities and eateries, when you just want to observe and go with the flow.

Traveling with a partner is not all about disagreeing and giving in to another persons preferences.

What traveling together will provide for you: life changing experiences, amazing views that you can recall together, incredibly funny stories that you can share with your friends and your family and a true understanding of what it means to work in partnership with someone. If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere. It's personal development. 

Mike and I in Peru trekking to Machu Picchu.