Want To Marry Someone? Travel With Them First

A trip is cheaper than a divorce

It’s not until the flight is delayed, the luggage is lost, and that significant bout of gastro that we’ll truly know who our partners are. In sickness and health, in boredom and mild states of panic, travel has a way of bringing out the best and worst in everyone and as such should be one of the foundational experiences when deciding if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone.

Things will go wrong.

And in doing so, these things will push us out of our comfort zones into that nebulous place of vulnerability, one without makeup or modesty where all our ugly bits and pieces are on display for each other to see.

The first test that travel exposes our relationship to is at the airport. Flying is a uniquely painful experience, one which can reveal the true nature of a person in subtle ways. For example, do they stand up and queue before their boarding zone is called? Then congratulations, you dodged a bullet, feel free to let your friends and family know that the wedding is off and it was never meant to be.

There are other things, of course. How they speak to the flight attendants, if they recline their seat immediately after take off, and whether or not they stand up before the seatbelt sign is switched off will all paint a better picture of someone than any amount of movie dates or coffee breaks ever will.

Thanks to the modern condition, there is only so much time we get to spend together as couples. The rest of it is gobbled up by things like work, the gym, and various public transportation systems.

Travel changes all of that. You’re no longer ships in the night but sailors stuck on the same, oftentimes leaky boat, surrounded by nothing but the ocean with the meagre rations left for you in the hotel minibar. You’ll spend every waking moment of the day together. You’ll eat the same food, see the same sights, and get to experience all the little annoying habits that you can no longer hide or escape from.

Still happy?

Great, now let’s throw a tropical cyclone into the mix, one that hits Cuba and leaves you trapped in your casa particular while streets flood, windows break, and a country falls to pieces around you. There is a flight you have to catch back to Mexico in forty-eight hours and no one seems to know when, how, or if you’re going to be able to get there in time.

While this might sound terrible [it was], exposing your relationship to this kind of stress is a healthy thing. It’s a way of seeing whether or not you’ll bend or break under similar life pressures. Will you fall to pieces or become a stronger, more collaborative unit, supporting each other while you eat ropa vieja for the third day in a row?

Much like our relationships, travel also exposes our stomachs to a variety of new, wonderful, and oftentimes dangerous things. You’d be hard-pressed to find a traveller who hasn’t come down with some equivalent of Delhi belly and there is nothing quite like sharing a cramped hotel room with someone who is doing what the Germans colourfully call brechdurchfall.

Yes, that means shooting from both ends.

You will hear things, see things, and smell things that there is no coming back from. Any physical attraction you thought you had will be gone, just like that, and you have to hope there is still something left in that shattered wreck of a human to love. Otherwise, you know that your relationship was only a superficial one, unable to see past the end of that roll of toilet paper.

But if you look at your partner as they lie splayed out on that hotel bed, a green tinge to their face and a haunted look in their eyes that waivers between ‘I hope they have Netflix’ and ‘kill me now’ and you still find yourself hopelessly, madly in love with them, then congratulations, you’ve seen your partner at their absolute worst and a ring should fit quite nicely around their finger.

That’s one of the beautiful things about travelling. It strips us down to our core being and breaks down the walls which we spend so much time building around ourselves. To share this experience with someone is to find out who they really are and it’s much better to find out before the wedding than on the honeymoon. You’ll save yourself a lot of time, energy, and heartbreak that way.