Vacation with a partner is usually endowed with special meaning. It seems that these days, when we get the opportunity to devote ourselves to each other, will dissolve past grievances and give a romantic mood. The dream comes true and brings disappointment. Why you should be more realistic about holidays, says therapist Susan Whitbourne.
In our fantasies, a vacation together, as in a classic drama, is formed with the observance of the trinity: place, time and action. And these three components must be perfect.
However, if the best “place and time” can be booked and bought, then the “action” category (how exactly the trip will proceed) is more difficult to control. You may begin to be disturbed by thoughts about work or suddenly want to be alone. From here, a stone’s throw to feelings of guilt in front of a partner.
Researchers from the Breda University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands) have tracked how the psychological state changes during the holidays. They used the day reconstruction method, inviting 60 participants, who took at least five days of vacation from July to September, to jot down their impressions every evening and mark a mood graph.
In the last days of vacation, almost all of us experience an emotional decline and slight apathy.
At the beginning of the trip, all couples felt better and happier than before the vacation. For those who rested from 8 to 13 days, the peak of joyful experiences fell on the interval between the third and eighth days, after which there was a decline, and a day or two before the end of the trip, the mood reached a minimum. These days, most people felt depressed, the rhythm of vacation life ceased to please them, and there were more quarrels between them.
Couples who rested for only a week were almost immediately covered with a cheerful holiday wave. By the middle of the week, the intensity of the first positive emotions subsided slightly, but not as significantly as in the groups that took a longer vacation.
It turns out that if the vacation lasts no more than seven days, we are better able to maintain a joyful mood. Holidays longer than one week provoke a deterioration in mood in the middle of the trip. However, regardless of the length of rest in the last days, almost all of us experience an emotional decline and slight apathy. And it is these memories that run the risk of poisoning the experience of the trip, at least until the moment we begin to experience holiday nostalgia.
Therefore, if you feel that you are tired of everything, you should not give in to the first impulse and rush to pack your suitcase or rush to the airport, pretending to avoid traffic jams, although in fact you are running away from your own feelings and emotions.
Life does not obey our plans, and it is impossible to reserve a «week of happiness»
Listen to yourself. What do you want the most? If you need to be alone with yourself, tell your partner about it. Take a walk, drink a cup of coffee alone, remember the bright moments of the past days. Later, you can share these memories with your partner.
The diaries of all participants in the study show that the positive emotions that we get while on vacation with a loved one outweigh the negative ones. However, no one spoke of the holidays as a time that would radically change relationships in a couple or help to look at old things with a new look, which travel blogs often promise.
Life does not obey our plans, and it is impossible to reserve a “week of happiness”. Excessive expectations associated with a vacation can play a cruel joke. And, on the contrary, by allowing ourselves and the partner to live through all the feelings during this period, we will ease the emotional stress at the end of the trip and keep warm memories of it.
About the author: Susan Krauss Whitborn is a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.