Better Vacations Part 1: Dream Together and Grow Closer

Vacations are meant to be relaxing and fun, so why do they sometimes cause conflict? Or why do you sometimes come home feeling empty?

It takes intention to dream, plan, and play on your vacation. Here’s a three-part series to help you become better Friends, better Partners, and better Lovers with your next vacation.

Do you know how to have fun on vacation? Sounds like a dumb question, right? Isn’t fun the whole purpose of vacation? But many people struggle. Fight. And feel deep disappointment because they didn’t get the vacation of their dreams.

For many years our family vacation began as we drove out of our driveway and I began to cry. It became such a pattern that my kids called it out: I guess we’re on vacation because Mom is crying. I was classic at doing too much for the vacation prep, then cried out of exhaustion.

When I was 20ish and working as a nanny, I got a front row seat for the kind of struggles people face on vacation. The parents got home from a week-long trip to Europe and the mom slammed down her suitcases in the front entry where the kids and I said hello. “I’m never going anywhere with him again,” her tight lips whispered in my ear as she headed upstairs.

Vacations are high stakes and we all go into them with secret expectations. I’m not even talking about the expectations we don’t communicate to our sweetheart. I’m talking about how many people go on a trip and expect the vacation to be life changing.

When the trip ends and you return to your same humdrum life, you feel deflated. You have the post-vacation blues, and you don’t even know why.

Today I’m going to attempt to give you a better vacation.

Better because you’ll know how to create a dream for your vacation, that may not change your life, but will add to your life. Better because I’ll show you how to have a definitive line between dreaming about your vacation and sitting down to have an actual plan. And better because I’ll remind you how to play more on your vacation and I’ll point out the stumbling blocks that tend to block people from having fun.

In order to talk about your dream, your plan, and your playtime on vacation, I’m going to return to our conversation about the three distinct roles I see in every relationship I encounter. Those roles are Partner, Friend, and Lover.

As a reminder:

• The Friend in your relationship wants to share stories and gives you a homebase of belonging.
• The Partner in your relationship bonds when you share a project and you feel like teammates.
• The Lover in your relationship wants to share a new experience and that excitement and novelty fire up your chemistry.

Let’s identify the 3 Roles when it comes to making your vacation better.

• The Friend is good at dreaming
• The Partner is good at planning
• The Lover is good at doing
• And we’ll circle back to the Friend who is good at remembering your vacation

Let’s talk about each; one by one.

 

Dreaming about your vacation with The Friend

One of the core things that will make a great vacation is to dream with your sweetheart. When you dream together, your vacation is taking shape. Together. Your dreams = your imagination of what you want your relationship to become.

When you reveal your dreams with an open heart and you listen attentively to your sweetheart’s dreams, you have the best chance at building a cohesive dream that overlaps.

Have you ever dreamed with your sweetheart about a vacation?

Here’s how to fail at shared vacation dreaming: Instead of listening attentively, you just go on and on about your own dreams for your own vacation. You stand a good chance of drowning your sweetheart’s dreams. Maybe you’ve felt your dreams take a dive when your sweetheart doesn’t listen to your dreams.

This is why dreaming is a skill at which you can improve.

Hopefully your dreams are a little out of reach…which means it will take a stretch to get them. So when you reveal these to your sweetheart, it can feel a little vulnerable.

Give your sweetheart a reminder that vulnerability is good for your relationship connection but scary to enter into.

You could say something like, “I want to tell you about a dream vacation I’ve been pondering, but I feel vulnerable because it’s a little out there.”

This is a warning flag to your sweetheart: tread lightly with my heart.

If you want your sweetheart to keep telling you about their dreams, the best thing you can do is to listen. Listen so that your sweetheart wants to tell you more and more and more about their dream.

We all need that hug of reassurance. A phrase something like, “Wow! That’s a big dream! I love that you want that and I love that you would pick me to be beside you.”

Then ponder where your dream overlaps with your sweetheart’s dream. This is where you can really build your future and thus your intimacy because moments are invitations to connect. When your sweetheart shares with you a dream for their vacation, they’re offering you an invitation to connect with them.

I always say there’s two big ways to create memories and intimacy with your sweetheart. The first is the things you do over and over, like the way you say hello and goodbye.

But the other way to create memories and intimacy are the special—standout—moments and a vacation is prime territory for big special moments. Today, as we talk about vacations, think about how a dream for your vacation is also a dream for your relationship and the intimacy you will share.

The role of Friend in your relationship is deepened by understanding each other. When you have a chance to see and be with your sweetheart in a new situation, you get to understand something new about them.

That new understanding is a pocket of belonging just waiting for you to crawl inside. Think about the invitations that your dreams offer to increase your intimacy. Listen for the ways your sweetheart is inviting you to crawl inside a new kind of intimacy with them.

Where does your sweetheart’s dream appeal to you? Where can you cozy up and dream alongside your sweetheart? Toss out these ideas and open even more doors as you build this dream together.

You don’t have to desire all the elements of your sweetheart’s dream, however. Like Doug and Jamee Simons talked to us recently, when you give permission to your sweetheart to go their own direction, that’s giving permission to your sweetheart for them to become their best self. You’re offering the understanding: you want to do some things I don’t want to do.

I want you to do those things. I don’t want to hold you back. But I do want to be here to hear all about it when you return.

When it comes to the Lover role (or the doing of your vacation), you bring an icky vibe when you’re doing something you don’t want to do. Your sweetheart can feel your reluctance.

So, as you and your sweetheart are sharing dreams for your vacation, make it clear where those times are in the vacation that you’d rather bow out. You want your sweetheart to have their fun, so warn them, “I’m gonna cut you loose to enjoy that on your own. I don’t want to be the wet noodle on your boat ride, barfing off the side.”

What dreams do you have for a vacation that you’ve never articulated to your sweetheart? How can you listen to your sweetheart in a way that will invite them to tell you about their dream vacations

 

Here’s a warning and a suggestion:

Warning: When you share your dream, your sweetheart might say something like, “Great idea, but we can’t afford that,” or “Yeah! Like we’re ever gonna take scuba diving classes!” This is your sweetheart “yes, butting you.” (Here’s the whole episode I did about why we tend to rain on our sweetheart’s parade.)

In short, the reason your sweetheart might respond this way is that they are trying to protect you (or maybe themselves) from a disappointment. It’s our lizard brain at work. Remember when we talked about the Lizard Brain? It’s whole job is to protect you, but it’s very unenlightened, and it tends to show up as a real killjoy.

I’m warning you about this so that you can deflect it if/when it arrives. The best way to diffuse the fear of the “yes, but” comments from your sweetheart is to call out the fear without inviting the fear to the party.

You could say something like, “I know you’re trying to protect me from disappointment when you say things like that. But it doesn’t feel good. I’d love it if, just for a moment, you’d set all the practicalities aside and just dream with me. Dream with me for the fun of dreaming. Would you do that?”

Suggestion: Create a Dream-Only Zone. If you want to communicate a dream to your sweetheart or if you want to hear about your sweetheart’s dreams, carve out a protected space where fears aren’t welcome.

You could say something like, “You know I think dreaming is good for our relationship even if we never get a chance to realize the dream. When I hear about your dreams, I get access to a part of you that surprises me. I like being included in your dreams.

“When I get to tell you about my dreams and you’re willing to be curious about why I want to do that, or you ask me to tell you even more about my dream, I feel loved and seen. I feel like you want to know more about me.”

 

There are no mind readers

You can’t read your sweetheart’s mind. And they can’t read yours. Dreaming together helps you understand your sweetheart better.

When you hear a radical dream like, “I just want to wake up when I want, go swimming when I want, and eat what I want when I want,” that could help you understand your sweetheart’s frustration when you’re on a vacation with your little kids and your sweetheart screams, “Everybody just figure it out on your own!”

A tired parent has the simple dream of autonomy. If you bring your kids on vacation with you, the dream for complete “what I want, when I want” isn’t realistic. But the dream can inform your planning. Maybe you each want to take a day of the vacation for your personal hedonism. Or maybe you want to pack a bunch of independent snacks so the kids can be more self-sufficient in feeding themselves.

Think how much differently you’ll see your sweetheart on vacation when they erupt, “I’m tired of all you people!” You won’t take it personally. You’ll realize your sweetheart just wishes they could have some of that “what I want, when I want it,” bliss.

Here’s an example:

I go away to a writer’s conference every year smack dab in the middle of when my family likes to plan a vacation. I felt so seen when I heard my husband talking to my daughter and he said, “That’s when your mom has Dollbaby Camp, let’s find another weekend.” He was keeping both my dreams alive: I wanted to go write with The Dollbabies, and I wanted to go camping with my kids.

When you protect the dream of your sweetheart’s vacation, you’re strengthening The Friend role inside your relationship.