Better Vacations Part 2: Plan Together and Reduce Stress

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.

Last week, we talked about how you can strengthen the Friend role in your relationship by cultivating a shared dream. Now let’s transition to The Partner and talk about the logistics of making that dream come to life.

The Partner is great at plans. Checklists and spreadsheets? That is The Partner’s jam.

Can I offer you a caution however? I see some couples get into trouble with the transition from dreaming to planning. If you’re ready to make that leap, I suggest you call it out specifically, “Sweetheart, I’m so excited about this vacation! Are you OK if I begin to make some definitive plans?”

Then, do that thing The Friend does so well and listen. Truly listen. Is your sweetheart actually ready to move into planning mode? There are tons of reasons your sweetheart might not be ready as you are, and we can talk about these in another episode. But trust me here, listen to your sweetheart’s reluctance and don’t rush the plan.

But if your sweetheart is eager, yes! Get that plan going. Let’s talk about all the ways The Partner role in your relationship can be strengthened when you make a great plan.

 

Your partnership is built on 2 skills that you can learn and improve: Leading and following

Turning your dreams into reality often requires some planning. The Partner is great at planning.
Here’s the thing, who’s gonna make the plan? This is the leader.

If you are not the leader, how can you follow WELL? Because following? Following is a hugely beneficial skill. The worker bees of the world are all followers. Unsung heroes and heroines.

 

Let’s talk about leadership first

The leader has a vision: we’ll need to get plane tickets, passports. Where will we stay? How do we want to spend our time?

Part of leadership is noticing the rhythm between you and your sweetheart when you cross this line between dreaming and making firm plans. Does your sweetheart need more time to dream? Or maybe you are dragging your feet because you like the dreaming, but actual planning feels like work?

A good leader notices this line and can dance back and forth. A good leader keeps articulating the overall vision and then translates that vision into an action item. Here’s a couple examples:

“We know we want to go camping, but it’s prime camping season. I’m a little concerned we won’t be able to find a place to pitch our tent. Should we make a reservation somewhere? Or take our chances and realize we run the risk of being stuck without a good spot?”

Or

“We’ve booked our AirBnB within walking distance of the ocean. Do we want to just relax each day and take it wave by wave? Or do you think it would be nice to book an adventure or two and we should start looking for what fun things are available there?”

The leader drives the bus, but doesn’t make every decision alone. Who tends to be the leader in your relationship? How does that leadership style work for your relationship?

 

Now let’s talk about how to be supportive to your relationship as a follower

I was very cautionary about that leap from dreaming to planning because it’s typically the leader who is ready to jump first. I encourage leaders to wait until the follower is ready to jump on board. But now I’m going to encourage the follower to be ready to make that leap before you’re actually ready.

A good follower senses that their sweetheart has some momentum and the very first thing they can do is: don’t get in the way. They encourage their sweetheart to go for it. If you are the follower, I’m not telling you to surrender your preferences and your dreams. I’m simply inviting you to be grateful to your leaderly sweetheart who is ready to make those dreams and preferences a reality.

Followers often have a higher amount of fear or trepidation. But fear doesn’t go away just because you wait to make plans. In fact, the opposite is true: action is the antidote to fear. Your sweetheart is ready to leap. All you need to do is grab onto your sweetheart and let their momentum take you somewhere.

Then, as a follower, the next thing you can do is to be encouraging. If my husband is ready to make some plans, I try hard to thank him. Then I remind him, “As long as I’m with you, I know I’ll have a good time.” I say this more so to remind myself of that truth than to remind David.

Sometimes, as a follower, if I don’t have a strong preference, and David does, I’ll start to tell myself stories like, “What if I don’t actually like it there?” or “What if that hike is too hard for me?” These are my fears talking, right?

Rather than let my fears pollute our vacation, I talk back to my fears. Because, after all, the function of our fear is merely to warn us of an impending problem. If I address the problem, I’ve heeded the function of my fear.

Here’s what it sounds like when I talk back to my fear: “I can tell you’re worried, Rebecca, about if the place is gonna be nice or not. Here’s the thing: in order to guarantee you’ll like the place, there’s a lot of research needed. Typcially, you hate that sort of research. Would you rather do the research, Rebecca, to make sure you like it? Or do you just wanna go with whatever David picks?”

Usually all it takes is for me to notice my fear. And to notice that life is filled with choices. Yes, I could pick the place. But that takes energy and decisions. As soon as I remind myself of this, I am happy with whatever David chooses. Because I hate choices and I’m pretty good at making the best out of any situation. So my fear is satiated.

Then I address my second fear: what if the hike he chooses is too hard for me? This is a real fear because my husband is physically stronger and more agile than I am. So I ask him, “David, what if the hike you pick is too hard for me?”

Then my sweetheart of a husband says, “Then we’ll turn around and find something else fun to do.” Done.

 

Did you notice how part of the job of being a follower is managing your own emotions?

I have many couples in my office who struggle because each person is expecting the other to manage their emotions and help to keep them regulated. Remember those hidden expectations: I want a vacation from my LIFE. So we give over our emotional regulation to our sweetheart thinking, “Make me happy.”

Um, that doesn’t work.

Here’s what I want you to understand: leadership takes a lot of energy. Driving the bus isn’t glamorous. You get blamed when you’re the leader. You get asked things like, “Where are we going next?” or “What are we eating for dinner?”

The leader has made a plan and they may look calm and confident on the outside, but I can assure you that every leader is also bearing the weight of expectations. That leader wants to make you happy. That’s why they’ve made the plan they’ve made. They are hoping that their plan will make you glow.

But this I know for sure: it won’t always work. Sometimes life isn’t fun. Sometimes you get a flat tire, or you miss your plane connection, or you get to the campsite and it’s pouring rain. Just because your sweetheart made a plan doesn’t mean you are guaranteed to be happy.

 

Happiness is an inside job

And it’s the job of The Lover, which we’ll talk about next week. But before we leave the role of The Partner on your vacation, let’s clarify just a few things:

1. When you sense that your sweetheart is ready to cross that line between dreaming and planning, support them. It takes huge effort to plan logistics. Get out of the way. Fan the flames of action, rather than dousing those flames with your wet noodle energy.
2. If, however, you don’t feel like you’ve had a chance to dream enough, speak up. “Could we wait to nail down the specifics until Wednesday? I can feel myself resisting a plan and I want to give myself time for what I really want to do to bubble up so I can see it.”
3. Clarity. Once you’ve stepped into true Partner Mode and you’re ready to make a plan, define the tasks. This isn’t something that happens naturally in relationship. It’s a business skill, right? But how much better is your trip going to go if you are both clear about who is doing what? Make things clear: who’s in charge of making reservations? Doing research? Packing?
4. Follow up. “Follow up” has the word follow in it, but it’s actually a leadership task. If your sweetheart said they’d do the research, you can lead by asking them, “Can we talk about all this again on Thursday while we have coffee?” This is good leadership because it keeps the momentum going and provides some accountability and a timeline.
5. Budgeting. I don’t want to get bogged down here, but budgeting is a huge part of having a successful vacation. There’s nothing worse than having a great time only to come home and be panicked by the mountain of debt you just created on your credit card. This dooms the final step of a great vacation: remembering (which we’ll talk about in a bit). Instead of remembering the great time you had, you remember that was the vacation that sent you into a financial tailspin and caused all kinds of conflict.
6. Gratitude. This is huge. Planning is a huge job. Let your sweetheart know you see them doing that huge job.

You can have a rock solid Partnership whether you are the leader or the follower. In most couples that I coach, people take turns flowing in and out of leadership. Here’s what that might look like:

How about if I take the lead on the meals for our vacation and you take the lead on accommodations and adventures? This is great. You each get a chance to take ownership for part of the vacation, and you each get a chance to offload some of the mental load that comes with leadership.

Here’s an example:

I remember a trip David and I took to Spain when our children were small. My mother died a year previously, and my step-father gave us a vacation inheritance so we could take the trip. It was a really sweet thing for him to do.

But our budget was tight. Every night, I ran through the receipts and the pesetas I had in my coin purse. It was a big job keeping us on budget, but now I have this really rich experience of handling those specific coins and bills from Spain and the work actually became part of the joy in my memory.