Reasons Why You Should Travel With Your Partner

Before we met, we always dreamed of traveling. It was not until we started dating when we made our dreams become a reality. It started with a 48 hour trip from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and escalated to a honeymoon in Saint Lucia and traveling throughout Europe for three months. Every trip we have taken we have grown more as individuals and as a couple. Most of our favorite memories have been from our trips together and we cherish those moments almost everyday. Some may enjoy traveling solo, but we never want to travel without the other. Given our experiences, here are my reasons why you should travel with your partner.

Learn Each Others Strengths and Weaknesses

Whether you have been dating a month, one year, or married for five years, you can always learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses. What is more important than learning them, is how to work with their strengths and weaknesses. Can you apply one persons strength when the other one is weak and vise versa?

I know how to drive a manual car, whereas Adam does not, so I had to be the one to drive the entire time during our Europe trip in Italy. Where I am weak, Adam is strong. I tend to get frustrated at giving directions or just give poor ones. When driving throughout Italy, I would have been weak if it were not for my co-captain directing me to our destinations.

sailing together at Lake Garda, Italy

Team Work Makes the Dream Work

Traveling is not always that picture perfect vacation. Things happen when you least expect them to. Your airline loses your luggage, you get a flat tire in the middle of the road, you lose your wallet, the list goes on. Can you work together to solve the problem at hand or will you bicker at each other under the stress?

We are definitely not perfect, but we do always work together to solve problems when they arise during our travels. Like getting lost in the gardens of Versailles looking for Marie Antoinette’s Estate. We went off track when we saw something beautiful and never found our way back for another two hours. As frustrated as we were, we were at least in the mess together and ended up having an amazing day in Versailles.

Enjoying the Gardens of Versailles

Learn Each Others True Character When Pushed to the Limit

When you start dating, your true colors do not show just yet. You are still getting those fillers out, trying to impress one another. When you travel, the unexpected always happens when you least expect it because you are at your most relaxed state, so what happens when you get pushed to the limit and let your true colors shine? Do you love your partner when they make three wrong turns in a row? Do you love your partner when they are so mad they makes noises you never knew existed? You get to learn more about each other, the real characteristics of the person you are dating.

Our first trip together was driving to Los Angeles, California from Las Vegas, Nevada. We were going to watch Adam’s favorite hockey team, the St. Louis Blues play against the Los Angeles Kings. Adam told me that I might see a different side of him, his hockey side. I did that night and I loved his enthusiasm and frustration of his team’s performance. In addition to seeing Adam in a different light, we both saw each other’s character when we arrived to our car to find the battery dead. Our first big travel pickle as a couple. We handled it well and ended up making it back home in Vegas safe and sound that night. Traveling brought more of our characteristics into the light and we loved each other for them.

Blues vs. Kings game

Reach Beyond Your Comfort Zone Together

Enjoy something the two of you never even dreamed of doing. Did you ever imagine skydiving? Do it! Did you every imagine camping at a National Park? Do it! When you reach beyond your comfort zone with your partner you have someone you trust to lean on. To help you learn and do something you thought you would never do in your lifetime. In the end you will learn about each other, yourself and what you are capable of achiveing.

Traveling to Europe for three months on a budget was not easy for us, but talking to people and hosts we just met was even harder than our budget. We had to go beyond our comfort zone of staying in hotels and stay with people we connected with online. We found two programs where you take a leap of faith and trust in total strangers, Couchsurfing and Workaway (to read about our experience of Couchsuring and Workaway click here). For almost three months we met and stayed in strangers homes and when we said our goodbyes we were saying goodbye to a friend, not a stranger. We learned to get out of our comfort zone of being shy and conservative. We had to be outgoing and talkative to people we just met – that was a big deal to us. We learned that it was not as hard as we thought and we were capable of reaching out and becoming friends to total strangers in a foreign land.

Improves Intimacy

This is a very important part of a relationship and lets face it, we are all guilty of letting work and life get in the way of connecting with your partner. When you are in your everyday routine you can get stuck in the motions. It is quite easy, you are comfortable with your life, you are tired from working long hours, the list goes on. When you travel, you are on vacation, even if you are away from home for one day or five miles. It breaks you out of your everyday life and all of a sudden you feel a weight lifted and feel like you are going on a first date all over again. We don’t fully understand what it is about traveling that improves intimacy, but it does.

For us, we are relaxed, we escaped work or the city and nothing else matters anymore, except enjoying each others company. We hold hands in public, we kiss in public, it is like we are the only two people in the world when in reality there are tourists all around us. And what is more romantic than hearing the waves crash against the ocean? It is ten times better and more romantic than listening to sirens go by your apartment window, or watching your daily television show to fall asleep to. So, what happens when your back home from traveling? We can tell you that it is not like Vegas where what happens during vacation, stays at vacation. No, what we ignite during our traveling and vacations carries over to our everyday life and that is healthy and important. We definitely are not complaining about traveling for this beneficial reason and neither should you.

Loving our private infinity pool at Jade Mountain, St. Lucia

Rediscover Your Relationship

You may think that rediscovering your relationship is the same as improving intimacy, but it is not. Rediscovering your relationship is about falling in love all over again. When you travel you are relaxed, you do not have the internet and televisions to distract you (at least you shouldn’t), it is just you and your partner enjoying your destination together. So, with that being said, you talk and you enjoy activities together and then you talk some more. Soon you start talking less about where you are and what your seeing and talk more about reminiscing how the trip reminds you of your first kiss or the first time you went hiking together. You rediscover all the reasons why you fell in love with your partner because you see them in a different light when you travel. You see them at their purest form, their full happiness.

We love traveling together because we are always discovering new places while reminiscing over old memories. Almost every time we hike, we remember our very first hike together where we watched the Las Vegas Strip light up the sky. In that moment we both knew we had a special relationship going. We remember all those butterfly feelings in our stomach in that moment because we were falling in love. Or when Adam sets up the tent and builds a fire, I cannot help but have googily eyes like it’s the first time I have ever seen him. Not that we need the reminder, but traveling helps us reconnect all the reasons why we fell in love and how lucky we are to have each other – to create more memories to cherish the next time we travel.

Hiking at Great Falls Park

Enjoy Every Special Moment

This is a no brainer, you are on vacation enjoying countless moments that you will be able to cherish together forever. Every time we travel we never have to tell stories to each other of what they missed out on, instead we get to share the stories together. We would not want anybody else by our side when we see a cheetah in the wild for the first time, or when we hike to the highest point on an island. At the end of each experience we get to hold each others hand, look each other in the eyes, share a kiss and say, “wow this is amazing! I am so happy we got to do this together”. We love sharing those moments together of pure bliss. This is definitely our favorite reason why we travel with each other – adding more experiences to cherish for a lifetime.

Reenacting a Star Wars scene!

Grow As a Stronger Couple

Overall, every reason we just discussed are all going to make you grow stronger as a couple. We always come back home changed, we just spent days encountering and enjoying new things and we were able to do them all together which binds us. What we learned about each other, what we faced together, it all goes into effect in our everyday lives making us a happier, healthier couple than before.

Being goofy in Dallas, Texas!

At the end of the day, life’s greatest adventure is not where you travel, but who you travel with.