Nobody tells you that traveling as a couple gets easier and harder at the same time.
Easier because you stop auditioning. Early trips carry a kind of low-grade pressure — you want everything to go well, you’re still figuring out who the other person is when things don’t go to plan, you’re performing a version of yourself that can handle a missed connection with grace. Twenty-six years in, that’s gone. If the hotel is terrible, we say so. If one of us is exhausted and needs a slow morning, we take one. There’s no performance left.
Harder because you know each other well enough to know exactly which buttons to press, and travel has a talent for finding them. Hunger, heat, jet lag, a delayed flight, a rental car that’s not where the app said it would be — any one of these is fine. All of them together, on the second day of a trip, after a bad night’s sleep? That’s where twenty-six years of accumulated grievances can surface with remarkable efficiency.
We’ve learned to see it coming. There’s a specific kind of silence that means one of us is close to the edge. We know it. We’ve stopped pretending we don’t.
Here’s what actually changes over that much time together: your tolerance for the wrong kind of trip gets very low, and your ability to course-correct gets very high.
We’ve done the trips we thought we were supposed to do. We’ve sat in restaurants because the guidebook said we should. We’ve stayed in places that looked better in photos. We’ve done tours that moved too fast and skipped things that deserved more time. Early on, we’d finish those trips and say it was fine. Now we just don’t book them.
Twenty-six years gives you enough data to know what you actually like. We like moving at a pace that lets you have a second coffee somewhere. We like finding places that weren’t on any list. We like having dinner late, staying longer than planned, and being the people at the table who clearly aren’t in a hurry. We don’t like structured itineraries that treat a city like a checklist.
Chris finds the energy of a place first. Knows within twenty minutes of arriving whether it’s going to be a good trip. James builds the architecture around that — the reservations, the logistics, the backup plans. It’s an arrangement that emerged over years without us ever deciding it. It just became how we travel. Sometimes we flip roles, but we each know what needs to be done, without ever really delegating a task.
The thing we’d tell anyone starting out: don’t try to travel the same way. Figure out what each of you is actually good at, and let that be the division of labour. Resentment on a trip usually comes from one person doing all the work or one person feeling like a passenger. Neither is sustainable across twenty-six years.
We still disagree. We still have the occasional terrible afternoon. We still occasionally pick the wrong restaurant.
But we go home together, and we start planning the next one before the jet lag wears off. That part hasn’t changed at all.
