By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
It often starts as something small. One of you mentions a trip, a long weekend somewhere new, a friend's wedding abroad, the kind of holiday you used to take without a second thought. The other goes quiet, or finds a reason it isn't quite the right time. Said once, it barely registers. Said for the third or fourth summer in a row, it starts to feel like something else entirely, a referendum on how much you want the same things, or even how much you want each other.
If you have found yourselves stuck in this particular tug of war, with holiday brochures or flight searches becoming a flashpoint rather than something to look forward to together, you are dealing with something more common than it probably feels. What is underneath it is rarely the trip itself. This article looks at what the disagreement is often about, what the research suggests matters, and what tends to help, whether you are married, together without being married, a same sex couple, or in a relationship that includes more than two people.
Why This Disagreement Cuts Deeper Than It Looks
On the surface, a mismatch over travel looks like a simple difference in preference, the kind any two people might have about food or how to spend a Saturday. But travel carries more weight than most leisure choices. It tends to be expensive, time bound, and visible to friends and family in a way that a quiet weekend at home is not. There is also an emotional story attached to it for many people. Travel can stand for adventure, for a relationship that is still alive and curious, for two people choosing each other over the pull of routine.
When one partner wants that and the other does not, it is easy for the partner who wants to go to hear the reluctance as a verdict on the relationship. It is just as easy for the reluctant partner to feel judged for not measuring up to some idea of what a good partner should want.
Neither read is necessarily accurate, but both feelings are real, and in my experience they tend to compound each other. The more one partner pushes, the more pressured the other can feel to perform an enthusiasm they don't have. The more the reluctant partner withdraws, the more rejected the other can feel. By the time this has repeated over two or three summers, the original question, do we want to go away together, has often been buried under a much heavier one, does this relationship still work.
It's Rarely About the Travel
In therapy, when a couple brings a recurring disagreement like this one, the most useful question usually isn't who is right about holidays. It is what each of you thinks travel represents, and what it costs you to do it or to avoid it. Reluctance to travel can come from many places that have nothing to do with disliking holidays.
Financial anxiety that is hard to admit to, especially if one partner earns more or feels responsible for managing money.
The exhaustion of someone who has very little capacity left after work and caring responsibilities.
Sensory or social overwhelm that makes airports, unfamiliar food or constant togetherness feel like hard work rather than rest.
Sometimes, a softer signal that something in the relationship doesn't feel solid enough right now to invest a week of uninterrupted closeness in.
Equally, the partner who keeps pushing for travel isn't always chasing escapism or running from the relationship, as it can sometimes get framed. Often they are trying to protect something they are afraid is slipping, a sense of being a team that does things together, of novelty and shared memory making, of the relationship having a life outside chores and routine. Until both of these underlying stories are spoken aloud, the conversation tends to circle the same ground every time. One person proposes, the other declines, and both feel slightly more alone in the relationship than they did before.
What the Research Suggests Matters
There is a helpful finding in the research on couples and leisure, because it cuts against the instinct to treat this as a frequency problem, a matter of agreeing how many trips a year is fair. In a study of 48 married couples, how satisfied partners were with the leisure they shared was linked to how satisfied they were with their marriage (Johnson, Zabriskie and Hill, 2006). It was a small sample, and it describes a link and not a cause, but it points in a direction that fits what I see with couples. The quality of shared time seems to matter more than the quantity.
A more recent study looked at couples and holidays specifically. Couples who had more shared experiences on their holidays in the previous year reported higher satisfaction with their relationship at the end of the year. The number of holidays they took was not a significant predictor. What mattered was how engaged partners were with each other, having fun together, having mindful conversations, physical intimacy and trying new things together (Shahvali et al., 2025).
Earlier work in the lab points the same way. In a series of studies including three experiments, couples who took part in a brief novel and exciting task together reported a bigger lift in relationship quality than couples given an everyday task (Aron et al., 2000). Doing something fresh together seems to matter, and it does not have to involve a plane.
In other words, the goal probably isn't to win the argument about whether to go away three times a year or never. It is to work out what would make the time you do spend together, wherever it happens, feel shared. That reframing tends to take some of the heat out of the disagreement, because it stops being a contest over a number and becomes a conversation about what each of you needs to feel present with the other, on a beach or at home on a Tuesday evening.
Couples that travel together a lot are not always more content
When the Travel Question Sits Alongside Other Differences
Sometimes a travel mismatch isn't a separate issue at all. It is one visible expression of a wider difference in how the two of you handle leisure, risk, money or rest, and it just happens to surface most clearly when a holiday comes up. If one of you is naturally more spontaneous and the other more cautious or routine bound, travel will tend to be where that tension shows most sharply, because it asks both qualities to be in the room at once. Planning and spontaneity. Spending and saving. Structure and surrender.
This is worth naming openly, because it changes what kind of conversation is needed. If the deeper difference is temperamental, the aim usually isn't to convert one partner into the other's way of approaching things. It is to find a version of travel, or a version of staying home, that both of you can opt into, rather than one person always conceding and the other always compromising on what they would enjoy.
This pattern can show up just as easily once you are already away, with two people in the same destination having quite different holidays. If that has been your experience too, Sex on Holiday and Why It Doesn't Live Up to Expectations looks at a related version of this, the gap between what people expect from a holiday and what they get from it. And if the disagreement tends to flare once you are away, the piece on why couples argue on holiday looks at what changes when routines disappear.
LGBTQ+ and Non Monogamous Relationships and Some Additional Layers
For some couples, the question of whether and how to travel together carries extra weight that is worth naming directly rather than assuming it is the same conversation everyone else is having. For LGBTQ+ couples, particularly where one or both partners aren't fully out, or where a destination's legal protections and general safety for same sex couples are uncertain, reluctance to travel can be about safety and comfort rather than disinterest in the relationship or in travel itself. That is a different conversation to have, and a different kind of compromise to look for, than one about preference alone.
For couples in consensually non monogamous relationships, travel can raise its own questions. Is a trip for the two of you specifically, or does it include other partners? How does time away affect agreements and routines with people outside this relationship? How much is a holiday expected to function as protected, exclusive time? None of this makes the underlying dynamic, what travel represents and what it costs each person, fundamentally different. It does mean the practical conversation often needs a little more explicit groundwork before it gets to logistics.
Things to Try Before You Book Anything
Whatever is underneath it for the two of you, a few small shifts often loosen the deadlock.
Each of you says what a good holiday would give you in one sentence, without naming a destination. Rest, adventure, time with each other, a change of scene and proof that you still choose each other are all different needs.
Each of you says what worries you most about going, and what worries you most about not going. The second answer is often the more revealing.
Look for the smallest version. A long weekend, a trip within the UK, a day away that still has something new in it. A smaller trip can test whether the difficulty is travel itself or the size of the commitment.
Take turns choosing. One trip planned around what energises one of you, the next around what restores the other, with the planner doing the planning and the other agreeing to be engaged rather than merely present.
Ask whether some trips could be taken apart. A friend's wedding, a visit to family or a solo walking week can be a fair answer when it is agreed openly and does not replace time together. It works best when neither of you hears it as a withdrawal.
If a trip is not possible this year, agree on something at home that delivers some of what travel was meant to deliver, such as a new place to walk, a night away somewhere close, or an evening where you try something neither of you has done before.
If you try one of these and it goes badly, that is useful information too. It usually shows which of the underlying worries is doing the work, and that is the thing to bring back to the conversation. None of these is a trick. They work because they move the conversation from what one of you wants to what both of you need.
How Couples Therapy Can Help With This
Couples therapy can help in three ways here.
It slows the conversation down enough to find what is being said. Most couples have had a version of this argument many times, fast, defensive and circular. Therapy creates room to say the softer thing underneath, such as I am afraid we are drifting, or I am exhausted and ashamed to admit it, without it immediately triggering the other person's defences.
It separates the practical question from the emotional one. Where to go, how much to spend and how often are practical questions with workable answers. Whether we still want the same things from each other is an emotional one. Mixing the two tends to make the practical question impossible to settle, because it is being asked to resolve something it was never about.
It helps build a version of shared time that works for both of you. Sometimes that is travel. Sometimes it is something closer to home that still delivers the connection travel was meant to provide. The point isn't to declare a winner in the original disagreement. It is to find what meets the need on both sides.
It is also fine if working through this shows you that you want quite different things from life together. Understanding that clearly is better than years of silent resentment, and therapy can support whichever direction you choose.
A Disagreement Worth Taking Seriously, Not Personally
If this has become a recurring sore point between you, it is worth treating it as exactly that, a pattern worth understanding rather than a character flaw in either of you. Wanting to travel isn't more virtuous than wanting to stay home, and needing rest isn't a rejection of your partner. The disagreement is communicating something of its own, and it usually has more to say than yes or no to the next holiday.
If you are wondering whether this is the moment to get support, the piece on when to go to couples therapy covers the signals worth paying attention to, and the piece on what to do when summer exposes the cracks looks at the wider pattern.
If this is a conversation you have tried to have a few times and keep ending up back at the same impasse, having it with some structure and a little distance can make a real difference. I offer a free 30 minute consultation for couples, in person in London or online. I do joint consultations rather than individual intake calls, because this is relationship therapy and the first steps are shared steps. There is no obligation beyond that single conversation.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist, author, and the founder of Rise and Grow Therapy, a private practice offering couples and relationship therapy across Kensington, Pimlico, and Angel, Islington in London, as well as online consultations. His approach draws first on Imago Relationship Therapy, alongside integrative relational, attachment-based, Gottman, and systemic approaches. Mark works with couples of all kinds, including LGBTQ+ couples and those in non-traditional relationship structures such as consensual non-monogamy, as well as with individuals working through relational issues.
References
Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples' shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273 to 284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.273
Johnson, H. A., Zabriskie, R. B., & Hill, B. (2006). The contribution of couple leisure involvement, leisure time, and leisure satisfaction to marital satisfaction. Marriage & Family Review, 40(1), 69 to 91. https://doi.org/10.1300/J002v40n01_05
Shahvali, M., Kerstetter, D. L., Tews, M. J., Mitas, O., & Behrad Far, R. (2025). Couple vacations: Linking joint vacation experiences of romantic couples to satisfaction with relationship life. Leisure Sciences, 47(5), 1002 to 1021. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2023.2174216
