Five-star luxury with rose petals sprinkled on the doona is not romance, at least not the kind that sets you up for a long-term relationship.
Five-star luxury with rose petals sprinkled on the doona is not romance, at least not the kind that sets you up for a long-term relationship.
Opinion
February 14, 2025 — 3.00am
You can’t say you truly know someone until you’ve arrived with them at the dingiest guest house in the Mekong Delta and checked into a room with tiled floors and walls, like it’s going to be hosed out at the end of your stay.
There’s a bare lightbulb swinging above the only piece of furniture in the room, a creaky old double bed. This is when you really figure out who you’re with.
You won’t know them, either, until you’ve sat on the rattly old sleeper train from Saigon to Hue and played cards and drunk lukewarm 333 beers while rural Vietnam slumbers outside your window.
Who is this person you’re in a relationship with? What do they love, what do they hate? How do they deal when things don’t go exactly to plan? And are your own reactions roughly the same?
You don’t know that until you’ve attempted to relieve your bladder from just inside the door of your tent at four in the morning because there’s a desert lion stalking the campsite. You can’t figure it out until you’re lost somewhere on the back roads of Sardinia on an old scooter, the sun is setting and you need to find somewhere to stay.
It’s Valentine’s Day, in case you didn’t realise. And the capitalist, idealist world will be feeding you a whole lot of cliches about true romance.
It will tell you that it’s five-star luxury with rose petals sprinkled on the doona. It’s champagne on ice, and strawberries dipped in chocolate. It’s a gift voucher for the day spa. It’s a trip to Paris to enjoy warm summer evenings.
And, yes, those things are lovely. You might consider them dreamy. But I’m here to tell you that they’re not the ticket to romantic success for long-term joy.
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For that, you need adventure. You need a challenge. If you want to get to know someone, to really dig down into who they are and what they stand for, to find out if you’re truly compatible, to forge a bond through adversity that you will call back on in stories and memories for the rest of your lives together … then you need to rough it.
No rose petals. No champagne. Lukewarm 333s and single bunks.
By far the most successful and memorable holidays I’ve been on with my partner have been the adventures. The occasional luxury has been great – expensive meals and beautiful hotel rooms have very much been appreciated, thanks – but it hasn’t changed our relationship, or revealed anything about us other than that we are capable of enjoying really nice things. Who isn’t?
But the challenges have been better. The hyper-low-budget roam around southern Vietnam; the self-drive safari around Namibia and Botswana; the scooter adventure through Sardinia; the entire year trying to raise a small child in Spain.
These holidays have been key. You need to know how the person you love is going to react in difficult situations because if you’re going to stay together and start a family and raise children and live your lives together, you are going to wind up in a lot of difficult situations.
Parenthood is brutal, a rolling series of challenges and stuff-ups that you have to handle on about two hours’ sleep. Even without kids, just being in a successful relationship is difficult; it requires compromise and care, empathy and the ability to know when to just shut up and let the other person do what they’re going to do.
Travel creates those moments. This is your relationship in miniature. This is the person you’re with, all their strengths and weaknesses and foibles and beauty laid bare.
But this isn’t just about testing each other. Really it’s about having fun. It’s about having the most fun you will ever have in your life.
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I wrote a story a few months ago about “type 2 travel”, or “type 2 fun”. It’s the enjoyment you get from battling through adversity, the sort of experiences that create memories, that give you a feeling of true success, and that mean so much more than the easy wins.
That’s the sort of travel you want to have with a romantic partner. You want to triumph together in tricky situations. You want to sit there side-by-side years later and talk about how you dodged cows in a rickshaw in India, how you set up a fortress around your car to stop monkeys stealing your food in Botswana, how you dragged each other up that sky-high mountain pass in Peru.
Do those things and you’re bonded for life. You know everything about each other you will ever need to know. You’ve stayed in a tiled hell-hole in some nameless South-East Asian town and you got up the next morning and you just kept on going.
You probably deserve a little champagne.
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Ben Groundwater is a Sydney-based travel writer, columnist, broadcaster, author and occasional tour guide with more than 25 years’ experience in media, and a lifetime of experience traversing the globe. He specialises in food and wine – writing about it, as well as consuming it – and at any given moment in time Ben is probably thinking about either ramen in Tokyo, pintxos in San Sebastian, or carbonara in Rome. Follow him on Instagram @bengroundwaterConnect via email.
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