Traveling with your partner is one thing. Long term travel with your partner? That’s like, a whole other, totally different, completely not the same thing. It turns out that traveling as a couple on a romantic weekend getaway is worlds different than spending an entire year backpacking around the world on a year-long honeymoon. And frankly, taking frequent trips doesn’t really prepare you for long term travel together.
My husband and I spent a whole year traveling the world together as a couple …and lived to tell the tale! We’re even still happily married, I swear. It can absolutely be done, and it’s an incredible and enriching experience for any relationship.
But … there are a FEW things that nobody told us about before we jetted off on our around-the-world trip. And so, to prepare/warn you, we’re laying it alllllll out, so you know what to expect and are MUCH more prepared than we were. Without further ado, here are 30 things nobody tells you about traveling long term with your partner!
Table of Contents
Hey, we have a bunch of other posts similar to this one! I bet you’d like them, too. Here, check them out:
- 25 Things We Never Asked for from Traveling the World for a Year
- 30 Things Nobody Tells You About Quitting Your Job to Go Travel
- Our Year-Long Honeymoon: What Happened & How Much It Cost
- 25 Things Nobody Tells You About Traveling While Fat
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Things Nobody Tells You About … Your Relationship
1. Choose one: a sex life, or having money. You can’t spend a year traveling and sleep in the same bed unless you’re a zillionaire or fabulously lucky. If you’re a regular person, like us, you’ll need to get real comfortable with hostel dorms. Welcome to our sex life, 12 total strangers! We’re ALL sharing the bedroom now.
2. All of your conversations will eventually end in “never mind, you were there.” Spending every single second of every single day glued to each other’s sides doesn’t make for thrilling dinnertime conversation. If one of you so much as leaves the room without the other person, suddenly there will be so much more to catch up on than usual. “How was the bathroom?” will be a new exciting conversation starter.
3. You’ll have the same songs stuck in your collective head for weeks on end, and neither of you will even know the name of the song… or any of the words. The worst offenders for us are cumbia hits by Latino artists we’ve never heard of, whose words we’ve been unable to grasp except for “corazon” so we can’t even Google the song to put ourselves out of our misery. We just find ourselves humming the same repetitive notes for days. And days. And days….
4. You’ll miss each other way more than is normal for extremely short periods of time spent apart. Ventured out on a journey to the mercado alone? You’ll feel yourself irrationally missing your other half and excitedly sharing inane details about s**t like the kinds of cheeses you found and how much they cost upon your grand reunion.
5. You’ll eventually stop feeling like 2 different people and begin to feel and act as one conjoined human. Your partner will feel like an extra limb, like an extension of yourself. Which, yeah, kinda romantic, but it will quickly verge from romanticism into weirdness. Like when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and accidentally call yourself by your partner’s name before realizing THAT’S YOUR OWN REFLECTION (yes, this actually happened).
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6. You’ll accidentally wear matching outfits. All the time. Even if you didn’t intentionally bring all of the same clothes, you’ll somehow end up wearing them, and matching everywhere you go. If you’re like us and happen to own a lot of the same clothes already, you’ll inevitably find yourself getting dressed and then turn around to find your partner wearing the exact same outfit.
7. 99% of your arguments will involve either hunger, exhaustion, or feeling overwhelmed. Watch out if all 3 hit at once. You’ll learn to interpret your partner’s crankiness, like “oh, that’s your hunger sass. Let’s get you a snack.” You’ll also learn to ask your partner 3 questions so you can solve them as quickly as possible and get your companion back: “Are you hungry? Are you tired? Are you feeling overwhelmed?” A snack, a coffee, or sitting down quietly for a few minutes is SO much easier than snapping at each other and feeling hurt and lost in a foreign country surrounded by strangers. Let those feelings take over and you’ll soon find yourself in full-on meltdown mode, possibly screaming on the street and getting stared at by total strangers who now definitely think you’re insane. Hey, it happens to all of us!
8. You’ll learn not to take those arguments personally. Travel is full of challenges, and no couple is safe from the occasional fight. They are inevitable. You’ll learn not to take it personally when your partner snaps at you because they’re cranky, hungry, tired, homesick, or just overwhelmed. Not taking it personally means fewer fights and fewer “I’m sorry for what I said when I was hungry” conversations. Instead, you’ll be able to just say “that’s OK, it just means next time I’M cranky, you can’t say sh*t!” This is so much easier said than done, but once you get there, most of your arguments will stop being disruptive, which means you can go back to your regularly planned ~adventures faster.
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Things Nobody Tells You About … Blogging or Being a “Digital Nomad”
7. Planning to blog during your trip? Welcome to having a job again. If you started a travel blog as a fun way to share your magical travel adventures with your family and friends, you’ll either never actually blog – because it takes forever and is so much more work than you realized it would be – or you’ll become rapidly addicted to blogging and start spending 8 hours a day working on your blog.
8. Being a “digital nomad” or a travel blogger means you quit your job so you could work 12 hours a day for almost no pay. Don’t do the math and calculate your hourly rate. It’s depressing. Psst: if you’re feeling nosy, go read my travel blog income reports!
9. You’ll expect your partner to be your co-worker. Sure, they didn’t apply for the job, but you’ve hired them. You’ll expect them to do things like post on Instagram, write blog posts, and take photos for YOUR new hobby/obsession, even though they actually wanted to spend the trip like, catching up on reading or learning calligraphy or whatever.
10. You’ll start arguing about “work.” You’ll nag your partner to do things like finish a post you wanted them to write, or update an Instagram profile you created, and you won’t understand why they aren’t jumping at the opportunity to spend their free time working on YOUR new hobby.
11. Finally, you’ll settle for being grateful for any help at all. After pushing and nagging and scolding and lecturing and cajoling and begging, you’ll be grateful for any help your partner offers you at all. A whole blog post? Amazing! Spending an hour pinning stuff for you on Pinterest?! Unbelievable! Once you stop expecting your partner to work on YOUR hobby turned obsession (turned full time job…), suddenly things will be a lot less stressful and you’ll go back to enjoying your time together as partners, not co-workers.
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Things Nobody Tells You About … Missing Home
12. You will crave some semblance of familiarity. Whether it’s fast food restaurants, English speaking movies, or gabbing about the US with every American traveler you meet, any reminder of home will reduce you both into blubbering messes. You’ll wax poetic with each other about stupid sh*t, like your favorite highway or your old desk at work.
13. You’ll find yourself missing home the most on your favorite holidays. No other country celebrates Thanksgiving. And Halloween is DEFINITELY not as big of a deal outside the USA as it is at home. On holidays like these, you’ll miss home more than ever.
14. After the first few weeks, everything feels so much easier. You’ll both be emotionally raw for the first couple of weeks as you ease into your new lifestyles. You’ll be missing everything, and you’ll feel totally overwhelmed by your new daily reality. You’ll mourn your old life and wonder if you’ve made a huge mistake. But after the first few weeks, things will start to feel SO much easier. You’ll find yourself getting used to the act of constant traveling, enjoying yourself more, and missing home a little less.
15. You’ll start “nesting” in every room, apartment, or dorm locker you sleep in. Travel for long enough, and spending 3 days somewhere will feel like your new home. You’ll start doing things like arranging your belongings carefully on your 1 shelf or in your locker. When your partner doesn’t put their belongings away in the extremely detailed and secret order that you unpacked them, you’ll get cranky and say ridiculous things like “you’re supposed to put your socks in THIS PILE, not THAT PILE. That’s where they BELONG.”
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Things Nobody Tells You About … Long Term Travel
16. At a certain point, travel will feel exhausting. It’s not sustainable to travel long-term the way you used to travel on weekend trips or 2-week vacations. You can’t go out and do stuff EVERY SINGLE DAY. You can’t sight-see for a month straight. You need time off to just decompress and relax and do absolutely nothing. That down time is really important to recharge and enjoy your travels, so don’t feel guilty for taking a few days off to do absolutely nothing!
17. At some point, you’ll throw your carefully researched plans out the window. You’ll have a checklist of places you wanted to see in each city, town, or country. But you’ll be too exhausted to actually see all of them. Eventually, you’ll check your checklist out of the window, and pretty soon, whole towns will get crossed off the list, too. At one point, you just might book a plane ticket to another continent on a whim. YOLO! You’re a free spirit now. Roam where the wind takes you, etc.
18. You’ll start to travel more and more slowly with each new destination. At first, you’ll try to cram in as many new and exciting places and activities and attractions as possible. But a few months in, you’ll be skipping out on seeing another ancient Incan Ruin or stunning waterfall because oh my god there are so many of them and you’re just so TIRED. So, you’ll start to travel more slowly. You’ll add in a few days to do nothing in each place. Anything shorter than a full week will feel too rushed. Eventually, you’ll start looking for places where you can hole up for a full month at a time (heyyyy, Trusted Housesitters, this is why we love you)!
19. You will need to take vacations from your strenuous schedule of … vacationing. You’ll start finding places where you can set up home base for a month at a time. You’ll feel like you need to take time off from your vacation. You might find an amazing Housesitting gig in Mexico, for example, and then spend a full month doing absolutely nothing but dog-sitting and watching Netflix. It will feel GLORIOUS.
20. You will become irrationally grateful for the tiniest things, like a couch, a home-cooked meal, and not having 10 other people snoring next to you all the time. This will recharge you the way that travel used to recharge you when you were a regular person with a job and a home of your own. Your soul will feel nourished by this small slice of regular life. You will wonder why you ever stayed in hostels at all, and begin shopping for homes on Trusted Housesitters like you used to shop for weekend getaways on AirBnB.
21. Not buying travel insurance is like asking the universe to teach you a lesson. You cannot possibly travel for a full year and not have SOME disaster befall you. If you’re anything like us, disaster will actually follow you around and jump out of bushes to scare you. Do not gamble with the universe. The universe will school you. Our World Nomads travel insurance paid for itself and then some, and we’ll never travel without it again!
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22. If you treat every meal like you’re on vacation, you’ll gain weight like you’re on vacation. You’ll find yourself eating out more than you ever have in your life, and each time you eat out, there will be some exotic local food that you HAVE to try. You’ll order dessert for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and say things like “f*** it! We’re on VACATION!” As a result, you’ll return from your very long vacation carrying 30 extra pounds of weight and not fitting into any of your old clothes.
23. Get your ducks in a row before you leave. Get your paperwork in order. Have your bills taken care of. Get your credit card on Auto-Pay. While you’re out of the country, bills will pile up at your forwarded mailing address and it will be way too easy to ignore them. They will feel like Someone Else’s Problem… Right up until you return and you’re like “oh look, your student loans defaulted. Wait, what?”
24. These 3 little words will strike fear and dread into your heart: “sign and return.” Doing paperwork is a special new challenge that we never appreciated until we couldn’t find a scanner or printer anywhere. Trying to find a place to print something, sign it, and scan it will take several days and more money than you could ever imagine. It’s so easy to say “sorry, I can’t … I’m ~travelling~” but all you’re doing is piling up all of the Neglected Responsibilities that you will have to deal with when you return.
25. You might think you’re uncool now, but just wait. Pretty soon you’ll be behind on everything from music to movies to pop culture references to memes. While you’ll be discovering brand new artists to fall in love with that nobody back home has ever heard of, you’ll soon find yourself operating in the weird ancillary region of People Who Aren’t Hip back home. You’ll return from your trip and not understand what people are wearing, talking about, or listening to. When did THOSE jeans become cool? What’s that meme everyone’s quoting?! You’re so lost. Oh god. Are you an old?!
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Things Nobody Tells You About … Returning Home
26. You’ll still be in “travel mode” well after you’ve officially settled back down. You’ll still be wearing the same 6 pairs of clothes. You’ll still pack a day-bag for every outing, even if you’re just going to the grocery store. You’ll still say f*** it to nice clothing and makeup, because at this point, you’re so used to be comfortable it just never feels worth it anymore. And you’ll still marvel at the small miracle of things like free, drinkable tap water and ice. Holy sh**, is ice a luxury or WHAT?!
27. It will take a long time to re-adjust to not traveling. It takes a while to adjust to long term travel, and as it turns out, it takes a while to un-adjust, too. 6 months will have passed since your trip; you’ll be settled back down, unpacked, re-rooted, and you’ll sit down to dinner and this weird feeling will come over you like: wait, this is temporary. Or you’ll be backpacking in Prague during your Christmas vacation and realize that the past 6 months of unpacking and settling down felt like a vacation – THIS actually feels like real life.
28. Once you’re settled, you’ll start dreaming of your next trip. You can’t shake off the travel bug for long. You may have a couch and a day job, but pretty soon, that old itch will creep right back in and you’ll find yourself sending your partner pictures of your new travel obsession and researching travel itineraries. This is an extremely convenient time to have a travel blog, by the way.
29. You’ll go right back to your old style of travel. Before your year-long trip changed you into a slower traveler, you used to squeeze in as much as possible into a weekend trip or week-long getaway. Now that you’re back, you’ll go right back to your old style of cramming-it-all-in travel. You only have a week to see everything?! There’s no TIME to relax! That’s what home is for!
30. Your relationship will never be the same. Traveling together long term will change your relationship forever. For starters, you’ll always have a snack on hand to prevent hanger-related fights. You’ll learn to understand your partner better, and to speak without using actual words, because you’re so mentally in sync. You’ve grown so used to spending every waking moment together that when you get back, you’ll miss each other during the day. You’ll have SO much to share with each other at the end of each day – you were apart for an ENTIRE DAY, after all! Spending a night in cooking, cuddling, and watching TV on the couch will feel incredibly exciting – it’s the very thing you craved for an entire year! But you’ll always look forward to that uninterrupted time together on the weekends, on long road trips, and of course, on weekend getaways and vacations.
Hey, we have a bunch of other posts similar to this one! I bet you’d like them, too. Here, check them out:
- 25 Things We Never Asked for from Traveling the World for a Year
- 30 Things Nobody Tells You About Quitting Your Job to Go Travel
- Our Year-Long Honeymoon: What Happened & How Much It Cost
- 25 Things Nobody Tells You About Traveling While Fat
What’s the longest you’ve ever traveled with your partner? Does spending a year together non-stop sound like fun, or torture? Drop us a comment below!
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Amazing. My husband and I traveled for 13 months, went home for 4 months, and then set out again to move to another country where we’ve been living for the past 2 months. So we’ve officially been unemployed and have spent almost every single day together for the past 19 months! Holy sh*t! Some of the things here you wrote seem like they come directly from my brain. I especially love the one about how going to the supermarket alone is like a momentous outing that requires a full report upon return. Obviously!
Haha YES! That’s amazing – you’ve spent more time than we have together 😮
That’s a fun post! My husband and I travel for his work, most of the time. We stay places a week up to a year and then move on to the next job. We drug our kids with us for years, but now they are grown up. We settled down for a bit for the kids to go to high school, but after we had been there a year, my kids were all wondering when we were leaving again. It’s like a sickness you just can’t shake. I’m so appreciative of the life we have lead and that my kids have experiences and friends all over the world. It gives us all a great appreciation for different types of people and customs. It has also brought us all closer together and made us depend on each other more than the outside world. Even now. This was a fun post to read.
That’s so cool! Very Wild Thornberries style 😛 My goal is to take our (future) kids traveling with us every summer, since my husband is a teacher (the hope is that I’ll still be full time blogging and able to take it with me as we go). I love hearing about families who travel! We’re still a good 2-3 years away from even having a baby but we’re definitely already thinking about it!
My husband and I have found that to survive a lot of travel together, we sometimes have to go it alone. So there is always some time set aside in each trip for us to go off and do out own thing. Because sometimes togetherness is over rated.
We definitely did that a couple times. But like, I can count on 1 hand how often it happened, and after 4-5 hours apart we’d return like we’d been gone for months like OH I MISSED YOU SO MUCH! We’re both very clingy, hehe
I couldn’t agree more! To every single one of the points. We traveled together for around 7 months and it all is true 🙂 We thought after returning we would need at least six months without traveling but we are already planning the next trip. (We are back home for about one month now haha) The ‘fighting about the blog’-thing, we tried to avoid. So, our travel blog is mostly my project (my partner does the design and coding-part though) and he has his own project as a Web-& Graphic-designer as this is what he was working for, for the last 10 years. This also gives us the freedom to “spend some time apart” while traveling even if we are actually together 24/7 😀 And I can also agree about the part that spending time on the couch feels exciting now. We’ve been dreaming about our couch and ordering pizza during our trip a lot and when we actually did, it felt awesome! I loved your post as it is just so real. Thanks for sharing!
I’m so glad this range true for you! That’s a great idea – I guess I just figured my husband would be into blogging since he writes, does photography & creates video … but it’s completely different. I still get super excited when he does write or take photos for me, though 😛
This is a great post! I travelled with my other half for 6 months and it was up and down in a lot of unexpected ways x
Really really enjoyed this post! So true 😛
Haha I knew I was going to love this after #1 🙂 And you’re spot on, hunger is the enemy of a happy traveling marriage! My husband has noticed that I just get really, really quiet when I’m hungry – because after years of hangry fights on the road, I finally learned it’s better to just keep my mouth shut until I can put some food in it! Fight, avoided 😉
Hahaha we totally each have hanger tells too! It’s like how new mothers can identify a baby’s cry as hungry vs tired. I can identify Jeremy’s crankiness as hungry or tired, too 😛
I love this post! I can feel that some about the relationship, especially when you live together before travelling. Haha and a hunger anger is so true, it’s called “hangry” 😀
I’ve always tended to solo travel and only do shortish trips with friends/partner. I’m sure I’d end up killing anyone I travelled with for more than a month let alone a year (or more likely they’d kill me!) I’m slightly in awe of the people who not only can do this, but their relationship also survives the return to ‘normality’ at the end too.
I honestly think I’d kill anyone except my husband. And I figure hey if we can hang out for a year straight non-stop and not get sick of each other, a whole lifetime should be a piece of cake, right? 😛
Love this post so much! so much of what you have said is so true! My husband and I have only traveled together for one month straight before so when we get home the time apart with our jobs is nice again haha
My boyfriend Alan and I take trips together quite often. I’ve had thoughts about traveling for longer terms together like a year and wondered what it would be like. Thanks for giving me some ideas Lia. Good to hear from someone who lived to tell the tale!
I love this list so much! #7 is huge for us. I definitely have some bad cases of hangry when it has been too long since my last meal. My husband’s version of hangry is hot and angry. He can be hot all day while we are sightseeing but he has trouble relaxing and sleeping in the heat. We are hoping to do some longterm travel as a family in a couple years. We have a plan and we are working hard on it. I think that most of your list will apply to us as a family too. Thanks for sharing this! I’m going to check out some more of your site.
Oh man, HOT is totally one that will get us feeling cranky and overwhelmed too. We suck at making decisions when we’re super hot! Luckily most of South America isn’t hot so we only had to deal with our sweaty, overwhelmed cranky selves a few times 😛
Great post! It’s so interesting to read your perspective. We’ve been traveling for almost six months now as a family and have had a very different experience from yours thus far. Traveling with kids already puts you in the frame of mind to go slower, seek more comfortable ($$$) accommodations and constantly bring snacks!
Hahaha that’s smart! I hope we’re better at this when we do start traveling as a family in a few years 😛