Xavier G. Font: How do vacations affect relationships?

Psychologist Xavier G. Font explains how vacations affect love relationships.

Vacations are something we normally associate with leisure and rest, but in reality they are more than that.

What characterizes the holiday period is not only the fact of having fewer responsibilities while it lasts. In addition, although we do not realize it, it makes our life context change for several days, which means that we think, feel and act in a different way.

In other words, vacations are not only important for what they allow us to get rid of, but also for what they bring us. And this is very noticeable, for example, in relationships. Both for the good and for the bad.

On this occasion we will talk about the influence of the vacations in love relationships of this type, and for this we have the professional perspective of a psychologist who performs couple therapy: Xavier G. Font.

Interview with Xavier G. Font: What do vacations imply for the couple's relationship?

Xavier G. Font is a psychologist specialized in Brief and Strategic Therapy, and offers his services both in sessions for individual patients and in couple therapy, in his office located in Barcelona. In this interview he talks to us about the way in which something as apparently simple as being on vacation influences couple relationships, even if we don't realize it.

Could it be said that the differences between people in a loving relationship are more evident when both have free time to devote to what they prefer?

Not all couples who go on vacation do so under the same conditions. There are couples who are stable, happy and together and others who may be going through a more complicated time. Getting out of the established routine and having much more time together can enhance both what we like most about our partner and what we like least.

Couples who start a vacation at a time of instability are more likely to argue precisely because they spend more time together and take advantage of the vacation to reproach each other for problems that have been dragging on for some time.

How can simply having different expectations about vacation plans affect a couple's relationship?

Managing expectations is always important to work on in advance, especially in couples with different vacation preferences.

It is important to organize them by negotiating with your partner the time, activities and plans that each of you would like to do. Otherwise, it is easy for disagreements to arise from the beginning that can ruin the vacation.

As for the potential benefits of vacations, in what ways can they help strengthen a love bond?

Vacations can be a perfect space to recover the time that you normally don't have during the year. Usually couples explain to you in consultation that their day-to-day life is so full of obligations that in the end they only end up sharing small spaces of time. Work, home and raising children take up a lot of our time.

On the other hand, the opposite happens during the vacations. By having fewer obligations, we have much more time that we can dedicate to our relationship and, of course, much less stress, which causes this time to be of better quality.

In this way it is possible to do many of the things that we enjoy and that keep us together. It is common that suddenly improvised conversations suddenly sprout up again where we enjoy ourselves, put aside day-to-day problems, talk about future plans and even improve sexual relations. All of this, of course, helps to strengthen the bond with our partner.

From what you've seen in your work, does the simple fact of having a vacation and getting away from a heavy workload for several days at a time tend to ease a lot of relationship problems?

As I mentioned in the previous question, it is common basically because we get rid of the day-to-day obligations and allow us to enjoy ourselves and the people around us more.

It is also true that it happens to many people that the first days of vacation are still immersed in the same dynamics of when they are working and this does not allow them to disconnect completely and enjoy. It is usually quite unpleasant for those who suffer it, because they invest a lot of time in forcing it not to happen, causing the opposite effect.

If a couple going through bad times takes advantage of their vacation trip to reconcile and put aside their usual conflicts, is it usual that these improvements in coexistence are generalized to their day-to-day life when they return to their usual lifestyle?

It depends on the couple, their conflicts and how they manage them. If the couple takes advantage of the vacations to untie a specific conflict, talking, negotiating and agreeing on a solution, when they return to normality that conflict does not have to resurface again.

If, on the other hand, the couple's conflict is more structural and they have been dragging it for a long time, it is common for them to plan and use the vacations in the hope that things will improve.

In these cases, in the end the vacations end up being an avoidance behavior to avoid having to face the problems they have. Surely when they return to normality, the conflicts they were running away from will return and even more potently.

Do you have any advice that you recommend to follow when it comes to avoid that the vacations produce unnecessary problems in the couple's relationships?

It is important to dedicate part of our vacation time exclusively to ourselves. Try to do those things that we have been putting off for lack of time and have the feeling that we are doing something that we really want to do.

As a couple, the most important thing is to communicate. Talk about what you each want to do individually and also together. From there, plan your time, agreeing on everything you have talked about.