Learning to travel with your husband or wife can be one of the most freeing and exhilarating skills to build. Traveling allows you and yours to build memories and have once in a lifetime adventures together. Unfortunately it isn’t always easy and can cause the relationship to be tested. We are offering our top 5 tips to traveling with your other half and staying married! They seem simple but they take a lot of self awareness and practice to perfect. Good luck!

5 Tips to Help you travel with your husband or wife and stay married.

1. Communicate

This is such a simple word with so many complicated parts. Communicate. Talk to each other. Sometimes when you travel together and you are spending so much time with each other, you forget that you still need to communicate. What do you like doing or not doing. Where do you want to eat dinner next, let each other have a voice. If one person is making all of the decisions there is a high chance the other is going to be unhappy.

If you’re upset about something, talk about it. Don’t keep it inside and let it build up until it explodes at the wrong time. Little things matter. Communicate about the little things, so when the big things come up you are comfortable talking to each other and have already established good communication skills.

2. Apologize

It’s inevitable, if you spend more time with your significant other in stressful situations you are going to fight more. When we usually think of traveling we imagine relaxing, peaceful travel – when in reality traveling for long periods of time with your significant other can be a challenge. A fun challenge that is definitely worth it, but be prepared to learn how to fight fair and apologize quickly.

Luckily the fights will (hopefully) be over mostly minimal non important things. It takes realizing that you are arguing over something that in the big picture doesn’t matter. Apologize for over-reacting, the things you said and shouldn’t have said, and move on. The sooner you learn to fight well, and apologize quickly and get over it, the better you will travel together.

Give each other the benefit of the doubt. Go into traveling with your husband as a team, knowing that neither one of you is trying to hurt each others feelings, or do anything “against” the other person.

3. Know your strengths… and know your weaknesses

I am horrible at directions. I know this about myself and have given up on trying to get us around. Josh is not a planner. He is great at executing once he is given the plan, but it’s always my job to figure out our next destination and organize the details for once we get there. We have learned each others strengths and know our weaknesses. We don’t try to deny or cover them up, we simply surrender and let each other take over in areas we are good at.

4. Have alone time

Traveling together doesn’t mean you have to spend 100% of your time together. You don’t have to be engaged in conversation during every minute and you don’t have to know what each other is thinking or doing constantly. Give yourself alone time. Whether that means you go for a run outside alone in the park nearby, or you sit in bed and get lost in a good book you’ve been trying to read for months. Either way, spend time in your own thoughts, you will be happier because of it.

5. Go All In

The difference with traveling as a married couple vs. boyfriends or girlfriends is you’ve hopefully gone all in to the relationship. The key to staying married after traveling through new cultures, stressful situations and unexpected circumstances is to be all in.

By this I mean there isn’t an option that one of you gives up and fly home. The reason so many couples break up after traveling together is because traveling can bring out the ugly in people. You can’t hide when you spend 24/7 with someone. Your messy, complicated, emotional roller coasters all come out and you will be exposed if you aren’t completely honest and open with one another. Know what you are getting yourself into before you board the plane with your significant other, and agree to be all in together.