7 Ways Travel Strengthens Romantic Relationships

The impact of travel on boosting a couple’s bonding or rekindling their romance is now backed by science. An article published in the Journal of Travel found that partners who travelled together experienced enhanced communication, and that connectivity extended into their life back home. Here are the top seven travel ingredients that add a zing to your recipe of romance.

It’s Always Better Together

“In life, it’s not where you go, it’s who you travel with,” says American cartoonist Charles Schulz known for his comic strip Peanuts. Similarly, on a trip, your company is more important than the destination because it’s the journey that matters. More so, when you are travelling with your significant other. Gazing at sunsets in Bali or simply having breakfast on a cliff restaurant in Pune could be more magical when you have that special someone to share the moment with. Delhi-based couple Rusha and Adi Srivastava couldn’t agree more on this. “We are married for 10 years now and our best memories together are those of the places we have visited together,” says Rusha. In their decade-long marriage they have spent 25 vacations together in India and abroad.

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Bonding Outside the Comfort Zone

When you are outside your usual surroundings, you need to process a lot more information and evaluate unforeseen situations in a much more in-depth fashion. Breaking out of the routine amps up the romance quotient as both of you see each other playing new roles. Moreover, vacations heighten your senses as you are in a faraway place, disconnected from the various trappings of life. All these factors, combined together, bring you and your partner closer.

Spending Unhindered Time with Your Significant Other

The everyday demands of life—both trivial and crucial—eat into the time that you want to share with each other as a couple. That urgent mail in your inbox or that all-important message in your WhatsApp looms large over your ‘we time’ even while you sit next to each other on the bed. But while travelling, you are away from the crackling calls of reality. So there’s enough room for all those conversations shelved for an indefinite future, a deep gaze into each other’s eyes, or those long-forgotten sweet nothings. All these factors help you open up, giving a better peek into each other’s heart.

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Getting to Know Each Other—All Over Again!

Travelling requires you to take a lot of decisions together, starting from deciding upon a destination and budgeting for the trip, to planning the activities. All of it helps you understand each other’s preferences and tells you the way your partner functions in a critical situation. Moreover, this entire preparatory stage fills both of you with a we-are-in-this-together feeling.

Earning Experiences and Making Memories

Be it walking through the halls of the Louvre, or the cobbled path of Taj Mahal, you’ll be revisiting history together and creating some incredible moments, which you will always look back with warmth, affection and humour. Such remarkable memories that the two of you made, could work as a soothing balm in the times of a rift. They can even weed out some of the bitter memories that have left both of you scarred. Also, as you and your partner travel along, you make fun and surprising discoveries about each other’s hidden talents and get to learn a lot of new things together. Shared explorations and experiences create your future vision of the world too.

Facing Challenges Together

Let’s accept it: Unforeseen situations and horrible chain of events are almost inevitable during a trip. Misplaced luggage, lost reservations, missed trains and delayed flights are just a few of the mishaps that one can think of. While fighting these challenges and finding solutions together, your mettle as a couple is tested. Also, when you participate in adventure activities like hiking or camping in the woods while travelling, you emerge as strong teammates, playing to each other’s strength and supporting through the weakness.

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Learning to Embrace the Differences

It becomes easy to adjust to each other’s preferences and idiosyncrasies while travelling together. If one of you is very active and eager to bounce out of bed every morning to pack in as much as possible, while the other loves to slow down and simply unwind, then you learn to accommodate both in some way or the other. This goes a long way in helping a couple adapt to each other in their everyday life. “I hate how my wife spends an hour in the bathroom and she can’t stand the fact that I always leave my shirts out,” says Mumbai-based Kaushik Mittal. “But while travelling we don’t fight about these inescapable irritants because we are keen on making the best out the trip,” he adds. That’s how you figure out how to work around the annoyances and live with them, or better, laugh them away.