What It’s Like to Take a Yearlong Honeymoon

When a dead pig washed up ashore moments after my husband and I arrived in the Vietnamese town of Mui Ne, I thought, That’s not a good sign. Two nights later, we got into a burner of a fight — over what I can’t remember — that culminated in me throwing a spicy shrimp in his eye and flouncing off on the back of a moto-taxi to a different hotel. I spent a few solitary days comforted by what I imagined was Nick’s unhappiness at not knowing where I was. But he knew where I was. The town was small; the moto-taxi drivers were gossips. My dramatic gesture had benefited no one, least of all myself.

We made up, and then fought again, in dramatic ways and places: outside of Angkor Wat, Cambodia; in a village in India. In Africa, I locked him out of our cliffside hut above Lake Malawi, yelling that I wanted a divorce.

The notion of traveling together sounds quite romantic on paper. “A yearlong honeymoon,” people commented as we planned our trip together. But the idealized view of travel — long walks on sun-dappled beaches — is a far cry from the reality of it … or my reality of it, which included a lot of discomfort, both physical (crappy youth hostels, exotic stomach bugs) and emotional (being the constant stranger in the strange land).

“Aren’t you homesick?” I’d ask Nick. “I have you,” he’d tell me. I had him too, and he was the world to me, but while we were traveling the world together, that was not enough.

Which scared me. It felt like certain doom — a dead pig washed up on the shore of our marriage. But of course, it wasn’t. It was just us under the strain of extreme travel. It was two people in a bubble. Back home, our relationship existed on a foundation of friends, family, jobs. Out here, we were adrift.

Eventually, we came ashore. Back on solid ground, things stabilized and then got better than ever. One of the paradoxes of traveling is that it’s precisely what makes it hard (being out of your comfort zone) that makes it transformative (expanding your comfort zone). That year, we expanded our comfort zone as a couple, but only once we got home was I really able to internalize some of the lessons learned: that it was OK to need more than him; that things weren’t always as bad I allowed myself to believe; that if I just paused a beat before flinging the shrimp, running off, the moment would pass; that my overwrought dramatic gestures hurt him, but they also hurt me.

Maybe it’s because that trip toughened us up or maybe it’s because our everyday lives these days are so frantically busy, but when we go away now — even with the kids — it does kind of feel like a honeymoon.