Travelling with a significant other can be very revealing. A guy I went out with in my early 20s showed his true nature when, on our return flight from a week in Jamaica, I reached over to grab his leg on the plane and felt something lumpy under his pants. No, not that — he had decided to strap a bunch of drugs to his legs and neglected to tell me. Customs was a riot, I tell ya.

Taking a relationship on the road not only lets you know whether your date’s a criminal, spending day and night together challenges your ability to put up with each other’s moods and reveals just how long you can circle an area late at night looking for a hotel room before one of you snaps.

If it’s a road trip, you get to play the “Which Way Do I Turn?” game. Always good for a fight.
You’re inches away from the intersection, there’s an 18-wheeler on your rear end and he’s screamin’, “Which way do I turn?! Which way do I turn?!” and you’re frantically searching for too-small-to-be-on-the-map corners on your 1954 map for a road that doesn’t exist anymore.
Then you discover just how long you can go without speaking to each other once you finally haul yourselves out of the ditch.

It’s easy to understand why people enjoy travelling alone. When you’re travelling alone and you get lost, you can simply admit it instead of driving in circles with him repeatedly saying, “I’m sure it’s just around the next corner, I remember from when my family came here when I was six weeks old.”

There are lots of wonderful things about travelling with a partner. Discovering you travel well together can really solidify a relationship.

It helps if you like the same things. If your idea of a vacation is paddling your way to an island in the middle of a lake and setting up camp and his is five-star hotels, it might be a problem.

For their first trip together, a friend of mine dragged her devoted city boy camping. She said it was like camping with Felix Unger, you know, the anal half of the Odd Couple?

Sure, use the last of the drinking water to wash your hands for the fourteenth time in 10 minutes. Though the benefit is that the Felix Unger types come up with ideas like softening your hard-earth bed with leaves, she laughs.

Ultimately, it’s not the where, when, and how of travelling together that are important, but your ability to go with each other’s flow.

Though, you might want to get yourself a fully updated GPS before you go, just in case.

Josey Vogels is a sex and relationship columnist and author of five books on the subjects. For more info, visit joseyvogels.com.