To the new couples ‘turbulence testing’ their relationships: just relax and enjoy good times instead | Emma Beddington

Holidays offering the newly-in-love stress tests are missing the point. Strife is inevitable, writes Emma Beddington; it’s how you deal with it over the long term that matters

‘Turbulence test” trips are a “romantic travel trend” for new couples, according to US Vogue. The magazine spoke to two women who had decided to stress-test fledgling relationships with trips, and a hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, that aims to “lean into couples’ curiosity about their connection” by offering a “turbulence test” package. It includes $100 (£74) of cocktails and a pack of conversation cards, which does indeed sound like a recipe for brewing trouble in paradise.

I can’t fault travel as a trial for new romance: coffin-sized shared spaces, upset schedules, tricky interactions, destination disappointments – and the unhelpful accepted wisdom that holidays should be better than real life when they’re less comfortable and way more expensive than staying home – make them into a Soltan-scented pressure cooker for couples. My husband and I nearly split after a horrific trip to Italy in our second year together – it started with unsuccessfully trying to hitchhike 20 miles in a thunderstorm after discovering no trains ran on 15 August and continued with a fortnight of rain, recriminations, tinned soup and cheap wine-fuelled fights.

And I suppose it’s admirably clear-sighted (though I wouldn’t necessarily call it “romantic”) to decide, still in the first flush of oxytocin-fuelled infatuation, that you need to know now if your new partner won’t try new foods, ever, abandons you halfway up a hill when you get a blister, or refuses to express a single opinion on trips, flaccidly bleating that they “don’t mind” as you suggest restaurants and outings (jail for those people – a mere break-up is too good for them).

But isn’t it also borrowing trouble from tomorrow, perhaps unnecessarily? What might early on feel like hard lines can blur with time and tolerance. It would have been a shame if we’d shaken hands and gone our separate ways back in 1995: now he’ll follow me to dingy chapels to see saints’ shrivelled body parts without complaint; I’ll follow him (complaining, yes, but barely audibly) into the Ryanair boarding queue 90 minutes before take-off. I actually think we both get something – other than aggravation – from our fundamentally incompatible travel (indeed, life) philosophies.

Turbulence will find you anyway; there’s no need to seek it out. I can think of so many relationship stress tests that fall into your lap in the first year alone. For a start, there’s sleeping together – not sex, but actual sleep with its unsexy baggage of mouthguards, night lights and childhood teddies (there are three people in your relationship now, and one of them is a well-sucked rag called Boots). You’ll also encounter their slobbing around at-home self: cartoon character sweats, greying long johns, synthetic slankets crackling with static and novelty onesies put the most potent attraction to the test. The first time I saw my husband’s tartan slippers was challenging; I don’t suppose my dad’s stained cricket jumper was much of a turn-on either.

You’ll definitely get sick with the kind of minor illness that reveals what you’re like under par. Perhaps your strong silent type becomes a pathetic cry-baby when they get a tickly throat; they’ll almost certainly be repulsed by the trail of snotty paper handkerchiefs you leave in your wake when you have a runny nose. Gastric troubles are an even sterner test – noises, smells, the horror.

Meeting their friends and family presents fresh challenges: a thoughtful, sensitive soul might become a Neanderthal banter-monger with their mates, or a sullen lump of teenage resentment back in a dysfunctional family cocoon; you could discover you hate everyone in their entourage (in which case you might be the problem). Then the “holidays” in the American sense of the word roll around and they insist on eating pike, “don’t believe” in presents, or have an unbreakable commitment to New Year’s Day family charades, MC’d by a creepy uncle.

What I’m saying is relationship turbulence is as much of a certainty as death, taxes and delayed flights, and however long you’ve been together, you’re never safe from it (36% of US divorces are among the over-50s, a pattern also seen in Japan and Korea, and identified by the ONS as a UK trend back in 2017). So why not relax and enjoy the honeymoon period without an expensive, stressful stay in the bridal suite?

• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here