Caroline O'Donoghue: Holidays with men versus holidays with women
Last week I went on holidays with a female friend, something you have to do at least once a year when you live with a man, to make sure you’re not going insane.
I can’t tell you how much I treasure the 'woman holiday': rented apartments filled with stripped-out crisp packets, half-gorged tubs of hummus, and three-quarters-drunk bottles of mineral water that stand in every room like carved heads at Easter Island — pagan protection against the much-feared 4pm dehydration headache.
We hiked, we swam, we chain-smoked, we drank cocktails, and we talked constantly. Every so often, when we were at a restaurant, debating which outfits we thought to be the most iconic, I would notice something.
Other women. Other women, with their partners, cocking their ear to one side, leaning their chairs slightly back, glancing over their shoulders at the words ‘Charlotte’s post-miscarriage dress’. I tapped my friend. I grinned.
“They wish they were with us,” I whispered.
My friend, who is both single and humble, disagreed. “I don’t think they do.”
“They do,” I hushed.
Now that I am sober, I feel like I must walk this sentence back.
Men are not boring on holidays. Or: men are not always boring on holidays. I have had the best times of my life while Gavin and I were travelling together. We’ve been to warehouse parties in Berlin, gospel ceremonies in Memphis, bike-riding in Georgia. We go to festivals every summer and occupy what I believe to be our most divine state: traipsing through fields, kissing the glitter off one another’s faces, seizing a second chance at knowing each other at 17, despite not meeting until we were 24. I love going on holidays with my boyfriend.
However. Something happens to men on sun holidays. Or, I suppose, something happens to women, which is that we discover how tired our partners are. Most men seem to spend the first four days of a sun holiday completely asleep, waking only briefly to not put SPF on, before burning intensely and then refusing to put aftersun on. Why do they suddenly need to sleep so much??? This is not, before you email him, a criticism of Gavin: I have seen this with many men, both boyfriends of mine and of other people. They sleep like bears in winter, leaving their girlfriends to read alone and text their friends about it. We respond to “how’s the holiday?” with “Bliss” followed by five photos of a cat we have befriended.
When the men eventually wake up, they put on a wrinkled linen shirt and you go to dinner together. We are too excited; they are not excited enough. We are taking long, loping steps, showing off our cotton maxi dress that we ‘just threw on’ and have been fantasising about ‘just throwing on’ since the moment we booked this holiday. They say: ‘Nice dress’. We say: ‘Thanks! I just threw it on!’. We are waiting for more discussion of the dress, hoping probably for a deep discussion of which woman in pop culture the dress most represents. This discussion does not come.
This is where we have our first resentful thought of the holiday. If this was a girls' holiday, we think, we would discuss this. My friend would tell me that I looked like Gwyneth Paltrow in , and I would squeal and say that that was exactly what I was going for, and then we would talk about what film her dress was like.
Restaurants are a whole other thing. Here’s the main difference between men abroad and women abroad: women are perfectly willing to be ripped off. I mean that in a nice way. Most women I know will gladly pay the extra 20 quid to sit in the port and watch the boats come in while they drink their wine, realising that the view is part of it, and that atmosphere comes with its own price tag. Men will not. I think men feel as if paying too much for something is like being laughed at. That the restaurant owner is mugging them off, personally, and that afterwards the staff do a little bow-legged dance and go “Aha! Irish man! I have his money!!” So you go to the restaurant a few streets back, the one that is very nice but has no view of the port, and you add this to your list of resentments that are piling up, unbeknownst to your poor partner.
Once you’re sitting down, you will then subject your partner to all the conversation you have stored up while he was asleep.
Information about the book you’ve been reading, the people you met, the market that someone told you about. You are, let’s face it, being annoying. You have adopted a sort of actress-y tone, something that implies you are salt of the earth and have been living on the Amalfi Coast your entire life.
This poor man who just wants to catch up on his sleep and eat a few nice meals at a reasonable price in the sun has really had it up to here with you.
You have a fight — big or little, depending on how many resentments you’ve stored up and how many days he has been asleep for. You will say something insane, like: “I just want to LIVE before I DIE!” or “I could have been on the stage, you know!”
You make up, he catches up on his sleep, you have some very good sex, and you have a lovely time. But part of you wonders whether this holiday was better suited to a girls' trip: where you could really spend 40 minutes on how nice tomatoes are in different countries, or whether or not you would kiss an old man in exchange for going on his boat for 10 minutes.
My advice to young, straight couples: keep men on their feet.
Men are at their best when you’re travelling with them, jumping off the high thing, swimming to the bottom of the deep thing.
Changing trains in China, changing money in Europe, changing minds when you get into trouble. This is when so many men are at their best, when they are high on their own enormous capabilities.
Keep the boys moving. And save the savouring, the elegance, the decadence, the luxury, for your girls.
