Many years ago, a girlfriend and I spent three months travelling around North America by car. It was planned to be, in part, an accelerated bonding time for us, and indeed, we shared many great experiences.
Then there were the not so great ones. Two months into the trip, when our usually sunny dispositions toward each other were feeling the strain of self-imposed "duotary" confinement, we were approaching the Badlands of North Dakota. I was happy because I imagined the mutual admiration of stunning scenery would bring us close again. In retrospect, I may have pushed reconciliation a little too hard, and we ended up having the worst blow-out argument of our entire relationship standing at the edge of a scorched canyon that can only be described as desolate and unforgiving. Or maybe that was us.
Anyhow, as guys make plans to woo their girlfriends - or re-woo their wives - with their own romantic getaways this summer, I wonder whether there's a lesson to be learned here. Maybe it's best to go in without any soft-focus visions of making it on the beach at sunset. Or better yet, prepare for disaster. Managing expectations might indeed be the key to romantic success.
But how do you achieve the perfect balance? Greg Sacks, a friend and custom trip planner at Toronto-based Trufflepig, says poorly communicated expectations are often the ruin of adults' vacations. Here's an extreme but true story: Two men on a group trip decided that their idea of romance was to engage in some wife-swapping. One of the women was into it. The other? Not so much. What happened? Greg tells me: "Bottles were smashed off the bedroom walls, hotel security was called and one of the wives took all of her husband's belongings and threw them out the window onto the outdoor breakfast area below. It was a major scene."
While most people recognize without guidance that mid-trip polyamory should be agreed upon before departure, the point applies to less obvious cases, too. A friend told me about the time she was on a ski trip with her boyfriend and, instead of skiing together like she thought they would, he waved goodbye at the top and went off ripping the slopes ahead of her. She says being left behind wouldn't have been as hurtful - and après ski hot-tubbing would have been more, um, pleasurable - if she'd known what she was getting into.
Another big mistake when planning a romantic trip is choosing the wrong location. If your woman has an ambitious, Type-A personality, you might expect that the thrilling climb up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania would lead to some adrenalin-charged evenings. But think again, says Greg. "It's the worst because you get altitude sickness and you can't sleep. You've got full-on insomnia. You've got terrible headaches. And then you get really bad gas, which is part of the altitude sickness. It's a great thing to do if you're an old couple, but not if you're still at that point where you think your girlfriend doesn't fart."
Ian Newby-Clark, an associate professor of applied social psychology at the University of Guelph, has studied the effects of how people plan for the future and says that, on the whole, most people wear rose-coloured glasses. "I listened to peoples' plans and predictions for getting things done, which tend to be far too optimistic," he told me. "In fact, if you asked someone for their story about how they're going to go about getting something done and then you asked for their best-case scenario, they're basically the same."
While Dr. Newby-Clark says this Pollyannaish attitude can lead to beneficial outcomes in most endeavours, it can also lead to frustration when it comes to romance.
"When you plan a romantic trip at an inn up north, for instance, you're not usually thinking about what could go wrong," he says. "The traffic might be bad, or one of you might have had something happen at work that day that put you in a bad mood. It could be disappointing."
Are people better off preparing for disaster? "You're reminding me of the phrase, 'Expect the worst and hope for the best,' and I don't think that's quite right," he replied. "That can lead to other problems, like self-fulfilling prophecies."
"Wait, have they been scientifically proven?" I asked.
"Self-fulfilling prophecies? Yes, there's a pretty good amount of literature on the self-fulfilling prophecy effect," he said.
Okay, but how about this loophole: If I go into a trip expecting that my negative expectations will lead to positive experiences, isn't that still essentially optimistic?
It seems to me, after talking to those in the know, that the best plan is to plan ahead - taking into account differing expectations - but then let go. My own experience showed me that the good times just happen when they happen.
One of the most romantic moments on the road trip I took so long ago did not happen while gazing into the majestic Grand Canyon or while watching fountains ejaculate to the sound of Celine Dion in front of the Bellagio in Las Vegas. No, it happened after a long day's drive while drinking Colt 45s in a sleazy motel in middle-of-nowhere North Carolina.
And that was something I never would have expected.
Micah Toub's memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks, will be published in April 2010.