MAGAZINE
The summer we find each other again: why holidays bring us closer to the people we love, and sometimes drive us apart
All year, we look forward to the holidays so we can «finally find each other again». Sometimes we do, wonderfully; sometimes, on the third day, we discover we’re strangers to each other, facing a conversation that goes nowhere. Both happen for the same reason.
What brings us closer: time that serves no purpose
The rest of the year, we spend a lot of time with the people we love — but it’s functional time: meals where we organize the week, drives where we divide up the errands, evenings where each of us winds down beside the other, looking at two screens. That time doesn’t create intimacy; it creates logistics.
Holidays offer what we’re missing: time that serves no purpose. An afternoon spent waiting under an olive tree, boredom shared. It’s in these empty stretches — never in planned activities — that real conversations return, the ones where someone finally says what’s been on their mind for six months. A couple, a family, a friendship isn’t mended in the big moments: it’s mended in the idle hours — and summer is the only reliable source of them.
What drives us apart: our roles were holding us up
Yet the same mechanism causes August falling-outs. At home, everyone has a job: appointments, tech problems, staying in touch with the school. These roles are tiring — and they protect us: as long as we’re playing a role, we don’t have to ask whether we still have anything to say to each other.
On holiday, the jobs disappear: all that remains is two or five people facing an empty day. It’s a gift when the relationship is alive, a test when all that was left of it was the routine of keeping things organized. Many couples don’t argue because of the holidays: on holiday, they discover what March had hidden from them.
The real culprit: the picture nobody put into words
There’s a cause of summer conflict more common than any other, and almost always invisible: each person set off with a picture of the trip they’d never expressed. One imagined sleeping until eleven; the other had three villages, a museum and a hike in mind. Neither is wrong, and neither said a word — because it seemed obvious.
So the disappointment that follows isn’t aimed at the other person: it’s aimed at the gap between the trip we dreamed of and the one we actually got. But the other person is there, so they bear the brunt — hence the arguments about breakfast time, which were never really about breakfast. The remedy is disarmingly simple: before setting off, tell each other what we truly expect from those two weeks. Not the itinerary — the expectation. «What I need is sleep.» «I need to see people.» That quarter of an hour saves more holidays than any destination.
The most dramatic case is the family home: we arrive as adults, respected elsewhere, and within forty minutes we’ve slipped back into our 1997 role. Knowing that defuses most of it — we can smile at what’s happening instead of seeing it as an attack.
Spend a little time apart to find each other again
The most useful conclusion is the most counterintuitive. Successful holidays aren’t the ones where we stick together from morning till night, but the ones where everyone gets their quarter hour of forgetting: an hour walking alone, a book in a quiet corner. We come back with something to tell — and we need something to tell if we’re going to talk.
We don’t prove our love by never leaving each other’s side. We prove it by putting up with each other at eleven in the morning when it’s raining, laughing about a plan that fell through, and quietly giving each other permission to be somewhere else in our thoughts for a while. That’s what it means to find each other again: not to fit together perfectly, but to relearn how to live together without an instruction manual. And if the quiet is missing, there are gentle tricks: a local radio station while each of us reads in our own corner, an image of a harbor on the living room screen. Being together without an obligation to talk — often, that was all we were missing.
— The Terondo editorial team. Radio stations and webcams from around the world, for evenings when we want to be together without having anything to say.
Photo: Bob Wick; Bureau of Land Management — Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.