Are You Two Together? Solving Trip Conflicts

Every winter, the long-married East Coast couple would fly to the Bahamas to escape the February chill and snow. They looked forward to the balmy weather, the chance to relax and the “couple time” it afforded.

Getting there was awful.

He was a last-minute type. Getting to the airport at a leisurely pace, with enough time to sit at the gate before boarding, wasn’t his style. “That’s kind of how I am,” he would say. His wife was the opposite: Her nerves started fraying if she wasn’t at the airport before the one- to two-hour window the airlines advise.

“There was always an intense argument on the way to the airport,” says Karen Shanor, the Washington, D.C., psychologist who counseled the couple. Eventually she helped them arrive at a solution. For the past five years, Shanor says, they have left on separate planes, the husband booking a flight that departs earlier than the wife’s. If he’s late, he’s late. The woman would rather take separate planes, Shanor says, than have a power struggle.

At holiday time, when people are traveling in record numbers and confronting crowds and tight schedules, such differences in traveling styles are magnified--and are the source of much unhappiness.

How do such people even get past a first date?

The old “opposites attract” axiom has some basis in reality, says Dr. Mark Goulston, a Los Angeles psychiatrist: “Often people who tend to be very organized are attracted to people who seem to be more spontaneous, and vice versa.” It’s a way, Goulston says, to complement what you may see as your own shortcomings.

How do these shortcomings evolve? Why are some people packed days ahead and others running out of the house with clothes in their arms when the airport shuttle pulls up? Why can some vacationers be ready for a dawn car trip, while others are dawdling after the clock strikes noon?

Last-minute types may just be unorganized, therapists agree. But some may have a level of confidence that early birds lack, Shanor says. They may also be more seasoned travelers, feeling that everything will fall into place because it has before.

Some people can do things at the last minute and remain calm, Goulston says, but “they are often distressing . . . to the people around them.” And some of these last-minute types get a kick out of the power to inflict stress.

Vacations aren’t going to change such people. “If you are someone who does things at the last minute at work,” Goulston says, “you are probably going to so the same thing on vacation.”

So much for the psychoanalytical stuff. How do you survive the holiday trip with your opposite?

Thomas T. Olkowski, a Denver psychologist who specializes in travel-related issues, can speak to the topic from professional and personal perspectives. “My wife used to arrive 90 seconds before flight time, literally,” he says. “She’s gotten better because she travels so much for business now. And airlines have gotten stricter about being on time.”

Still, if the couple gets to the airport with two minutes to spare, Olkowski says, “she’ll go buy a newspaper.” Counters his wife, Jeanne Hayes: “It’s a personal failure to be early; it means I haven’t budgeted my time well.”

Over the years, Olkowski and Hayes have reached some accommodation. If it’s time to board, for example, and his wife is nowhere in sight, he goes ahead and boards. Talking about the differences can help, Olkowski tells clients. “The first thing to do, whether you are married or friends, is to acknowledge up front what your [traveling] styles are, to talk about it . . . so you can understand each other and compromise.”

Once you get good at traveling with a person with an opposite kind of internal clock, you might even get better at handling everyday situations. Take it from Olkowski: “My wife believes you can show up at the movie theater at 6:55, buy a ticket, get some popcorn and still get in to see a 7 p.m. first-run movie,” he says, laughing.

They’ve solved that problem, too, he says. “We never go to the movies together.”

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Healthy Traveler appears the second and fourth Sundays of the month. Kathleen Doheny can be reached at kdoheny@compuserve.com.