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Does Your Companion Share Your Travel Style?
If your travel styles do not sync up, take a look at differences in temperament.
Posted August 3, 2019
Do you need eight hours of sleep to stabilize your body and mind? Can your traveling companion get by on four one night, nine another?
Do you thrive on noisy, crowded restaurants, while your mate or buddy, given the chance, would select quiet, open places? Do you begin a trip with a list of goals and an order of achieving them, create a single target but then open yourself to what presents itself for discovering, or simply head out the door ready to engage with whatever comes?
People tend to subscribe to one of three approached to making travel plans. Temperamental style may have hardened into strategies for vacationing, and when yours clashes with that of your companion, it can become a source of conflict rather than pleasure.
Do you and your companion agree on a basic approach?
Travelers generally prefer one of three styles, although familiarity with the destination can push them to more or less structure:
1. The Prepared
Define your goals, fine-tune your path to achieving them (perhaps with a Plan B), and go for it. Travelers who prefer this approach often do copious research on the resources available at the destination, details concerning them, and the supporting means of finding food, lodging, any tickets that might be required, and ways to get from one place to another. Flights are booked with care, itineraries are drawn up, reservations made, and transportation options understood and planned.
The prepared traveler acquires the most current maps, checks hours and open days of attractions, and designs a travel wardrobe to accommodate expectations. They have a checklist of tasks to be completed before leaving home (adjust the thermostat; arrange for mail to be stopped, held, or collected by a friend; suspend newspaper and other regular deliveries, household services, and commitments for the duration of the trip).
2. The Flexible
A second style is less intent on pursuing specific goals and instead substitutes general ones, like having fun, discovering something new, revisiting old haunts or memories, and sharing the time with a companion. Relationship issues often are primary: Travel is seen as an opportunity to share, to make decisions and solve challenges together, to enjoy seeing each other in a different (and possibly new) context.
Details are meant to serve the purpose of shared pleasures and bonding. If one museum is closed, a second can substitute quite well. So could a safari into a street lined with stores or a walk along the waterfront or into the hills. One advantage is that choices during any particular day can be responsive to weather, calendar (days of the week when a destination might be closed), and clock (opening and closing times).
3. The Spontaneous
The freedom-lover embraces a third style, that of spontaneity. Schedules and plans make them feel hemmed in, controlled by outer forces. They far prefer to figure things out as they go along.
A devotee of this style might simply show up at the airport, pick a destination, board a flight. Having a passport in hand might be the only limiting factor, along with some awareness of financial limitations and a time when they do need to return. With the only structure being the period of time available, the more they can follow the whim of a moment, the happier they may be. A “good” trip can be measured in discoveries, adventures, meeting challenges that appear along the way, and taking advantage of opportunities.
Appreciate and respect each other’s temperament.
If you each find yourself partial to a different style of travel, see if you can appreciate the differences in temperament that have led to those styles. Temperament is the biological basis of personality and, as such, can offer keys to resolving conflicts between two people if only they can understand each other better.
Here is a brief recap of how the nine temperament dimensions may manifest while traveling:
1. Activity Level
How much does a person require physical movement, and how comfortable are they being still? Must they act on their environment, or are they comfortable receiving from it?
2. Approach-Avoidance
How comfortable is a person with novelty? Do they embrace something that challenges what they have known, actively seeking out the new? Are they skilled at seeing the familiar through new lenses? Or do they thrive in the comfort of what is familiar?
3. Adaptability
When a person is blocked from pursuing a particular path, do they easily switch gears, try another one, or do they become frustrated and angry?
4. Rhythmicity
People are hardwired to have internal signals of hunger, the needs for rest and sleep, the benefits of routines. But routines and schedules are more important to some than to others. For a person who needs regularity and predictability, travel must accommodate those needs.
The travel partner who is not as distressed by shifts in blood sugar or energy levels does well to recognize that the need to maintain regularity is real. Responses to jet-lag can be a give-away to differences in rhythmicity. Some people barely react to it; others require a day per hour of change to adjust.
5. Mood
Some people are naturally cheerful and positive; others are more serious. As long as companions who have different moods (and moodiness) know how to work with each other, they should be able to travel well together.
6. Threshold of sensitivity
Like rhythmicity, the threshold of sensitivity is most biologically driven. When traveling companions understand that they do not experience sound, sights, touch, smell, taste, and temperature in identical ways, they will be more tolerant of each other’s reactions and willing to accommodate needs that arise from them. Respecting different reactions to temperature (and its change) can be particularly important.
7. Intensity
The laser beam and diffuse light can journey well together when they allow each other to help modify an extreme. Agreeing to a level of desired drama and ways to regulate it is a bonus.
8. Distractibility
When traveling, the person with the greater focus can help you not miss your planes or trains, while the one who is more distractible can notice the Flash Mob beginning to gather and lead you to what might be one of the highlights of your trip. Again, the tendencies can be complementary when they are respected, allowing more time for switching gears to the low-distractibility temperament and gently redirecting the high-distractibility one back to the activity that is happening at the moment.
9. Persistence
In one extreme, a persistent traveler will not give up until they manage to dine at a targeted popular restaurant, while another will be quick to look for a substitute and to let the original goal be released. Asking “why” a person is holding onto a particular goal with such tenacity can help negotiate how to deal with the challenges that achieving the goal may offer.
Select your travel companions carefully when you can. Even when you cannot, enjoy what they bring to the experiences; appreciate their gifts and idiosyncrasies as they broaden your perspective on possibilities. All kinds of travel, but especially vacations, can then be more rewarding.
Copyright 2019 Roni Beth Tower
