MUCH LIKE everything else in life, our holiday habits appear to go in cycles. As children, we holiday with parents, to campsites in Brittany, for example, where the kiddies’ disco ends at 11pm and French teenagers teach us to blow smoke rings; or to a family friend’s mobile home in Wexford, where the local town has an arcade with three arcade games and a pool table.
As adults, holidaying is usually divided between either raucous group holidays with a gaggle of friends to “party destinations” (where we rise in the late afternoon and go to sleep with the dawn) or calmer couples’ getaways to the Algarve or an island in Greece.
Unless, that is, you’re suffering from what the online travel community Thelma Louise terms “holiday incompatibility syndrome”, where what you want from a holiday just isn’t the same as your other half. In this alternative view, married women leave their husbands at home – but, far from a Shirley Valentine scenario, these holidays are usually more about reconnecting with friends and relaxing than about finding a “younger model”.
Pat Dawson, interim manager of the Irish Travel Agents’ Association, says: “Many women would be more into the cultural end of things [than their husbands] – they’d want to do more, and see more of the cultural aspects of countries. They go for the good wine and the good food. It’s sad, but a lot of men would be happy watching television. And definitely, between the ages of 30 and 50, most men hate the beach, whereas the women love it.”
FOR THE PAST 10 YEARS, Irene Byrne has holidayed with various female friends, instead of with her husband, Pat. “Pat doesn’t like the sun,” she says. “So that’s the main reason I go with a friend. I just want to go with two or three books and sit in the sun. In the beginning, we’d go to an apartment, but I wouldn’t do that any more – I’m getting too old. I like to get up, go walking for an hour, come back and read, have a cup of coffee and go to the beach for the day.” How does Pat feel about this? It seems to conjure up visions of a husband left at home alone, mourning his holidaying wife – but Irene tells a different story.
"He went to Machu Picchu recently with our twin sons," she says. "He likes walking holidays and doingthings. But there's never any argument about it." And the couple does, occasionally, holiday together.
“I’d go to Paris with him for a weekend, or I’d go to England with him – I go to visit a cousin, and her partner has similar interests to Pat. He’s into planes and museums, that’s what he likes. That, to me, would be a little boring.”
The question must surely be raised: is it about the nightlife? Is this a way of holidaying with friends that allows a married woman to recapture her single days? “We don’t drink that much,” says Byrne. “We’d be in bed by 10.30pm or 11pm. We might go out to the entertainment [provided at the resort], but we wouldn’t be going out to the bars at night. We met four girls from Dalkey one year – they were in their 40s, but they were out on the tear every night. They just let their hair down . . . you don’t blame them.”
FIONNUALA BRENNAN, from Tramore, Co Waterford, travelled to Nice earlier this year with three friends to celebrate their 40th birthdays.
“My sister had done the same thing with her friends when she was 40 – that’s what gave us the idea,” she says. “We met for coffee one afternoon in December and decided to do a weekend. We decided to go to Nice because one of the group has gone regularly, and knows it well.”
For Brennan, it was a chance to get away with her friends and a rare opportunity not to talk about everyday life. “We didn’t talk about our partners, or our children, or our work . . . we just talked about the food, the drink and the people. We’d lived together in Paris in our early 20s and we kind of relaxed back into it.
“The priority was just to chill, swim . . . we’re all into doing different things, but it was so beautiful, lying out in the sun, reading, eating good food, having a leisurely breakfast and a long dinner.” You get the impression that it’s not a holiday that Brennan will be forgetting any time soon – nor, she says, will she be repeating it too often.
“If I could get away with it, I’d go every year,” she laughs. “My husband kept saying, ‘enjoy it, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’, and I was saying, ‘twice in a lifetime?’ In another five years, maybe – but it was expensive. I probably spent as much that weekend as we would spend on family holidays. It’s not something I could do regularly.”
EMMA AND ALAN Henderson have been married for two years, and, although the shine hasn’t gone off holidaying together – “we go on two or three holidays a year” – she sometimes goes away without him.
“I’ve been on a few hen weekends, where, obviously, he can’t come,” she says. “And a couple of times I’ve gone on girly spa-type weekends. I go with two of my friends from Ireland. The boys are all into serious sports, they do triathlons and marathons, and, well, this is something that I thought I could seriously commit to.” Doesn’t Alan feel left out? Spa treatments, these days, are surely something men could enjoy as much as women.
“No. Alan wouldn’t really be interested in spa treatments. He has done them with me before, but he didn’t like them. Had had a bad massage from a man in Budapest who pummelled him too hard,” she laughs. “But he’s not left out – he goes away to Munich and Berlin on holidays with his friends, or long weekends. The first time he went, I was going to go, but no other girls were going, and I just thought it would be very ‘beery’.”
For Henderson, holidaying without her husband isn’t driven by a severe case of “holiday incompatibility”.
“When we go away together, we like doing very similar things – mostly eating and drinking and taking day trips,” she says. “But I just don’t see any reason why you can’t go away with your friends. I don’t think I’d ever go away for longer than a weekend, because I’d miss him too much.
“But I think it’s important to nurture all of the relationships in your life, and sometimes you need a little one-on-one time with people, away from your partner.”
