Should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of vacations? What you need to consider
Last Tuesday, I was wiping strawberry jam off my 1-year-old’s cheek and loading the dishwasher when a voice note popped up from my college roommate Mia. She’d landed back in the US three days earlier from her second big post-wedding trip, a food tour through Portugal, and her voice was half amused, half twisted with anxiety: “We always said we’d start trying after we checked off our two big bucket list vacations. But now I’m here, unpacked, and all I can do is overthink it. Should I have waited? Should I keep waiting for that Japan trip we still haven’t done? What if I messed this up?”
Mia and her husband Sam got married three years ago, right when half our friend group was getting pregnant and the other half was posting photos from treks and international getaways. They watched multiple friends cancel their dream trips after surprise pregnancies, and made a loose plan: get the two big trips out of the way first, then build a family. First was a 10-day hike in Patagonia last year, then Portugal this summer. Now that the trips are done, the external noise has started: her mom texts her every other day about her age (she’s 32), her cousin who struggled with fertility told her she’s reckless to wait, a stranger on her Instagram comments said she “wasted her best fertile years” on vacation.
I was in the exact same spot five years ago. My husband and I got married, and I’d dreamed of an Iceland road trip and a long weekend in New Orleans for my 30th birthday since we started dating. Everyone in our family kept dropping hints: my aunt made comments about my “reproductive window” at every Thanksgiving, my coworker who had trouble getting pregnant told me I shouldn’t risk waiting. We went anyway, took the two trips, and started trying three months after we got home.
What I didn’t expect was how much that time of just being the two of us, no one relying on us for every meal and nap and bedtime, actually set me up for parenthood. I came home from those trips rested, not the tired “I need a vacation from my vacation” drained that a lot of busy travel leaves you with. I’d spent two years checking off the things I wanted to do just for me, so when I got pregnant and had to cut back on late nights and long hikes, I didn’t feel bitter or like I’d missed out. That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re weighing this question: the first trimester of pregnancy for a lot of people is so draining you can barely get off the couch. If I’d gotten pregnant halfway through our Patagonia trip, I would have spent the whole vacation miserable in a hotel room, and I would have resented it.
That doesn’t mean waiting is always the right call, though. The first thing I told Mia is to start with your actual health timeline, not a social media bucket list. If your doctor has told you that starting by a certain age gives you the best outcome, or you know you have PCOS, endometriosis, or a family history of fertility issues, that’s your non-negotiable line. Count the months you have between now and that line, and only fit in the trips that actually matter to you both, not the trips you think you’re supposed to take. My cousin has PCOS, she wanted to do a 14-day trip to Japan before starting trying, and ended up cutting it to 7 days so she could start six months earlier. It ended up taking her 18 months to get pregnant, so that small adjustment made a huge difference for her stress levels.
Another concrete step that helped me when I was deciding: write down what each trip actually means to you, not how it looks on social media. If one of your two planned vacations is just something you saw other couples do, and the other is a dream you’ve had since you were a kid, prioritize the one that matters. You don’t have to hit a certain number of vacations to “earn” starting your family.
You also don’t have to check every trip off your list before you start. You can still travel when you’re trying to conceive, and you can travel when you’re low-risk pregnant, and you can travel with kids. It just won’t be the same trip as the one you take when it’s just the two of you. I love traveling with my son now, but I’ll never get that Iceland trip back: the one where we hiked 10 miles a day, stopped at a random hot spring at 2pm, drank wine by a campfire until midnight, no one needing a snack or a diaper change or to leave early for nap time. That memory is mine, and that’s why waiting was worth it for me. But if you’d rather start trying now than wait another year for a big trip, that’s just as valid.
If you’re already done with your couple of vacations and you’re panicking that you waited too long, the most helpful thing you can do is stop scrolling fertility anxiety content online and book a pre-conception checkup with your OB. That 20-minute appointment will tell you everything you need to know about your current health, any small steps you can take to prep, and it’ll calm a lot of that vague panic that’s usually coming from other people’s opinions, not your actual body.
Last week, I met Mia for coffee, her sunburn still fading, a jar of Portuguese pasteis de nata sitting between us on the table. She ended up booking that pre-conception checkup, and they’re squeezing in that small mountain weekend they’ve been talking about this fall, then starting trying in January. She still worries sometimes—she texted me last night a photo of a baby blanket she saw at Target, then 10 minutes later a photo of a cherry blossom garden in Tokyo that she wants to see. There’s no perfect answer here. I don’t regret waiting, and I don’t judge anyone who skips the trips to start trying right away. Either way, there are trade offs. You just pick the ones that matter most to you.
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