Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From My Choice
The salt was crusted on my calves and my margarita was half-melted into ice when my sister’s text popped up on my phone, halfway through our second post-wedding vacation in 2019: “Still waiting to start trying?” I turned my phone to my husband, Jake, who shrugged and said “Tell her we’re waiting for at least one more trip before we’re tied down.”
Back then, half the people we knew thought we were crazy to wait. The other half swore we were geniuses for getting travel in before kids “ruined” all that. All our friends were getting pregnant within a year of their weddings. My mom left a dog-eared fertility book on my porch at Christmas. Jake’s coworker pulled him aside to say “You don’t want to be 50 when your kid graduates high school, man.” No one had a neutral take. We’d both been broke college students working 20-hour side hustles just to pay rent, so big trips felt like a luxury we’d earned after years of dreaming. We decided to hold off on trying for a couple of years to check a few spots off our list.
Three years and four trips later, we had our son Milo, who’s now two. I get asked this question all the time by newly married friends scrolling through our old travel photos: was it worth it to wait?
The biggest, most unexpected benefit of waiting wasn’t even the vacations themselves. It was the time we got to work through messy, high-stress problems as just the two of us, no kid pulling on our leg demanding a snack mid-argument. On our third trip, we got stranded in a rainstorm in Costa Rica when our rental car broke down on a backroad. We had no cell service, all our snacks got soaked, and we had to walk three miles in the rain to the nearest house to call for a tow. I’ve thought about that day a hundred times since we had Milo. That day, we didn’t blame each other for picking the wrong road or forgetting a backup charger. We just shared the last dry granola bar and laughed when a local farmer picked us up in the back of his chicken truck. Now, when Milo is having a full meltdown because I cut his sandwich wrong and Jake’s running late from work, we know how to tag out without fighting. One of us takes him, the other gets 10 minutes to breathe on the porch. That skill didn’t come from our weekly date nights at the local taco spot in our old neighborhood. It came from that rainy day on a backroad in Costa Rica, when it was just the two of us figuring it out.
But it wasn’t all perfect. Waiting three years to start trying meant I was 31 when I got pregnant, and that first year of trying, I spent a lot of nights lying awake panicking that we’d waited too long. I have a friend with PCOS who waited two years for two European vacations, and she ended up needing IVF that she might not have needed if she’d started a couple years earlier. That’s a tradeoff no one talks about when they’re telling you to “travel while you can.”
The first concrete thing I tell people asking this question is to start with your own fertility context, not what your cousin or your mom says. If you’re under 30 and have no known fertility issues, waiting a couple years for two or three big trips is very low risk. If you’re over 35 or you already know you have factors that can make getting pregnant harder, that extra vacation might not be worth the added stress and risk later. That’s not fear-mongering, that’s just being honest about how fertility works.
The second thing I tell people is that the myth that you’ll never travel again once you have kids is just that—a myth. You don’t have to cram every dream trip into your pre-pregnancy years. We’ve taken four trips with Milo already: a long weekend to the mountains, a week at the same beach we went to in 2019, a road trip to see my parents, even a quick flight to visit Jake’s sister. It’s not the same as when we could sleep until 10 and spend all day wandering a museum or lay on the beach reading. We have to pack a cooler of snacks, plan around naps, and one of us is always on toddler duty. We only get one margarita each, because someone has to watch the kid eating sand. But it’s still travel. It’s still fun. If you’re okay with that change, you don’t have to put starting a family on hold just to check every trip off your list. If what you love is slow, lazy, kid-free beach days, though, get that in now. That kind of trip is way harder to pull off with a toddler, and there’s no shame in prioritizing that before you start trying.
This year, we’re talking about trying for a second kid, and we’re debating waiting one more big trip to Japan, something we’ve wanted to do since we started dating. I’m 34 now, so we’re weighing the tradeoffs. Half of me says let’s go, get that slow, kid-free trip in before we’re outnumbered by kids. The other half says we can go to Japan in five years, when the kids are old enough to remember it, and it’ll be just as good. I don’t have the answer yet.
There’s no perfect choice. Some of my friends started trying right after their wedding, have two kids now, and they’re happy. Some of my friends waited five years, traveled the world, and had their first kid last year and they’re happy. Waiting worked for us, and I’m grateful for the time we got as just the two of us. But it wouldn’t work for everyone, and that’s okay. At the end of the day, the right answer is whatever fits what you and your partner actually need, not what everyone else says you should do.
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