Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Few Couple Vacations? What I Learned
The iced oat latte in front of me was sweating through its paper cup when Lila slid her phone across the table, thumb hovering over a sun-faded photo of her and her husband hiking the Amalfi Coast. “We did Italy last spring, Costa Rica in January,” she said, tapping the screen. “Everyone keeps asking when we’ll stop vacationing and start trying. I keep wondering: should we just wait to get pregnant after a couple more, anyway?”
I laughed, because I’d had that exact conversation with myself sitting on a beach in Cabo San Lucas, five years earlier. After my husband and I got married, every relative, every coworker, every random mom at the grocery store told us the same thing: travel now, because you’ll never get to do it again once you have kids. We took that advice to heart, penciled in two back-to-back big trips before we’d even start trying to conceive. A two-week road trip around the Pacific Northwest, where we ate too many fish tacos on the Oregon coast, got lost in old growth forests, and didn’t set an alarm for 14 days straight. Then a week in Mexico, staying with my husband’s cousin, where we spent most days napping in a hammock and arguing over whether we liked mango or pineapple on our tacos.
We got home, unpacked our suitcases, and I stopped taking my birth control a week later, just like we’d planned. I didn’t think much about the choice until Lila asked me that question at the coffee shop, and I started sorting through what actually mattered about that choice, vs all the noise people tell you.
The first thing I told her was that the idea you’ll never travel as a couple once you have kids is mostly garbage. Last year, my husband and I left our 4-year-old with my parents for three nights and went to a wine resort two hours from our house. We slept in, ate three-course dinners without cutting anyone’s food, and spent an entire afternoon reading by the pool. It was just as nice as any trip we took before we had her. You don’t have to check every big trip off your list before you get pregnant to have couple time later. That’s the thing no one tells you.
But the second thing, the thing I didn’t expect, was that those two trips before we started trying gave us something I didn’t know I needed. For years, our days were filled with work deadlines, rent payments, fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom, all the mundane stuff that eats up your time. On those trips, we didn’t have anything to do but talk. We sat on that beach in Mexico and talked about how we’d split night feedings, what we’d do if one of us wanted to go back to work full time and the other wanted to stay home, how we’d handle the big messy stuff that no one talks about before you have a kid. We never would have carved out that 10 hours of unrushed conversation if we’d been busy trying to get pregnant and going to work every day. That’s the real benefit of waiting for a couple trips, not the Instagram photos.
But that doesn’t mean waiting is right for everyone. My little sister got pregnant three months after her wedding, never took any big couple trips before she had her first. She did a babymoon weekend at a hotel an hour from her house when she was six months pregnant, ate room service and watched bad TV, and says she never felt like she missed a thing. She told me once that the 15 minutes she and her husband get every night after the kids go to bed, sitting on the couch eating leftover ice cream, is just as good as any fancy international trip. If you’re ready to try now, waiting just because people say you need to get your travel in doesn’t make any sense.
I gave Lila three concrete questions to ask herself, instead of listening to everyone else’s opinions. First, do either of you have any known fertility risks that make waiting a year or two a problem? If the answer is yes, don’t push back trying for a vacation. You can go after the baby is a little older, or take a shorter babymoon before the baby comes, and that’s enough. Second, what do you actually want out of these vacations? If it’s slow, uninterrupted time with your partner that you can’t get right now, you don’t need a two-week trip to Europe to get that. You can take a three-day weekend at a cabin an hour away, turn off your work emails, and get that same time way faster. Third, is there a specific trip you’ve always wanted to take that you know you won’t enjoy pregnant or with a newborn? Like a multi-day hike, or a trip that requires 12 hours of travel that would be miserable with a tiny baby? If that’s the case, then waiting makes total sense.
Lila closed her phone after we talked, stirred her latte, and said she and her husband are going to book that Japan trip they’ve been talking about for three years, go next fall, then start trying after that. She said she doesn’t want to look back in 10 years and wonder what it would have been like to go before kids, and that’s enough of a reason for her.
Last month, we took our 4-year-old to that same Oregon coast we visited on our couple trip five years ago. We built messy sandcastles, ate the same fish tacos at the same shack, and after she fell asleep in the hotel room, my husband and I sat on the balcony drinking cheap wine, just like we did before. It was different, of course. We kept checking the baby monitor, and we were tired from chasing her around the beach all day. But it was good. I don’t regret waiting for those couple trips, but I also know it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if we hadn’t. The right answer is whatever feels right for you, not whatever everyone else says you should do.
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