Trust me, I've Been There

Guardian newspaper columnist Zoe Williams on happy holidays without your other half. Illustration by Tom Percival / Advocate Art

With Valentine’s Day around the corner many of us are probably thinking about romance, about how to surprise a loved one with that little extra something – that jigsaw of inspiration and planning that takes you beyond a weekend in Paris and onto the next level.

Me, I’m thinking of ways to holiday apart. Once you have children, holidays are no longer holidays. Oh my, they’re lovely, the sight of your little ones in the carefree heat (before you start trying to remember the symptoms of sunstroke); the way they caper in restaurants, shrieking, and Europeans don’t mind (this, by the way, is a total myth). But it’s not a holiday. It’s basically just like being at home, with a whole heap of extra challenges and hassles. It’s like being in your full-time job, except you’re going for a promotion, which you’ll never get because it doesn’t exist.

If you want an actual holiday you need to leave your loved ones at the airport or, better still, at your front door – and go off on your own. How does one justify such a thing?

My man does it with winter sports. He loves to ski, although actually hasn’t done it for six years, having dislocated his shoulder in one of those exceedingly common après-lunch skiing accidents. Let’s just say for the record that if he comes back with anything dislocated, I am going to dislocate the rest of him. But this is a brilliant ruse. I hate skiing, so it genuinely would be a waste of the family resources for me to accompany him. By the end of January, he will have had a brilliant break, the path will be clear for me to have my quid pro quo break that doesn’t even have to include sport (maybe a reading weekend?), and we won’t even have had to go to Relate to achieve all of this.

My sister managed something similar in her marriage, by going alone to the gay ballroom dancing championships in Berlin. There was very little resistance from her husband, and now he is free to go cycling to Cannes. The obvious downside is that she had to watch a load of ballroom dancing.

Here are some ideas you cannot get away with: “Darling, what I’d really like to do is just get drunk for the weekend with my mates.” Think creatively, call it a stag/hen night, and then it’s OK. If necessary, you can befriend someone who’s about to be married.

“Precious, I fancy this Spanish music festival, just me and the girls.” If it’s something cool, your beloved will want to come with you – nobody dislikes music. But with tact and made-up hobbies, though, the world is your playpen.