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When my partner (finally!) set the date to reverse his vasectomy so we could start trying to have a baby, he immediately began insisting we take an elaborate vacation directly after his procedure—because, as he put it, “our lives are about to end.” Words cannot express how much this framing irked me. I’ve been looking forward to motherhood since I was a child carrying a dozen Cabbage Patch Kids with me everywhere I went, and I felt like my life was just about to begin.
My partner, however, intuited something I didn’t, which was that even though we were about to gain so much, there were things we would lose, too. As much as it pains me to admit he was right, the idea of taking a “last hurrah” trip before we started trying to make a baby was, in retrospect, a stroke of genius.
In fairness, there were several reasons for him to be worried the road was about to get rocky. Not only had we both undergone separate surgeries just to get to the point at which we could try to get pregnant—which was no picnic—but we were anticipating at least one, if not several, rounds of In Vitro Fertilization to follow, and I knew what this would mean for us. Years ago, I experienced a rare, life-threatening complication when freezing my eggs and found the entire fertility treatment process to be a total nightmare. I’d also been watching friends undergo IVF for years and knew that it would be a difficult journey, to say the least—physically, emotionally, and financially—none of which would be easy on our relationship.
If we succeeded in our goal, we’d soon enter into what is almost universally described as the most challenging phase of a relationship: the postpartum period. “The year after baby is often very difficult for couples. This is a period of transition, and when we transition into anything, things change. Protective factors for relationships tend to be ‘lost’ after having a baby—things like having fun together, talking with each other, and having time for sex and other forms of intimacy,” says couples therapist and author of the upcoming book Til Stress Do Us Part Elizabeth Earnshaw, LMFT. While some of these changes are temporary, they can exert tremendous pressure on relationships in the short term.
And of course, it would be a while before we could travel again as just the two of us, or at least do so unencumbered by thoughts of a child left at home. Last year, we vacationed on a sailboat in the Caribbean with another couple who had left their two small children behind for the week. They were very relaxed parents whose children were being competently cared for by the family nanny and grandparents and yet by the last day, as I was mourning the end of the vacation, the mom on board was crying because her flight had been canceled. She needed to get home to her babies.
It may also be some time before we feel up for the type of trip we typically enjoy together again post-baby. Our preferred vacations have always been adventurous—my partner is a pilot, boat captain, and athlete who loves to be outside and active, and I enjoy immersing myself in the culture of new places. Together those interests make for busy, stimulating, and ultimately exhausting vacations. According to Alexis Stein, founder of Alexis Stein Travel & Design, our appetite for a go-go-go couples trip may change post-baby. “Once you become a parent, you’re tired…. A lot. Like, all of the time. A weekend away with your partner has a totally different meaning than it did before,” she says. “I find most people just want to catch up on sleep rather than really take the time to explore a destination. Once you have kids, there’s nothing more luxurious than a robe and room service at a nice hotel.”
Smith finds that in order to reap benefits equivalent to a weekend away pre-children, post-children, you actually need to take a full week away. “The first two nights of a trip, I’m catching up on my sleep—it’s not until day three that I get into the groove of exploring a new destination,” she says. The issue then becomes that many people don’t feel comfortable leaving their kids for that length of time. “You won’t be able to gauge your comfort level until after you have your baby - so don’t miss your opportunity now,” she says.
And while traveling with your children is, I’m told, wonderful—Andrea Pion Pierre, a NYC-based lifestyle and travel influencer, tells me she and her husband prefer traveling with their twins to going on couples trips—it is also undeniably different. This is true logistically—“there are limitations when traveling with children,” says Stein—and in terms of how much focus is on the relationship versus the kids.
Of course, babymoons are designed to cover a lot of this ground. They’re meant to serve as a last chance for partners to connect with one another before the baby comes, and travel without the worries (or the need for childcare) that will soon become requisite. But overly ambitious itineraries during this time can backfire. And there are legitimate limitations due to pregnancy, “most especially long transfer times by car, multiple plane changes, and altitude,“ says Black Tomato co-founder Tom Marchant. “Another limitation can be climate and places that are very hot and extremely crowded in the summer or peak season.”
The trip we ended up taking for our “last hurrah” could not, in retrospect, have been a babymoon. (I know this because I am currently nine months pregnant—but more on that in a moment.) It involved two weeks of sailing the Greek islands, including popular Cyclades islands Mykonos and Santorini as well as lesser-known Ionian islands Ithaca and Kefalonia, followed by an Amazing Race-style week visiting some of our favorite spots on the Amalfi coast, such as Positano and Capri.
Such a sailing trip can be physically demanding—at each stop, we had to practice something called Mediterranean mooring, which typically involved one person jumping into the water with lines to tie the boat off to rocks and trees on land while the other steers the boat into position. It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of situation, and our boat only had two sets of hands. The rest of our days were spent jumping off the boat, swimming in the ocean, and exploring coastal towns, like Fiskardo and Kioni, on foot. We also spent a few days in Athens en route to and from Greece, which involved a lot of hoofing it in the September heat as well. In Italy, I averaged 25,000 steps per day.
Knowing what I know now, there is no way I could have done almost any of the above with a baby on board. For months, I’ve been prone to dizziness—which my doctor says is “just pregnancy”—so trying to tackle the stairs of Positano likely would’ve resulted in a 911 (or, 112) situation. And there hasn’t been a single point in this pregnancy during which I could imagine spending two weeks on a catamaran.
Notably, I also got to imbibe wine and spirits with abandon throughout the trip, which is obviously something I would not have done on a babymoon, and I didn’t have to worry about the potential risks of a single bite of food I tried, either. I would argue that restrictions in either area would have made the trip, if not less enjoyable, less hedonistic, and hedonism does, I’ve heard, tend to evade new parents. And perhaps more importantly, my partner and I got to enjoy intimacy without the ever-present third party who appears in pregnancy (and stays for quite some time thereafter).
And while I wouldn’t say anything quite so dramatic (or trite) as ‘we fell in love all over again’ on this trip, I do feel as though the adventure, novelty, and distraction-free quality time—we are not phone people when on vacation—deepened our bond, inspired optimism about the life we would not only live together, but also with our child, and ultimately made us feel more confident in our decision to start a family.
These happy consequences do not surprise Stein. “Taking risks and doing adventurous things creates confidence and security in a relationship,” she says. It also helps build what Earnshaw calls a couple’s emotional bank account. “When we have a ‘well’ that we can drink from, even during a drought we won't go thirsty,” she says. “That well can be the good feelings, memories, and experiences you built with each other pre-baby.”
As it’s turned out, without that well, we may have died of thirst long before the birth of the baby. At my 20-week pregnancy scan, I was placed on travel restriction and pelvic rest (a.k.a. a total sex-and-orgasm ban) for the duration of my pregnancy. This meant we couldn’t have gone on a babymoon even if we had wanted to. It also meant that in total, we would be spending around six months celibate. To add insult to injury, I’m writing this piece from Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, where I’ve been placed on glorified bed rest for the last four weeks of my pregnancy. All of which means my partner and I have been completely robbed of our last remaining time alone together as a couple doing anything, let alone anything resembling the things we enjoyed pre-baby. It’s been rough, generally, and very rough on our relationship.
And while I don’t yet know just how challenging the next few months will be for us, I know it will not be easy. During this time, when we will not feel like “us,” and I will not feel like myself, the memory of our “last hurrah” will, I believe, help to sustain not only us but me. While it’s true it will also serve as a reminder of what we’ve given up, I hope it will help us remember what we have together, and remind us of the many collective passions we can’t wait to one day share with our child.
Of course, not everyone can take a month off to travel pre-baby, and for some people, lying on the beach is an ideal vacation no matter the life stage. As such, your vacation doesn’t have to be extreme to qualify as a “last hurrah.” It just needs to be “you.” “The journey itself should reflect who the couple are,” says Marchant.
He does note, however, that there are certain things to prioritize on this type of trip if they happen to align with your preferences. “If you are a couple who enjoys very intrepid, multi-day treks and expeditions, these are often also best done before kids are born,” he says. For inspiration, he advises consulting your bucket list. “It’s easy to put off the ‘someday’ dream trip when life hits with packed calendars and shuttling the wee ones around, so use this as a moment to do it,” he says. “This will also serve as a good dive-off point to get to know how you like to travel so that when the time comes, you can still integrate incredible journeys with your children, just adjusted for scale.”
You also don’t have to spend a ton of cash to go big. We utilized several budget-friendly workarounds on our trip, from posting up in Sorrento and day-tripping to Positano and Capri to using a catamaran as our hotel. And honestly, my baby registry only listed one item: cash. My partner insisted babies don’t need all the stuff I wanted to buy for ours, and by all accounts, he’s right (again, ugh). What the baby does need, I secured through hand-me-downs and OfferUp on the cheap. Personally, I’d rather have a memory in Kefalonia than a bunch of brand-new $45 onesies.
Our journey has been riddled with more curve balls than some, but all couples are in for a ride once they bring a baby on board. For me, embarking on this last trip together pre-pregnancy helped preserve in ember the memory of who we were just before we became something else. When we’re inevitably bickering with one another after weeks of sleep deprivation, having barely left the house—let alone the country—in weeks and feeling like shadows of our former selves, I’m hoping that periodically revisiting our final pre-pregnancy trip will help us find each other, and ourselves, again.
And if you need more convincing that you should potentially prioritize a “last hurrah” before trying to conceive, to the shock and awe of every expert involved in our baby journey, we made a baby on this, our final “just us, as us” vacation. While this was an extraordinarily fortunate turn of events, if your goal is to get pregnant, a little carefree vacation aimed at celebrating the fact that you aren’t yet pregnant might not hurt the cause. For us, it really and truly was a “last hurrah”: a final adventure as two before we forever become three.