Why holidaying with another family can test even the strongest friendships

13 April 2012

There are many things you can do to offend another family during a shared holiday, like nicking the best bedroom or quibbling over restaurant bills.


Or you can do what I did and feed their six-year-old's surprise homemade birthday cake to your children by mistake. (It was in the fridge when we arrived. My children were hungry. The other family was asleep. I thought it was one of those little offerings you find welcoming you in rented Cornish cottages. I was to regret this mistake deeply the morning after.)

A shared holiday with another family sounds like a brilliant idea when it is first conceived - over dinner, say, three glasses of wine into the meal.

Nanny envy. Food wars. Marriages in meltdown: A lot can go horribly wrong on joint holidays

Nanny envy. Food wars. Marriages in meltdown: A lot can go horribly wrong on joint holidays

It seems like the perfect solution: entertainment for the children, company and conversation for the grown-ups, shared cooking, shared help, the chance to rent a bigger, nicer house that you might not be able to afford on your own.

It's extraordinary how many people use that last one as a reason. Why? You could do that with your real home. But you value your privacy and you don't.

And most of us have stories, or know people who have stories, of when it all went horribly wrong.

You just know, don't you, that it's not going to be all roses? What if the other couple bring their au pair? That's a disaster from the start.

'Never go with the other family's au pair or nanny, unless you are bringing one of your own,' says Helen Irvine, a psychotherapist and mother of three from York.

'Of course, their au pair won't want to look after your children and your children won't want to be looked after by them. You'll end up in the pool, or playing Lego with your children and theirs, inwardly seething as you watch your friends relaxing and working their way through Zadie Smith.'

It's when the children are nursery age that you find the highest cluster of horror stories.

Parents, anxious or insecure, still think it matters how many ice-creams their children have before lunch and tut-tut at your more easy-going ways.

'There's that terrible double conversation you have with your own kids,' says Irvine. "No, you can't have a lolly yet." "But, Mum, you said. . ." And you can see the other mother grimacing.'

Or they might not yet have learned that very important life lesson: that no one else cares how clever, or talented, or advanced your child is.

It takes a bit of time, too, to learn when it is acceptable to tell off someone else's child: never.

Irvine adds: 'By day three of a shared holiday, an infant's sleeping routine can represent an entire moral code. We had a nightmare once with another couple in Corfu. They were all: 'Oh no, we can't possibly go to the beach for lunch, little Felix has a nap between 12pm and 2pm.'

'We were thinking "Oh, how ridiculous, our whole day is being dictated by a two-year-old," but I knew as soon as we left the room that they were hissing: "Can you believe they don't put their child down for a nap? How irresponsible."

'Smugness is an evil on holiday,' says Sacha Jones, a teacher from Bristol with a nine-year-old son.

'I remember once my husband and I being called Library Corner by the other parents because we liked to read to our children, whereas our friends brought a truck-load of DVDs.

'God we felt superior. But looking back, it was only Scooby-Doo they were watching, not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It wasn't worth undermining a friendship.'

Occasionally, a shared family holiday hits the rocks because of a weakness in one of the marriages.

John Mason, a lawyer and the father of four children under 15, once went on holiday with one of his best friends from work.

He recalls: 'The tension between him and his wife was almost tangible. He wasn't pulling his weight at all - it was a whole different side of him I didn't know.

'She got up with their children, and put them to bed, and did the cooking when it was their turn. On the last night, when we were clearing up, he deigned to wander into the kitchen and said: "Oh, there isn't an oven!"

'It was one of those ovens that is split, with the hob one side of the room. We all just looked at each other in disbelief. They separated soon after.'

Clare Saunders from Aberdeen, a full-time mother of four, says the way to enjoy a shared holiday is to have shared expectations.

'My most stressful holiday ever,' she says, 'was when some friends who had rented a villa in Italy were upgraded at the last minute, and asked us along.

'We felt obliged to them from the start. It was so much more expensive than anything we could have afforded, and really my children were too young for that sort of a holiday.

'They are lovely people, but the pressure of keeping up with them was just awful. The house was amazing, with gates and cypress trees. Caroline arrived with a spray tan and she had all these amazing bikinis with matching sarongs and flip-flops.

'I was pregnant and lumpy and exhausted. The big problem was that we had agreed to share the catering, one day on, one day off.

'When they were cooking, they would leave their children with their nanny and go off sourcing exquisite ingredients, driving miles to a town where they had read up about the olive oil.

'We'd come down to dinner and the table would be laid with flowers and they'd be showered and changed into lovely pressed clothes.

'But then, when it was our turn, we'd both be trying to mind the children, it would be bathtime and everyone would be screaming and whinging and we'd be hissing to each other "Go and get the marinade on," or, "For goodness sake, start chopping."

'It was like having a dinner party every single day. Keeping up that level of appearance was exhausting.'

Parents with older offspring appear to have fewer cautionary tales. On the one hand, a holiday is less of a misnomer when the children can entertain themselves, and on the other parents have learnt what works and what doesn't.

Activity-based holidays seem generally to be a success - skiing, or water-sports, when you are entertained during the day and flop together at night.

Also higher on the success stakes is any holiday where the cooking is taken care of, so there is one less thing to be stressed about.

Half of the seasoned 'duo-vacationers' I talked to told me it was important to put the children's friendships above the adults, and the other half told me that holidays were only a success if the adults got on.

Both groups agreed that too much proximity, even to people you love, can lead to a dangerous lack of perspective.

'You can share a holiday with other people without having to share everything about it,' says psychotherapist Helen Irvine. 'If you want to go off and explore the local monastery, that's fine, but make sure you don't judge your friends for wanting to read a glossy magazine by the pool all day.

'Separate houses are good. Better still, separate continents.'

Helen is one of the more vociferous opponents of shared holidays, so you would imagine she has learned to give them a wide berth.

'Actually,' she admits, 'we go on holiday with the same family every August. And every September I say to everyone else I know: "Shoot me if I say I'm going to do that again."

'But, yes, we've just paid up again this year.'

And why might that be? 'The children, of course. The children always have a ball.'

Incidentally, on the topic of that chocolate cake we so unwisely ate when we arrived on that particular holiday - I realised my error overnight, drove to the supermarket in Bude in the early hours, bought a Mr Kipling chocolate gateau and squished, filled and re-iced the sponge so brilliantly that nobody noticed.

Some names have been changed © Guardian News and Media Ltd 2008.

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