‘How many Roman ruins are we visiting today?’ I asked my boyfriend warily, as we sweated up an Italian hill in 28 degrees heat. ‘Maybe we could spend one day at the beach?’

If you’re a Living Apart Together (LAT) couple, as we were, the stakes are higher when you spend longed-for time together on holiday. The dream of sun, sea and sangria doesn’t always translate. You can end up feeling as if you’ve gone away with a well-meaning stranger. Snoring, booking ahead versus living spontaneously, the Spotify playlist… the list of argument triggers is endless.

For five years my boyfriend M and I had survived on our wits. From Margate to Lisbon to Valenciawe tactfully overlooked key differences, but finally, in September 2024 on a joint birthday trip to Sardinia, we imploded.

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Flying back newly solo, it felt heartbreaking but inevitable. M hates noise and crowds (basically other tourists). I’m quite sociable. He doesn’t approve of long lunches on holiday or lie-ins. My obsession with printing out boarding passes drove him mad. Ditto my overplanning.

‘You think that when all the difficulties of life and work aren’t there, finally we’ll arrive at where we want to be,’ psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose tells me. ‘But then on holiday all that promise falls away and you’re faced with what’s actually there. There’s nowhere to hide, so you can start to feel that you’re each other’s hostage.’

To be honest, M and I nearly split up in Yorkshire in our first year, when I sprained my ankle. I limped for two hours until we arrived at the hotel, which refused to give me ice (‘We need it for the cocktails, Madam’). M thought that was hilarious.

We rowed. M informed me this was probably never going to be ‘a grand passion thing’. I tried to end the relationship. Finally, we started laughing. It became part of our ‘origin story’, but we learned the hard way that we holiday differently.

M and I had met online during lockdown: I was 56, he 59, and we lived independently. I work from home, he has two kids (his daughter lives with him), so we had fun weekends.

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Until that Italian trip broke us. There were mitigating circumstances, of course: M is comfortably retired, I’m a freelance writer and no one had paid me for months. Even cheap holidays cost a lot. Also M was in pain from a hip injury..

We had planned the holiday as our birthday ‘experience’, with modest gifts on the day. (A thrifty car-booter, M gave me a pre-loved Iris Murdoch novel and a bottle of Lidl gin.)

I was fussing about whether he liked the bamboo socks and fashionable (new) novel I’d given him, when something snapped. ‘I dread your presents,’ M told me in a moment of honesty.

It felt like everything conspired against us on that trip. Yes, we were staying in the quaint Old Town in a traditional wood-panelled apartment, but the bathroom was on the ground floor – with a terrifyingly steep staircase. Every night I feared we would plunge to our deaths. M thought I was questioning his virility: ‘We’re not old!’

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On the penultimate day, after slogging behind M to yet another Roman amphitheatre, I asked him directly, ‘Would you be better doing this type of holiday on your own?’

Looking back, it was the death knell. I saw sadness – but also the thrill of escape – in his eyes. What I really meant was, why don’t we have solo adventures, then find a big trip together that brings out the best in us?

The next day, we trailed around trying to find a restaurant. After one gin too many, I teased him about his inflexibility. He took a deep breath. ‘It was never going to work, we’re just too different,’ he told me, not unkindly. He was keen to stay out drinking to toast the news. Back at the apartment he proposed ‘break-up sex’. I declined.

We were polite on the return flight. I went back to London and cried. Determined not to wallow, I booked a girls’ weekend to Bognor Regis. We drank martinis and swam in a freezing sea. No one argued about packed lunches or the car playlist. It was heaven.

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