How to survive the summer holidays: making (and ditching) friends

Holiday friendships –?grinning and bearing it. Photograph: Alamy

If you're the sort of person who goes on holiday to meet people, it might be time to take a good hard look at yourself. At some point during your nascent relationship, your new holiday friends will ask themselves a serious set of questions. Questions that might include: "How did these people figure out my name?", "Do I really have to eat with them again?" and "Oh God, what if they're swingers?"

By and large, holiday friendships are the worst. Oh, sure, they start well enough – usually in a tipsy, sun-drenched rush of where-are-you-froms and how-was-your-flights – but that never lasts. By day two, they've bonded with you. By day three, you're trying to overlook their obvious psychological shortcomings. By day four, you're deliberately avoiding their attempts to get your attention at dinner. By day six, you're so overwhelmingly sick of hearing about their sodding workmates that you've started cancelling all activities that they've even vaguely expressed an interest in. Day seven – when they say "Let's stay in touch" and you scream a made-up phone number back at them and run for the airport – cannot come quickly enough.

But, fine, maybe I'm in the only person in the world who hates holiday friendships enough to spend entire trips twitching and alone in my room. Maybe, for whatever reason, you really are interested in meeting people. If that's the case, it's incredibly important that you choose your prospective friends carefully.

How old are they? Do their interests match yours? What books have they brought? Are they always drunk? Are they a couple scouting around for friends because they obviously can't bear to spend an entire week in each other's company? Do they look like the sort of people who'll turn up at your house at 3am because they mistook "Let's stay in touch" as an offer to actually stay in touch and not just an easy conversational get-out? Trust me, this will be the difference between a terrible holiday and a tolerable one.

Remember, you're going to be stuck in the same place as these people for several days. Pick badly and it'll be almost impossible to extract yourself from the friendship before the break ends. You won't be able to stop running into them – whether they're picking at their bellybuttons by the pool or pushing a boiled egg around a plate at breakfast because they don't know the Italian word for "egg cup" – and it'll be excruciating.

Plus, thanks to Facebook, it'll never end. At some point, either during the holiday or afterwards, these people will track you down online and befriend you. And then that's it. You're doomed to decades of birthday notifications and photos of their children and constant reminders that they still don't know the difference between "your" and "you're". You'll spend the rest of your life in a state of quiet panic in case one of them suddenly mentions that they're visiting town. At least in the past you knew that bad holiday friendships had an ending. Now, for anyone on Facebook, they're a life sentence.

But maybe I'm being too negative. Sometimes, if the wind is blowing in the right direction and you both understand the transient nature of the relationship, meaningful connections are still possible. The boy I met in Portugal when I was two who could only say the word "toast". The bored teenagers who I played rock, paper scissors with for 90 minutes while their mum faffed around in a department store. The woman vomiting on a cross-Channel ferry. The German guy who very carefully taught me all the swearwords he knew. I will always remember these people. I don't want to be friends with them, though. Good God, no.

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Making peace with my unfaithful ex-husband

You know how one minute you're in a happy and fulfilling marriage and the next you find out that your husband of 20 years has been cheating on you with someone 10 years younger? Well I do. I went from country club wife and mother of high school students to a single, 39-year-old "cougar."

In this weekly feature, I will share with you all the mind-boggling, head-scratching, is-this-someone's-idea-of-a-joke moments from my so-called single life. Consider this your private invitation to my tremendous learning curve…

For someone like me, who valued family, marriage and motherhood above all else, being told “There's someone else” by my then-husband was the worst thing that could have happened to me (outside of something happening to one of my kids). When we were cruising along in what I thought was a happy two-decade marriage and he admitted he'd been having a year-long affair, I slapped him as hard as I could, threw our floor fan across the room and invited him to “Get the f*** out.”

“Hurry up and go before
I start
to cry?

From there, my kids and I curled up in the fetal position for several months trying to figure why the person we all counted on to love us the most had handed us our collective a**es. Not only was I left to deal with the undying burn of betrayal, my kids were staring at me with their faces hanging open as if to say, “What the f*** do we do now, Mom?”

But the fun was just beginning. From there I would be dragged through two separations, a failed reconciliation and third person in my marriage (who refused to leave). My ex went right ahead and heaped on a big reeking pile of justification, which involved him re-writing our family history so he could sleep at night. Awesome. It wasn't enough to be humiliated and betrayed and hurt beyond belief, but he also constructed a narrative, which he shared with me repeatedly, that had little-to-nothing to do with the shared reality of the three other people involved.

That sucked.

Fast forward to now, three drama-filled years later.

By coincidence, I happened to be in the town my ex lives in on the third anniversary of our divorce (a date he doesn't remember). We met up for drinks to discuss the kids, and that is when we were both struck with the realization that we will always love each other profoundly. We visited like old friends, laughing and finishing one another's sentences. We grew up together, loved one another deeply, created two awesome people together and no midlife crisis, divorce or “other woman” can change that.

Of course nothing is to be done about it now. He has his life and I have mine. But I think it gives us both peace to know that we are no longer at odds with the person we've loved our whole lives. After we went our separate ways (and he said, "Hurry up and go before I start to cry"), I texted him and told him I was glad I got to spend some time with him on the third anniversary of a difficult day, and he responded with “I will love you always Babe.”

I just want to be friends?— I think
Staying the night seemed like a good idea at the time
Renaming one-night stands: Adult sleepovers

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