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Shikha Sharma
We have been trying to plan a trip with another couple for four months.
Four months. We have not booked anything. We have not agreed on a destination. We have not settled on dates. What we have done is have eleven conversations about the trip, each of which ends with everyone agreeing that we should definitely do this and someone saying they will look into options and then nothing happening until the next conversation.
The other couple are our good friends. We like them. We want to travel with them. This desire has been clearly established across all eleven conversations. The desire is not the problem.
The problem is that there are four of us, and four of us have four opinions, and the four opinions have not yet found a configuration that results in a booking.
It started in January. My husband suggested a beach trip. Our friend Kabir said beaches in February were crowded, what about the hills. His wife Meera said she got cold easily so maybe not the hills, what about somewhere with good food. My husband said everywhere has good food, we should decide on the destination first. Kabir said the destination determines the food. Meera said she had seen something about a place in Rajasthan that looked interesting. I said Rajasthan in February might be cold. Meera said she thought it would be warm. My husband looked up the weather. It was mixed. Nobody booked anything.
We had this conversation in four different forms over the following three months. Beach vs hills vs heritage vs somewhere no one had been. February vs March vs a long weekend vs a full week. Flights vs train vs just drive. Budget hotel vs nicer hotel vs that Airbnb Meera kept finding that nobody else was fully convinced by.
Last Sunday all four of us were at our place. I had made chai and put out Sunfeast Marie Light on the table because that is what my table looks like on Sunday afternoons, and we were ostensibly having a normal visit, and then Kabir said so are we actually going to book something or not.
We spent the next two hours trying to book something. We did not book anything. But we had an extremely detailed discussion about why not.
The Budget Conversation
The budget conversation is the one nobody wants to have and everyone has to have.
Four people do not automatically have the same idea of what a trip should cost. One person's reasonable is another person's extravagant. One person's basic is another person's uncomfortable. And because nobody wants to be the person who says I cannot do that, the budget conversation happens in code.
Kabir says he is easy about budget. This is not fully true. What it means is that he does not want to be the one who sets the ceiling but he has a ceiling. My husband also says he is easy about budget. He is also not fully easy about budget. He has a floor below which things become not worth it.
Meera is the most honest about this. She says what she is comfortable spending. I find this impressive. It immediately clarifies half the conversation. The other three of us then have to decide whether we are comfortable spending the same thing, which requires us to stop saying we are easy about budget and actually say what easy means.
We have had the budget conversation twice. We have not yet arrived at a number that four people have explicitly agreed to. We have arrived at a vague range that everyone has tacitly accepted while privately maintaining their own interpretation of where within the range we are operating.
The Airbnb Problem
Meera finds Airbnbs.
She is very good at this. She finds genuinely beautiful places that none of the rest of us would have found. The problem is that she finds them at the upper end of the budget range, in the vague area where my husband's interpretation and Kabir's interpretation start to diverge, and she presents them with such specific enthusiasm that saying no to them feels like saying no to her personally.
My husband has said no to three Airbnbs by saying he wants to think about it and then thinking about it until Meera has moved on and found another one. I have watched him do this four times. He does not know he has a system. He has a system.
Kabir says yes to all the Airbnbs immediately because he does not want to be the one who says no. Then later he and Meera have a separate conversation that I am not party to and the Airbnb gets quietly moved to the maybe pile.
I found out about this from Meera, who told me about the separate conversations with the resigned affection of a woman who has been married long enough to know which battles are worth having in public and which ones are better handled offline.
The Dates
We cannot agree on dates because the four of us do not have the same calendar constraints and do not have a mechanism for figuring out which constraints are firm and which are negotiable.
Kabir has a work thing in March that might move. Might. The might has been present since January. Whether the thing has moved is information we do not have because Kabir has not checked because checking requires the trip to be sufficiently real that checking is worth doing, and the trip is not sufficiently real because we have not agreed on dates, and we have not agreed on dates because Kabir has not checked his work thing.
My husband identified this as a circular problem in conversation number seven. He identified it clearly. Everyone agreed it was circular. Nobody resolved the circle. We had chai. We moved on.
The WhatsApp Group
There is a WhatsApp group. It is called something optimistic that Meera named when she created it in January.
The group has forty-three messages. Eighteen of them are Airbnb links from Meera. Six are my husband saying we should decide on a destination first. Four are me saying maybe we should all separately send our top three choices and find the overlap. Three are Kabir saying sounds good. The top three choices were never sent. Nobody followed up. The group has been quiet for eleven days.
Yesterday Meera sent a new Airbnb link. It is beautiful. It is in a place none of us suggested. It is available in March if we book by Friday.
My husband has not responded yet. Kabir said looks amazing. I said I will check with my husband. It is Wednesday. Friday is in two days.
We are not going to book by Friday.
The Part I Have Accepted
I have accepted that the trip will happen when it happens and not before. The four of us will reach a configuration of destination, dates, accommodation and budget at some point and then we will book something quickly because the pressure of finally deciding will make everything move fast.
This is how it works with groups. The planning takes forever and then the booking takes twenty minutes and then everyone is happy and wonders why it took so long.
We will go somewhere. It will probably be good. Kabir and my husband will argue about something on day two that will be resolved by day three. Meera will find a restaurant nobody else would have found. I will be in charge of snacks, which I am always in charge of, because I am the person who thinks about snacks.
I am already thinking about snacks.
The trip is going to be great.
We just have to book it first.
