Holiday Romance - Don't End Up with Holiday Baggage!

By Ryan Oliver

With the Christmas break-up season over, you have managed to get through the long lunches and party nights without too much embarrassment, even if you did have way too much sangria at your work friend's Sunday BBQ the other day.

Holiday romances are curious things. Some people go through their entire lives without ever having one. 

Others go miles out of their way every summer to have them because they are addicted to the transience, the inconsequential nature of mad flings that neither they nor their part-time partners have any plans to take further.

Others blunder into holiday romances and end up getting thoroughly messed up because of them. They mistake the blinding light and heat of a phosphorescent fling for love and devotion and actually consider changing their entire lives for the new man or woman temporarily in their lives.

It matters little that keeping this new flame alive might involve you emigrating to Fiji or putting in for a transfer from your office in, say, Sydney, to the Gold Coast branch.

Traditional thought has it that men and women have approached holiday romances from different angles.

Your standard blokey bloke has always been after one thing and one thing alone, of course. Not like the women, who have always been after something a little more spiritual and meaningful. Yeah, right!

We are in the Noughties now and women and men are often both after precisely the same thing. Fair enough too, if both parties are fully aware that a totally meaningless sexual adventure is the order of the day. 

Not so fair if one party has a different skew on things.

But if you're heading off for a sun, sea, sand - and, possibly, sex - holiday. There are a few things you should consider.

First (and we hate to put a dampener on things), are your "safe-sex" habits up to scratch? (Both for your sake and the sake of whomever you may end up with). If you're a little haphazard in this area, you're not only a fool to yourself, you're a possible danger to others.

Get a check-up and make sure you are clean, then clean your act up for everyone's sake.

If you're responsibly promiscuous, (cute phrase, hey?) you run fewer risks but you can still run into a few pitfalls. If you have a one-night stand with someone on a tour group, for example, and that's as far as you want it to go, you might spend the rest of your trip uncomfortably trying to avoid your former "love" and have an ultimately miserable time.

You might have a fling with someone in a place that you love to visit on an habitual basis. You might find yourself wanting to give this all-time fave place a miss in future, all for the sake of a passing fancy.

Many people, of course, have a torrid holiday romance and mistake it for the real thing. They go to enormous expense to keep the flame alive with long-distance phone calls, long letters. When they finally get back together again, they realise what a colossal waste of time it all was.

Either that or they realise that one or both partners were not the people that they thought they were. It is, after all, easy to play a role while you're on holiday - away from your reality, your humdrum normality. He doesn't know that you really work in an abattoir, so keep telling him you're a television production assistant!

If you're in a relationship already but feel tempted by the prospect of a holiday dalliance away from the prying eyes of your "beloved", just get a copy of Fatal Attraction out on video or DVD before your trip to keep you on the straight and narrow!

Enjoy your summer of love... or lust!