Not wanting to socialise on holiday..

[Ditsyprint40]

Being on holiday and wanting to rest and recharge, not make friends with every other holiday maker staying at our resort/hotel etc!

I spend all year listening to my children talk about ps4 games/anime and how much they love/hate school. Hubby works very hard in IT. I work in education so most of my conversations are either about pedagogy or how to do long division.Fascinating as it is, my role as chauffeur and chef to the above service users...a week with more of the same but in a different place....
I am one of those people who really likes to chat. I have ( shock horror) other interests outside of minecraft, danandphil and database migration. A holiday gives me a fresh opportunity to discuss say architecture..or art history..or well anything.
Much as I love my family...I need those rare holiday conversations with other people to feed my soul.
Please dont forget this when the annoyingly cheerful camping neighbour engages you in conversation at the water station. Your contact is really very valuable to me. The older adult may live alone..and their holiday chats may be the most contact they have with people all year.
Perhaps when we start to bore..the international phrase "well , must be off now.enjoy the rest of your day, bye!" could be deployed....

If you're up to discussing art history or architecture that's fine.
The last soap, not so much.

I think part of the problem is then feeling obligated to spend time together or meeting.

Occasional chats with random interesting people are fine. At least for me.

Perhaps when we start to bore..the international phrase "well , must be off now.enjoy the rest of your day, bye!" could be deployed....

But your example isn't what people are talking about, is it? It's the people who don't take the above cue as a 'that was a pleasant ten minutes, we now prefer to spend time by ourselves' and plonk themselves down next to you at dinner or what have you.

I've met some lovely people while travelling before husband/kids, and have some great memories. But my time with my husband and kids is really precious to me, so while I'll make idle chit chat over the kids playing or while waiting in a queue, I'll admit my heart sinks if the other party shows signs of settling in. And if they don't pick up the cues, we're both too awkwardly polite to tell people to go away.

However we find self-catering much much easier these days so this is less of an issue.

My mother met my stepfather at a hotel abroad and they had 24 happy years until she died so there you go!

This is me! I don't mind small talk in a queue but that is it.

DH is the same. DD2 is the same. DD1 however is a proper extrovert. She is lovely and friendly, plays with everyone, gets involved and attracts other children like her, fine for an hour but that is more than enough for the rest of us!

Ironically I met DH on holiday, amazing we got together really .

I have met some awesome people travelling and found out so much about the world. My favourite was a millionaire half way round the Annapurna Circuit, who was training for Everest we didn't swap numbers

DH is less sociable and I think has cringed on more than one occasion.

My DH loves it, I hate it! We always end up talking to at least one couple. One time we ended up talking to a woman who was on holiday alone, I was convinced that she was attempting to get in bed with us

Another time we got talking to an older couple during a wine tasting which was rather nice & a bit different. I suppose I didn't mnd that becuase it wasn't life story more like wine quality

A bit of a chat is fine. It's when Janet and John from Kettering declare themselves to be your new BFFs and follow you round for the rest of the holiday telling you about Denise from work's terrible bother with her veins, and complaining about the price of Heinz baked beans over here. Fuck the fuck off.

My DP is much more sociable than me, but we both have similar views on this. We are happy to have a quick chat with people but wouldn't want to end up sitting with them at dinner etc or keeping in touch when we came home.

On our last holiday he ended up chatting to a guy in the jacuzzi and they were both very excited to have found someone in the same (niche) line of work! I just zoned out but a few weeks later he was asking if I remembered the name of this company and spoke to his boss about it, so could be useful!

There was also another guy who appeared to be on his own on a day trip so I started chatting to him when DP went to the loo. Turned out his family were back at the hotel. I was a bit relieved as I was worried we may have ended up with this guy as a tagalong for the week! He was perfectly nice, but I go away to spend time with DP, not other people.

My DSis can't go away without making new friends and always holidays with other families. Even on their honeymoon they spent it with their whole family as they couldn't imagine a holiday with just the two of them!!

We will do the perfunctory Good Morning around the pool.

We rent privately and the pool is shared with ten villas, three of which are not let in the holidays. So you kind of have to be on nodding terms at least.

One year, DH made friends with a super bore thankfully they were in the last days of their holiday, super bore insisted we go to dinner with him and his high maintenance wife, (think Barbie doll) I sat at the table and joined in with the men discussing the upcoming season and what Quins would do if Connor O' Shea did go to Italy.

She told one of the other women at the pool the next morning that I was a rugby bore and there was no way she was going out to dinner or even for a drink with us.

My work here is done.

With love and thanks to Connor O' Shea.

I'm extremely happy to let my painfully extrovert [to the point of being exceptionally needy] OH blather away to other people on holiday ['you're NEVER going to believe this, darling, these people are from FINCHLEY'], it takes some of the pressure off me.

I personally take it or leave it. Might well end up talking to someone if circumstances seem to put us together somehow [e.g. booked on the same day trip, our kids are in the same club, or we just keep bumping into each other for any other reason], but as a rule I won't bother, not if I've gone away to 'get away from it all'.

Are you all on our current campsite? I miss the interaction so much I'm spending my time mumsnetting. Dh is loads more outgoing and sociable than me, but even I am wishing people were a bit more sociable here.

Yes, we are all MNetting and avoiding eye contact with you.

I am SO pleased to read this thread! I really thought my DH and I were the only ones!
As a young married couple, we would join in the fun - but different now we have kids

RE: Sitting you at a table of 8 on a cruise.

Apparently they screen your information to sit you accordingly. Age, where you live, occupation.

Not sure how I'd feel about that TBH.

What's worse than making friends on holiday is bumping into people you know and dislike on holiday.

Me and my mate went on holiday and her ex-boyfriend's parents were in the same hotel. Brutal, utterly brutal.

Good morning, good evening and hello is as far as I go. I'm in my 30s, I don't need a holiday BFF or penpal.

Oh well... I often make friends at holidays, there are some I am still in contact with even after 20 years.

But iif we became friends, it is because we found kindred spirits on each other and spent a good time talking about things that were significant to all of us. I doubt very very much I could become friends with someone who is clearly trying to enjoy their time alone or just sitting reading under the sun.

My exh was a disaster for this, he couldn't register when a fellow holiday maker needed/wanted to be left alone. I used to spend so much time worrying he was disturbing other people that it really put a downer on the holidays (Especially when he was trying to make conversation with incredibly dull people.. I still cringe at the memories).

One of the worst holiday experiences we had was staying with friends at a B&B in Northumberland. The other couple, who live in the States, had actually given us the stay as a honeymoon gift. The place subsequently went under new ownership. New owner was a NIGHTMARE. Everyone was made to have dinner at the same time, like a faux dinner party, and then he 'regaled' us all in the sitting room with a poetry recital afterwards. He got sloshed on whiskey - he wasn't so generous with his (paying) guests although IIRC on checkout he charged us for something we hadn't had although he claimed he didn't charge for something else. Our friends were happy to go along with it and they were paying...DH and I actually left and went upstairs I couldn't bear the poetry after a while and I was wildly cross that our evening with our friends, whom we see very infrequently (like once a decade at this point) was trashed by this guy. This is pre-Trip Advisor but as I said it was a gift so I am not sure I would have felt able to complain.

But it has put me off B&Bs for LIFE. I am actually a bit concerned about trying AirBnB for this reason. I have not managed to get confident we'd be able to avoid interacting with the owners of the property.

The idea of a cruise - waking up to find yourself in another country - is very attractive, but the tables of eight have always put me off. Can't bear the thought of enforced jollity, and having to talk to people that you would cross the street to avoid normally. I'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't want to get stuck with me for a fortnight either, so yes, I prefer peace and solitude, reading and sight seeing with OH, and not the rest of the tourists in the area.

No-one ever wants to make friends with me on holiday ( to be honest anywhere) if I had any secrets about this I'd share them

I get annoyed with my partner when we are on holiday because he wants to chit chat and do stuff. I just want to ignore him and read and eat!

We hate talking to people on holiday too but love cruises, you don't have to sit with other people you just request a table for 2 or 4.

YANBU. Why must we go through the whole holiday friendship process? My Dad goes away for a month every Christmas and just wants to chill out and do his thing(even though I wish he didn't have to tell me all his tales) We rarely get time to sit and recharge as parents so a holiday is a sacred thing

Has anyone used Airbnb? We've planned to use it for a trip next month, have dreading it tbh!

Completely agree! Everyday life is pretty hectic and I love being just 'us' on holiday and feeling like we're escaping from normality. We tend to shy away from holidays that would throw us together with random strangers and force us to socialise - it might sound grumpy but for us time with just the 4 of us and no outside influence is really important. We're just back from 2 weeks in a secluded gite with its own pool. It was bliss!