Before marriage, try a canoe trip
Before marriage, before the honeymoon—before you go down on one knee or accept a proposal… STOP!
There is something you need to do first. In my experience, travel reveals compatibility rather efficiently. After all, a journey can either cement your relationship or find the cracks you’ve carefully stepped around at home.
You may be in an unhealthy relationship and not even know it. Before that trip, I’d heard plenty about questions to ask before marriage. As it turned out, a kayaking adventure answered most of mine.
You may live with your intended and things are okay but try traveling with them. Don’t opt for the luxury resort – that’s too easy and papers over the cracks.
No, you need to do something that involves lots of fun but some stress and the requirements of working together toward a favorable outcome.
Take a five-day trip down a river in a kayak or canoe. This is a perfect test. My experience was with a woman who I really loved – but even though I was living with her, there was a niggling doubt that we were compatible on the most important levels. Let’s call her Mandy for the sake of anonymity and my personal safety.
Neither of us knew which questions to ask before marriage. Instead, we figured we’d find out as we went along—MISTAKE! We all have little habits that annoy our partners, and vice versa.
The little things travel brings out
Usually they are small and not that important. But they can become important. Over time, what was once cute or vaguely annoying, from the way they munched popcorn at the movies to openly belching or passing gas could become an area of incompatibility.
Time takes a leisurely approach to the truth. Before marriage or a long-term commitment, however, you might prefer a faster answer. I found one without planning to: the radio station I worked for organised the trip.
Twelve or so couples headed out to the Orange River in Namibia, Africa to enjoy four days and five nights of blissful canoeing and camping along the river.
The 'Before Marriage' Adventure Begins
The adventure began well. Our guides assigned each couple a two-seater Indian Mohawk fibreglass canoe, and we followed them downriver.
It was fantastic. The cliffs of the dramatic and rugged red-rock Richtersveld mountains at either side framed the easy-flowing river.
We started to feel the heat at midday – blistering and unforgiving. I noticed that a few couples started to lose the tones of fun banter and slip into irritation.
My partner and I were fine at this point. She was having a good time and so was I.
Then we stopped for a phenomenal lunch beside the river. The ground crew had pulled out all the stops. Since the radio station promised plenty of publicity, I suspected we were getting the best of the best.
We even received ice cream in the semi-desert sun! Naturally, that lifted everyone’s spirits.
All systems functioning
I was soon keen to get back in the canoe. This was serious fun! We saw out the day by 6 pm, having stopped off for swims along the way.
By the time we reached the first campsite, the crew had pitched our tents. This was awesome!
All of us were feeling great – a little burnt but buzzing with the events of something new and different.
Dinner was amazing: prawn cocktails, a braai (BBQ), fresh salad and cold drinks. Meanwhile, the fire crackled as we traded stories and teased each other with good humour. Life was good.
Days 2–4 on the river
Unless you’re the breakfast show host, as a radio DJ, mornings are not a time you’re familiar with other than leaving a nightclub and winding your way home – to bed! So, the wake-up call at 5:30 am was a shock to the system.
I barely recognized some of the women standing around the fire. I turned to ‘Mandy’ and in all seriousness whispered the question “Who are these people?” She giggled and reminded me that I was now looking at the girlfriends sans makeup.
That took a moment to sink in. Mandy always looked good—she was a Miss South Africa finalist, so her natural beauty hardly came into question.
At the risk of sounding shallow, I guess seeing your spouse in a 100% natural state (not by choice), would be another before marriage checkbox.
As breakfast arrived, the pasty, hungover faces began to look more familiar—or perhaps I was simply adjusting. Soon everyone swapped tracksuits for T-shirts and bathing suits. We were set.
Take me to the river…
Back down the river. By 7:30 am the heat started to rise and it seemed hotter than yesterday. All was good.
We were having a great time. By 11 am, however, things started to change. The heat was merciless. Although everyone kept paddling, the laughter and playful splashing faded to a murmur of conversation.
Mandy was quiet too. I was at the back of the canoe, noticing her paddle strokes were starting to get lazy. I felt I was doing all the work.
Without a word, I kept ploughing my strokes through the water. The before marriage warning lights were faintly starting to flicker into life.
However, Mandy’s out-of-time strokes were starting to become an issue in guiding the canoe so I lovingly told her (through gritted teeth) to relax and let me paddle. I looked around. It seemed my idea was not original.
Some of the guys were doing the work but a few of the women had chosen to take over. Sans makeup or not, those women were getting more attractive – not preening princesses but ‘one of the guys’.
Their lazy boyfriends lay back under hats, enjoying the ride.
Fortunately, lunch provided a good refuel. After a few dunks in the water, we were back on track. By the final stretch, though, my arms were starting to ache.
Where’s the white water?
Where’s the white water? I was keen for some white water – nothing hectic but something to break down the monotony. I asked one of the guides when this would happen. His dark face and dazzling white teeth flashed a mischievous look. “Tomorrow, friend, tomorrow”.
I was psyched. Good! The fun will really start then. Mandy was pulling her weight that afternoon and seemed happy enough so I was happy.
Dinner witnessed the first couple’s row that night. One of the guys was teasing his girlfriend about her burnt red face and shoulders. She burst into tears and stormed off with him in chase. Muted yelling came from their tent. The rest of us were fine.
We shared some jokes and stories and, lesson learned, avoided teasing our partners. That night, everyone headed to bed pretty early. We were wiped out. By the next morning, the sleepy faces no longer looked quite so shocking. Grumpier, certainly. Shocking, no.
Camping or glamping? No, this was camping
Camping is a major transition from doing the five-star resort. Most of the women were horrified that their needs were accompanied with a spade and an out-of-sight area of the bush.
Because snakes, scorpions and other bush creatures worried them, several women asked their boyfriends to accompany them on the trek to the bathroom.
All of us guys did bathroom breaks x2 because of this. It wasn’t a problem but some of the men were moaning their irritation about being woken up in the middle of the night to go on an unnecessary bathroom break.
By then, sleep deprivation had begun to show. We loaded the canoes amid snapping and cussing, then resumed the aquatic trek. Meanwhile, clues to unhealthy relationships began to emerge. The returning sun reminded us that we were in desert territory.
The guides constantly reminded us to drink water. After a few hours of paddling, the group began to spread out, so they kept looking back and calling for canoes to catch up. I could hear couples squabbling as patience ran thin and niceties wore away.
I had agreed that Mandy should sit in the back and have a go at steering for a while. She wanted to experience something different. I warned her that the guide had mentioned rapids today and her face lit up. That’s my girl, I thought.
Just when we thought ...
We seemed okay with each other. We chatted about life and good things. I was really enjoying her company. We even gossiped about all the couples arguing around us and allowed ourselves a self-congratulatory exchange of mutual admiration for our fantastic relationship.
It was getting seriously hot. Everyone was exhausted and hungry. It was already an hour past the usual lunch break. I was moaning about how hungry I was and when would we be stopping for lunch. Mandy had a go at me for bitching all the time.
My blood rose. “I am not bitching – I’m just saying I’m bloody hungry!” Somehow that exchange elevated to a full-on post-op of some fallout we had been through three weeks before. We had become another statistic on the river.
Then we heard fast-moving water and shouts that lunch waited just beyond the bend. We stopped arguing.
At this stage we were the second-last canoe, having fallen back with paddles out of the water while we had our spat. Now there was a purpose.
Lunch was around the bend. I paddled, Mandy paddled. I shouted a warning that the bend was coming and she should steer to the left. “I’ve got it!” she yelled from behind.
“Left, Mandy!” I yelled again.
“I’ve got it, Rob!”
Left becomes a matter of opinion
The water started to pick up speed and the canoe caught the current.
“Left, Mandy!….LEFT!”
She responded with something I cannot repeat here. Instead of steering left, we rounded the bend into the current on the right—the one we should have avoided. Its speed promised disaster.
“Mandy! Left! Steer left! Mandy – your other f*&&*%$ left!”
Too late. I saw the canoes on the left bank. Most of the others had already got out of the vessels and were congregating around a pile of cooler boxes and…lunch!
“We need to go over there!” I yelled, pointing like a crazy person to the left bank. The fact that I had lifted the paddle out of the water and into the boat so I could point the direction removed any secondary guidance I had been applying against Mandy’s concept of which side left was.
We started to turn broadside. Suddenly I was staring at the bank with lunch straight ahead.
My colleagues and the guides yelled at us as though their voices would somehow magnetically draw us to the bank. I remember thinking what a bunch of dumbasses – can’t they see that we know where the F they are?
It was the most useless, impotent exclamation of assistance I have ever received. My paddle was back in the water and I must have looked like the coyote cartoon with paddles spinning in a panicked whir.
The moment of deep-seated accusations and resentment
At this stage I had no idea what Mandy was doing at the back of the canoe. She could have been picking her nose for all I cared. I was on a one-man mission for staying dry and getting lunch.
Lunch literally passed us by. It was an agonizing minute or so as I realized we were doomed to hunger… possibly a very wet hunger.
Thankfully, a weed island in the main stream stopped us downriver. Before I could deliver a few choice words to Mandy, however, the last canoe came careering towards us.
They had stupidly followed our disastrous navigation. I remember hearing the yelling and screams from the occupants getting closer and closer.
“Oh crap!” was all I managed before we connected. A paddle caught me in the ribs, while Mandy received the back end of their canoe on her shoulder.
The force of the contact pushed our canoe to the side and water started to gush in. There is a silence that seems to follow any disaster…that moment of factual assimilation before all hell lets loose.
The rescue—and the blame
Mandy was the first to break the quiet. I discovered there were many things she thought about me in that moment – I evidently represented a crude reference to an unmentionable part of the female anatomy and I was born out of wedlock, I was selfish and uncaring.
Somewhere around this point, it dawned on me that I might be in one of those situations “other people” have—unhealthy relationships!
Meanwhile, from the canoe practically above us, Anna delivered a similar diatribe to her boyfriend Russell.
Eventually, the guides came downriver and pulled us out of the weeds. Mandy and I emerged soaked, bruised and nursing equally battered egos.
To make matters worse, we’d lost our water bottles and soaked the sleeping bags. Lunch consisted of the leftovers, which did not amount to much.
We were exhausted. Carrying the canoes along the bank back upstream to the pit stop was painful and long.
The guides extended the time for our stop so we could recover. The others looked at us with a mixture of pity and thinly disguised amusement. I munched on a tiny chicken leg and prayed for payback to all who sniggered. Russell and his girlfriend were not talking either.
Back in the same boat
The return to the canoe was difficult. Mandy just coldly stated she wanted to go home. I chose to sink into a passive-aggressive funk. Needless to say, I took over the helm at the back and stared daggers into the back of her head.
Later, some of the “sniggerers” came unstuck in the small but challenging white water. I took an uncharitable amount of joy in that.
By nightfall, back on the bank, Russell’s girlfriend and mine seemed to have formed a sulky alliance with each other and two other kindred miserable souls.
The three men and I were recipients of a silent wrath, deserved or otherwise, directed from the dark cloud of estrogen twelve feet away.
We decided to partake in as much beer as we could find – and there was plenty in the cooler boxes.
The Cracks Appear
The girls went to bed. We men stayed up until about 3 am. The discussion did go to the before marriage syndrome of doubts and thoughts. I eventually passed out at the fireplace with a semi-dry sleeping bag beneath me.
The two other guys were there too. Russell dared to return to his tent. I woke up at 5:00 am with a pounding headache and every bone in my body ached.
I lifted my head with a wince and noticed Russell had returned to the ‘brothers out of arms’ club.
Stony silence seemed the only soundtrack to the river that next day. Four couples hated each other and two remained. Mike and Sue were a couple that would survive a tornado and land in an embraced clump wherever the storm took them.
Although I admired their devotion, I also found it irritating. They had the joined at the hip sort of relationship: every conversation seemed to begin with “Mike says…” or “Sue says…” A bit nauseating, certainly, but it worked for them. The rest of us, not so much.
The fifth couple held out until lunchtime when something happened between them that made for another heated row on the river.
On the fourth day, better white water provided a welcome distraction. By evening, most couples had negotiated a fragile peace. One pair, however, continued their cold war.
Meanwhile, infighting broke up the “Estrogen alliance” and prompted a tentative “coming home” of sorts.
But the campfire communications were stiff and affected. Conversation was a politically correct exchange of dull words and little humour. This was not as much fun as it was the first night.
Getting off the river and back to life
From a purely voyeuristic point of view, the scenery and experience had been phenomenal. The actual ‘living in the reality of dysfunction’ was anything but phenomenal.
When the trip finally ended, we staggered off the canoes and boarded the coach home. Immediately, I noticed the new seating arrangements.
Three couples sat in different seats from each other. Mandy and I sat together but there might as well have been a wall between us. Russell and Anna seemed to have made amends and were quite happy. Sue and Mike were in their own “I love you toooo much” universe.
The coach ride was long and very quiet. I think we were both reflecting on all those things that neither of us would look at or see at home. We had some serious differences and thoughts.
It was not long after the trip that Mandy and I ended a four-year relationship. We loved each other but were in the typical cycle of all unhealthy relationships.
What the river revealed
Now we both knew the answers to those questions to ask before marriage. There were no more questions.
The canoe trip did not cause the breakup. Instead, it exposed the problems we had avoided at home. Those days on the water brought rather a lot to the surface.
I often wonder if we would have married had it not been for the trip. It was a before marriage wake-up call for sure. I suspect we may have got married and am pretty sure we would not have been together anymore after some time.
The trip down the river was a microcosm of the state of the relationship. It offered an insight we may never have seen until it was too late.
On reflection, I accept my negative role and see how much growing up I needed to do at that time. I think Mandy may have too. That we loved each other was not the issue. It was how we loved each other that was the problem.
A proposal with a different ending
Later, a good friend of mine announced her expected engagement. I looked up, smiled and offered my congratulations. Then came my advice: “Before marriage, go down the Orange River in a canoe.”
Stacey did exactly that after I told her my story. He proposed to her at the end of the trip. She accepted.
That, my friend, is the way to go! If you can survive a canoe on a river or some other stressful vacation type before marriage, you can survive and prosper in marriage.
A missed turn, a shared tent, or a holiday that changed everything—I’d love to hear your story in the comments.
8 Responses
I went on a missionary mission with my then girlfriend. We were based in Malawi and later up in Tanzania. It was rewarding but really hard. Our struggles brought us closer together but I can see how travel from our own comforts can be a real tester. Jane and I have been happily married for 22 years now and we both say that the foundations were created in our travels. Good luck and love to all!
LMAO! How true – I can vouch that travel will do this to you. My ex husband and I went hiking – all the signs were there…I just ignored them. Great article, Rob…thanks for that…
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