This section covers what happens when you travel: as a couple to get away, as a family with the children, or to the country where the person you met actually lives. The three do not share a budget, a pace or a set of formalities.
International dating
Meeting someone from another country, visiting, marrying, bringing your partner over: the dedicated section, under “Meeting in real life”, with its country pages and the distance tool.
Compare two countries
One topic, two or three countries, one table: marriage, divorce, adoption, fertility, inheritance, drugs, dental care.
Which country to get married in?
Seven questions to find out where to marry — at home, in the partner’s country, abroad, or no wedding — and what to check first.
Romantic destinations
By season, by budget and by temperament — and why the destination matters less than the pace.
The honeymoon
When to go, how much to spend, and the mistakes that spoil the first week of a marriage.
Sexual offences abroad
What your own country can prosecute you for elsewhere, and what local law punishes.
Three questions to settle before booking
- What pace? The most common disagreement on a trip, well ahead of money.
- What budget, and who pays for what? Agreeing an envelope before departure avoids the couple's first money argument happening abroad, in front of a bill.
- How long together without a break? Planning a few half-days apart is not a failure.
What many travellers do not know
Several countries prosecute their nationals for sexual offences committed abroad, even where the conduct is not punished locally. The relevant page sets out the principle and the rule for each country covered.
The first trip, and the ones after
A first trip together is a test nobody asked for. Twenty-four hours a day in each other's company, things going wrong, tiredness, decisions taken fast: a week teaches what a year of dinners would not have shown. That is no reason to treat it as an ordeal — it is a reason to start short. Three nights two hours from home teach almost as much as three weeks on the other side of the world, and cost far less if the test goes badly.
Later trips raise a different question: wear. A couple that always goes to the same place in the same way ends up not travelling at all but briefly relocating. Alternating — comfort then discomfort, city then silence, the two of you then a group of friends — keeps what travel actually offers: seeing the other person in a setting where their usual reflexes are no use.
When one of you lives elsewhere
The international dating section deals with the particular case where travel is not a leisure choice but the condition of the relationship. The questions then change completely: which visa to visit, which visa to settle, whether to marry there or at home, what a return flight every three months really costs over a year, how to meet the family without a misstep. Every country covered has its own pages on those five points, because the answers have nothing in common from one country to the next.
Before leaving: the short list
- A passport valid for six months beyond the return date, in many countries.
- Travel insurance: check what the bank card already covers before buying more.
- Digital copies of documents, reachable from an online account and not only from the phone you can lose.
- Vaccinations and treatments: some need several weeks' notice.
- Local rules on privacy, dress and public displays of affection: they vary far more than travellers expect.