People We Meet On Vacation: Why We Become Different People On Holiday
If, like me, you’ve been stuck inside this January with a snivelling cold, hooked on Traitors and doom scrolling through TikTok during the Brand Beckham family drama era, you probably won’t have been able to avoid the social media frenzy over Emily Bader and Tom Blyth’s portrayal of Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen in Netflix’s ‘People We Meet On Vacation’. The screen adaptation of Emily Henry’s wildly popular wanderlusty romance novel arrived at precisely the right moment for the warmth-seekers who didn’t get around to booking a winter-sun escape (spoliers ahead).
Don’t worry, this isn’t a film review, and being honest, as captivating as it is, the core structure isn’t anything new. Poppy (played with effervescent and slightly chaotic ‘sun in a cup’ energy by Emily Bader), is a happy-go-lucky, clumsy college dropout who pursues her dream job as a travel writer in NYC, while Alex (Tom Blyth) is her tonal opposite, a ‘play-it-safe’ townie from the fictional town of Linfield, Ohio, who’s only ambition is to return to where he was brought up and become an English teacher. They meet in college on a disastrously charming road trip home from Boston College, and, through a blend of proximity and chronically repressed chemistry, find themselves in a decade-long ritual of going on one weeklong summer vacation together every year. They’re best friends. They’re polar opposites. It’s also clear to anyone with a functioning frontal lobe that they’re painfully in love, but classically, they don’t want to ruin their friendship.
Believe it or not, the gripping parts of this story for me as a travel writer myself weren't actually the destinations, nor was it the love story. In fact, aside from the New Orleans sequence, the film doesn’t linger in any one place in the way something like Emily in Paris does (where the Parisian and Roman panoramas and the maverick outfits do most of the heavy lifting while the plot gets worse and worse each season). But let’s pause on that New Orleans scene while we’re here. We saw Alex, a reserved and structured ‘type A’ guy who doesn’t like food in the car, pretend to be CIA agent in a dive bar and then proceed to all but dirty dance with Poppy in front of an entire audience. In Squamish, Canada he skinny dips and has to walk back to camp naked and wears Poppy’s pink romper as his clothes get swept out to sea. It made me ask the question that is clearly at the heart of The People We Meet On Vacation: why do we become different people on holiday?
Well, there’s a lot here to unpack. There are the obvious reasons like drinking far more than we would at home, or feeling like you need to make the most of it because it’s ‘already paid for’. But getting a bit deeper, holidays tend to remove us from the narrative we perform daily at home, where we are tethered to roles and reputations. Reflecting on expressions of my own personality on holiday, my husband lovingly nicknames me ‘Holiday Rose’, an ode to the sexier, dolled-up, killer version of me that emerges from the hotel room on the first evening of every trip (though I have come to realise now that this compliment also functions as a lighthearted slight on ‘Home Rose’, the Bridget Jones version of me who is mostly dressed for toddler spillages and looks like a frazzled woman on the edge at nursery drop offs and pick ups).
Even though I generally lean more towards Poppy than Alex in most parts of how I choose to live my life, travel still unlocks this ‘ultimate woman’ version of me, the woman unafraid to do karaoke, unbothered about her rolls showing in a backless dress, the one who would go along with a story to get a free drink or divulge to a stranger by the pool simply because they speak English, knowing they’ll never be seen again.
This is exactly what happens to Alex. In Linfield, Ohio, he is predictable Alex, a man who likes his life orderly and planned out. But put him in a New Orleans dive bar in front of an audience of strangers, and suddenly the typically risk-averse Alex lets loose (literally, did you see those hips go on the dancefloor?) Removed from the gaze of people who have known him forever, Alex is free to try on a different version of himself that dances like Patrick Swayze and lies convincingly for fun and free cocktails.
There is something deeply liberating about anonymity abroad, allowing us to misbehave in small, socially acceptable ways, as we’re temporarily absolved of the need to be consistent, and Poppy naturally thrives in this space. Her whole personality is built around motion and in the joy from the new selves she can be, which is why travel feels like oxygen to her rather than an escape (hard relate). At home in New York, her spark dims, but abroad, she’s incandescent. Perhaps the only other time outside of travel that some of us get to reinvent ourselves is when we go off to university and leave our lifelong pals and the reputation we’ve built behind.
Cinema has long understood this phenomenon. Think of Lost in Translation, where Bob and Charlotte become braver because Tokyo allows them to exist without consequence, or Before Sunrise, where the knowledge that the moment is fleeting gives permission to Jesse and Celine to be vulnerable. Holidays have a habit of compressing time and heightening emotion, which makes everything feel significant, and we feel more alive than we do in ‘real life’.
But perhaps the most uncomfortable truth, and the one The People We Meet on Vacation handles well, is that our holiday selves aren’t new or inventions at all. ‘Holiday Rose’ isn’t a fantasy, but a glimpse of who I am when I am able to live without constraints and obligations. Travel lets us step outside the versions of ourselves that have calcified under routine, allowing us to flirt with who we might be if we were less defined by the ‘us’ of yesterday. Still, very few people can just holiday as and when they please, and Poppy, though she has her dream career, eventually realises that she has been chasing movement to avoid these constraints that are somewhat inevitable: travel has been both her joy and her hiding place. Alex too learns that playing it safe is like living in a cage, and in the end, they both find their middle-ground, bringing elements of the versions of those people they meet in themselves on vacation back home.
Maybe that’s why we return home feeling refreshed but melancholic? Perhaps ‘post-holiday blues’ don’t arise just because we have to turn our ‘out of office’ off and return to the rat race while we scroll through Skyscanner deals on an icognito tab, but more because we have to say goodbye to the version of ourselves that we met in a bar or in a hotel room mirror, who, deep down, we know is the ‘us’ we yearn to be.