u/Separate-Award-4646

I am so fucking tired of family vacations.

I’m tired of not choosing where I get to spend my time. I’m sick of dealing with annoying group dynamics and people I wouldn’t talk to if they weren’t related to my husband. Sick of the beach. Sick of it all.

This is my last family vacation, except for Europe next year, which we already paid for ourselves out of pocket. I’m no longer doing anything I don’t want to do; I’m done going places I do not want to go.

I’m 34 years old, and of the last 9 or so years I have not picked where I got to go, have had to push twin beds together with parents in the next room, or sleep on the pullout couch because “they’re older so they should have the king bed,” or sleeping across the room from my husband because we get the "extra" room etc.

How many fucking beach vacations can I be realistically expected to go on? It was cool the first 5 fucking times, at this point I’m tired of it.

I’m tired of being told to be grateful for shit I don’t even want. I’m sick of roleplaying as some teenager that has no choice but to go wherever they are towed to over summer-break.

I wish I could tell someone this, I wish my husband cared enough to put forth the effort to make our own vacations and stuff, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t see past the fact that it’s “free,” even though it’s nowhere near free other than the fact that we don’t pay for lodging.

We’re on Day 3 of this year’s super-exciting, totally-never-done-before trip to a pool-beach-golf oriented timeshare an hour away from where we live (with one of the nicest beaches in the country 10 minutes down the road); already we are $500 in. What’s free about overpriced seafood from a disgusting crab-shack, or groceries and alcohol every day? What’s free about not having any alone time with my husband for the 9^(th) year in a row?

I’m not doing it anymore. I don’t like it, and I am done. Actually, I hate it. I hate that I feel trapped in it, I hate being gaslit about how I need to be “grateful,” I hate that I’m 34 years old and have gone nowhere I wanted to by now, and done nothing I’ve wanted to do, all in the name of “well, it’s free” or “it’s family.”

I wish I could talk to someone about it, but despite the fact that I have been surrounded by people for days on end, I am completely and utterly alone.