I Just Got Home From a Trip With 12 People. It Would Have Been Unbearable Were It Not for a Simple, Underrated Solution.

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At the end of July, several friends and I took a vacation to Paris, to both celebrate someone’s 35 th birthday and spend money lavishly and irresponsibly before everyone starts having kids. Our headcount was a dozen people—including three couples—some of whom would be meeting for the very first time on this trip. I’m guessing this sounds hellish to you, and trust me, I had my hang-ups. I had visions of baroquely complicated dinner reservations and horribly testy Venmo negotiations. I feared a vacation itinerary so hopelessly brittle—with so many moving parts—that if one person were late to an appointment, everything would fall to pieces. Because seriously, how do you split up that many Airbnb rooms without hurting feelings? How on earth could we fit 12 people into a wine tasting? But to my surprise, we figured out all of these potential problems with considerable elegance, so much so that I want to clue you in. It’s simple. Just make your vacation a parallel play vacation. Let me show you what I mean.

“Parallel play,” as you probably already know, is a term used for a childhood development stage where toddlers engage in activities in close proximity with one another without actually playing together. One kid is on the Hot Wheels, the other kid is on the blocks, and neither of them yet possess the intellectual hardware to collaborate on those ventures. If you translate the parallel play concept to a week in Europe with a bunch of thirtysomethings, the term instead means a vacation where—outside a few lodestones on the schedule—nobody, and I do mean nobody , plans anything with each other. No 10 a.m. call times for the Louvre, no mandated aperitif breaks, no death-marches to various crosstown vintage stores, and therefore, none of the suffocating drudgery that sucks the joy out of travel.

Anyone on the trip can obviously do those things, but they are to be organized ad hoc with absolutely zero expectation that anyone else will join them. You might be going to the Musée d’Orsay with only two members of the traveling party, and frankly, that is for the best. Because guess what? Those two people actually want to go to the Musée d’Orsay. They will be accompanying you with zeal and buy-in, rather than the pervading anxious feeling that everyone else has been dragged there against their will.

We all have our horror stories about the alternative. My editor told me about a rendezvous in Denmark that resulted in several hours searching for a mermaid statue that one friend desperately wanted to see. (Her friend also dragged her to a day-glo EDM rave, and a Berlin sex dungeon, neither of which she wanted to attend. “Maybe I’m a pushover,” she said.) Personally, I mourn the $30 I spent to see an outrageously depressing sloth exhibit in Costa Rica, and I’d take every single night I’ve ever slept in a tent back if I could.