Of course, frolicking on the beach in the Caribbean while sauced on daiquiris may lead you to fall madly in love with your new significant other. But it’s entirely possible to have a perfectly pleasant takeout–and–cab-rides kind of New York relationship go to shit the minute you click book trip on Kayak.com.

Why? Aside from the obvious—24/7 togetherness is tough on even the most genial of personalities—one has to eventually do all sorts of relatively unattractive activities, like taking off one’s makeup (yikes), ordering in a foreign language, snoring.

But in general, real relationship trauma doesn’t stem from him getting a daylight view of your cellulite—it arises from inherent incompatibilities in your core vacation ideologies. Yeah, vacation ideologies. Most people like to spend their holidays doing one of the following: taking grainy photographs of old statues, consuming mass quantities of alcohol or sun-worshipping while comatose. And then there are those four people in NYC who want to “camp.”

All of these activities are perfectly appropriate. It’s when one partner thinks they’ll be spending the vacation looking for Wi-Fi access and the other thinks they’ll be drowning their BlackBerry in wine that things go bad.

“This guy took me to a yoga retreat because he was really into all that crap. I’m a tequila-shot kinda girl, and I guess that didn’t go over really well,” says Sarah, 29, a law student. “I wanted to leave so badly—but I couldn’t. It’s a vacation. You’re trapped!”

The good news? Either way, you’ll learn more about the guy whose last name you’ve been daydreaming about co-hyphenating with in four days of vacation than you will in an entire year of Wednesday-night rendezvous at the neighborhood bar.

E-mail her at julia@timeoutny.com.