Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty
Cathy didn’t know Dennis was a Disney adult when she married him. The 57-year-old says the first signs came a few years into their now–two decades together. They were in Orlando for a cruise and took an impromptu day trip to EPCOT, one of the four parks in Walt Disney World. Cathy, Dennis, and their three kids had a good time, so when Dennis suggested another visit to Disney World, Cathy was onboard. It was all normal enough for a young family in search of a fun place to go with their kids: Disney World and Disneyland are among the most-visited tourist destinations in the world with more than 70 million people making the pilgrimage to one or more of the company’s six U.S. theme parks every year.
But over the past decade, Dennis has transformed into a hardcore devotee. He insists on turning every vacation into a Disney trip; when the family went to California to see the sequoias, Dennis planned a three-day detour to Disneyland. “He has a way of soft-launching an idea before going all in,” Cathy says. “EPCOT was the soft launch.” Cathy has told Dennis that she feels “overstimulated and exhausted” after more than a day at a Disney theme park and wants to go somewhere “for adults,” as she puts it. “I’m not sure how much of that message he absorbed,” she says. On their last trip to the Magic Kingdom, Dennis tried to placate Cathy by buying her a massage at a Disney spa, but she was dismayed to find that the relaxing music was a compilation of songs from The Little Mermaid and Frozen.
Many stressors — politics, money, differing stances on how to raise kids — can cause wedges in relationships, and, as many Reddit threads and TikTok videos illustrate, strong feelings about going to Disney parks can provoke disagreements about all of them. Depending on your vantage point, it’s either a waste of money or an investment in lifelong memories, a testament to Walt Disney’s vision and the human capacity for innovation or a sprawling paean to the evils of capitalism. Whatever your perspective, being in a Disney-adult-gap relationship — a partnership in which one person is obsessed with the giant entertainment conglomerate and the other is not — can kick up disagreements about more than just not wanting to meet Cinderella again.
“The hardest trips to plan and coordinate involve partners who don’t exactly see eye to eye on Disney magic,” says Emily Carlson, the owner of the Disney-focused travel agency We Do Travel Right. These conflicts can get heated. Carlson tells me one of her clients got so frustrated with her husband rejecting her plans that she just decided to go alone with their kids. “It was a relief because now everyone had a chance to enjoy it,” says Carlson.
Disney vacations are expensive: A typical four-day trip for a family of four can cost more than $4,200, per The Wall Street Journal. When money is among the biggest sources of tension for American couples, asking a spouse to drop thousands of dollars on a trip they consider childish can be a hard sell, especially if they have limited time off from work. Even if people find ways to bring down the cost of a Disney vacation, the commitment to “doing Disney,” as some diehards refer to it, can be onerous. When Kara, 36, was in high school, her parents signed a 60-year contract to join the Disney Vacation Club (essentially a timeshare program), so her family has a condo at Disney’s Saratoga Springs resort. She’d been dating her now-husband, a non–Disney adult, for a few years when she told him about the property. “The idea that he was contractually obligated to spend money at a Disney property between now and, probably, death was horrifying to him,” she says.
To avoid unforeseen costs, dodge crowds that swell by the year, and cram the most Walt-sanctioned fun into a long weekend as possible, Disney adults like Kara tend to take the same approach to crafting itineraries as Napoleon did to strategizing the Battle of Austerlitz. Dining reservations require weeks or months of advance notice. Popular rides, such as the Magic Kingdom’s TRON roller coaster or Disneyland’s Rise of the Resistance attraction, must also be booked hours prior to your visit using Disney’s byzantine mobile reservation system, which can be frustrating even for seasoned parkgoers. It’s all arguably more complicated than just booking a trip to Miami.
Kara and her husband go for a long weekend every other year, and she wakes up early to map out day-of itineraries to avoid conflict. “I don’t know if he’s totally aware of all the logistics that go into his magical experience,” she says. “You know, women and their silent labor.”
Other Disney adults describe their partners as downright hostile to their passions, asking why they won’t just grin and bear it and put on some damn Mickey ears in the name of love. When Hannah, 26, started dating her college boyfriend, her dream was to share Disney World with her very own Prince Charming. “There’s just such a sense of magic in the air,” she tells me. “Disney theme parks give you an escape from reality and make you feel as though you’re the main character in your own Disney story.”
Her boyfriend was not only adamant that he would never go, but he also couldn’t understand why she was so enamored with Disney to begin with. “He thought it was just a giant evil company,” she says. “I did understand his concerns at a certain level, but as dumb as it may sound, Disney World is almost a sacred place to me. It’s where I feel the most happy, the most in touch with my inner child, the most excited about life. To think that my partner in life would not want to accompany me to a place I hold so dear was deeply upsetting.” After three and a half years of dating, they ultimately broke up. “My love of Disney and his disdain for it definitely wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. “But it certainly didn’t help.” While they never ended up going to Disney, “I’m glad we didn’t,” she says. “He would have been so annoying about it.”
What tends to unite Disney believers like Kara and Hannah is the steadfast belief that under the right circumstances, with faith, trust, and pixie dust, their Disney-hating partners will see the light. Jason, 29, is a California native and season-pass holder who estimates he has been to Disneyland more than 500 times. When he first met his girlfriend of two years, it took a lot of convincing to get her to go to Disney World: She’d grown up with no TV and a family that went to Europe every year, and she “wasn’t fond of the idea,” he says. She reluctantly agreed to go on a trip with Jason, his brother, and his nephews, and it apparently went well enough that she agreed to go again with his family the following year. “She still swears she hated going both times,” he says. “I think that’s just her upbringing. I think she experienced some Disney magic.”
In Disney-adult-gap relationships, like any other kind of relationship, a willingness to compromise is crucial. “I have certainly had travelers where their biggest pain point is that one partner is meh about Disney and the other loves it,” says Carlson. “They compromise in varying ways, like doing shorter trips, avoiding parks and cruises, or avoiding Character Dining and interactions.”
Kara and her husband worked out a system in which they travel with another Disney-adult-gap couple and he stays behind for at least one day to hang by the pool while she goes on rides. When he does accompany her to the parks, he usually takes a weed gummy and “has way more fun than he says he’s going to,” Kara says, pointing out that he even bought his own set of Baby Yoda ears on the last occasion. “That’s a metaphor for his whole Disney experience,” she says. “It’s like, Let me find the one thing I can like about all of this, and the rest of it, I’ll leave to you.”
Some find that, in the long run, the decision to indulge their partner’s obsession is one worth making. Cathy agrees to Disney trips in large part because, four years ago, Dennis was diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disorder. He’s healthy and doing well, but his health issues have put the squabbles about travel plans into perspective. “I try not to be a sourpuss if we’re going to Disney,” she says. “I’m picking my battles. We have a few disagreements that I won’t budge on. I’ll give him Disney.”
It helps for the Disney adult to be realistic about how much they expect their partner to buy into their obsession. “I don’t think it’s important that your partner loves Disney as much as you do,” Jason says. “What is important is dating someone who’s supportive.” Besides, he says, “if they don’t like Disney, they’ll probably like Universal.”