There’s a common piece of dating advice: before you commit, go on a big trip together. Hopefully the trip itself will be fun, but that’s (almost) beside the point: the real goal is to figure out how smoothly you solve problems together. When it starts raining at 10pm on a Friday and you’re caught outdoors because of a misread-map incident (if we’re being honest: entirely your fault), you’re going to learn a lot about whether your partner reacts to difficulties in a way you’d like to be around for the rest of your life.
The value of what you learn from the trip (a concept called “value of information,” or VOI) can far exceed the direct costs and benefits, because the trip is just for a week and the rest of your life is, well, the rest of your life. If there’s a 10% chance that the trip will show you that you’re not truly compatible, the expected value of that information is higher than any plausible level of (un)happiness you might experience on the trip itself.
Sometimes, the value of information makes the trip worth taking when it wouldn’t have been otherwise—your partner has already scheduled a trip during their time off and it’s very inconvenient for you to join them, but the value of information makes the trip worth it. Other times, you can make choices about the trip in order to increase the value of information you’ll receive: perhaps an all-inclusive beach resort would be more enjoyable today, but a road trip where you camp at different spots each night has a higher value of information and so is ultimately more valuable.