A Preposterous Idea

"Yes, lets!" take a relationship risk.

We brought Vertellis on sabbatical. It’s a relationship game with challenges like making your partner a special drink, and questions intended to create connection. It’s packaged in a small box, about the size of a deck of cards so perfect for travel. While it can be played in a focused way, you can also play just one card when the mood strikes.

Last week as we were tidying our apartment (and I was procrastinating) I opened the Vertellis box and pull out a question card. I read the question to Mike, “When did you last take a risk in this relationship?” He looked up and quickly answered, “Doing this sabbatical together.”

Boy is he right.

While long term travel with my one and only is exciting and romantic it’s not without risk. It’s stressful, filled with transitions and sometimes isolating. Being so far from home we are forced to completely rely on each other for care, support, and conversation. It was a leap of faith.

Taking a leap.

Several months ago my friend Eliza Waters wrote a short essay on the occasion of her 20th wedding anniversary.

New engaged Eliza and Jesse.

Eliza wrote…

Marriage is wild.

You meet someone when you are a baby and date for a while. And then one day you say, you know what we should do together? Everything. Forever. Yes, we should move around and go to school and buy houses and get jobs and travel the world and have babies. We should eat together every day and usually the same thing. We should share a bed and a sink and a closet and a bank account. We should fold each other's clothes and wash each other's dishes. We should go on all of our vacations together and visit our parents together and pay taxes together and watch TV together. It'll be great.

And somehow, despite the preposterousness of this idea the other person says 'yes, let's!' even though you cannot promise them what kind of person you will be when you grow up.

Because you want to laugh and explore together forever. Even though you have absolutely no idea what you are really getting yourself into.

You just say yes, let us do all the things together forever.

Eliza’s words resonated and I found myself rewriting her essay to fit my situation….

The sabbatical we planned was a wild idea. Let’s travel across the world, leave our family, friends and home and only have each other to rely on. Let’s feel isolated and anxious. Let’s sleep in dozens of beds and take dozens of flights. And because we are a little crazy and trusted ourselves and each other, we did it.

There is a lot of love and joy in our great adventure but this unusual time in our lives is not without its bumps.

As our sabbatical has progressed we have had to work through challenges like learning to live in smaller spaces. Our apartments in Singapore and Sydney have been tight and right now we are living in a camper in New Zealand. We have ‘together time’ ALL THE TIME. We often bump butts moving around and occasionally I get elbowed in the head. We can hear ALL of each others noises. Sometimes one of us wants to be alone and can’t.

We have had lots of snafus like booking plane tickets to the wrong city, forgetting to book a flight, getting dropped off at the wrong hotel because we forgot to check the address, losing things, ruining a cell phone, forgetting a debit card in an ATM, double booking activities, or just plain being inconsiderate. Each time we have to be generous with each other. We know each of us is doing our best but that doesn’t mean we don’t get frustrated and occasionally angry.

We have had to deal with illness and pain. We have both been quite sick a couple of times. In these cases we feel terrible about bringing the other down yet irritated when we are brought ginger ale instead of a requested Sprite. I have had back pain for six weeks and this had really pulled me down.

Sick in Singapore.

As much as we like visiting new places our worst times are usually about 24 hours into a new location. We are both stressed by the unfamiliar and this combined with a lack of sleep and being hangry triggers a tiff. Mike’s stress response is to speed things up to punch through a difficult time, mine is to slloooowww down so I don’t miss details. The tension needs an outlet which usually happens when I cry. I once threw a falafel at Mike. The good news is that neither of us is a sulker so we quickly talk about what’s happening and resolve whatever meaningless thing created the problem in the first place. But in the moment it’s not fun.

After Mike said that he thought this sabbatical was a risk, I asked him how he thought it was going. He said, “I think it’s been a big success. We still want to show each things and share new experiences. We still have plenty to talk about. I still want to watch sunsets and crashing waves with you.”

Feeling happy.

I feel the same way. Our lives are harder now than they are at home but our world is expanding and I love that I get to share that with Mike.

There is nobody I’d rather hit the road with and that makes me feel very lucky.

So, as Eliza said in her essay, we are doing this “Because (we) want to laugh and explore together forever. Even though (we) have absolutely no idea what (we) are really getting (ourselves) into.”

September 13, 1997