I love you, but you get on my nerves.

Relationships are beautiful, hopeful, and brave, but it's also mostly two people annoying each other for the rest of their lives and trying to navigate between the love and the irritation. Ruth Bader Ginsberg once said, “In every good marriage, it pays sometimes to be a little deaf.” That goes double for RV life. Marriage and relationships are hard as it is, but they take on a whole new set of challenges when lived in a 20’x10’ space day in and day out….forever. With one bathroom, one sink, and no real walls, there is very little literal space to have all to yourself. People laugh when I say you have to like each other to live like this. You can love your partner more than life itself, but do you like them all the time? Do they never get on your nerves? Yep…a lot. We go through that, but honestly we get along better in our tiny space. I’ve tried to figure out how that works and have come up with only one answer. We know if we argue, we cant each go to our own corners. We’d be headed to the same corner…the only one that isn’t crammed with stuff. I think subconsciously we know that so we make concessions that we may not have made in other circumstances. We each started going out of our way to compromise and reach common ground on issues. It became second nature after awhile and now it just happens without thought. Sure, we still get on each other’s nerves, but we seem to work it out before it gets to the surface. Crazy, right? It’s a skill that I wish we had figured out long before now.

I’ve always liked my “me” time and that is in short supply nowadays. So where do I go when I want a little space? Outside. I go outside. There is plenty of space there. Eventually we both end up outside.

This life just changes your expectations. The RV equivalent of roses and chocolate is him emptying the gray tank before I take a shower. We don’t have a bedroom per say so just being quiet in the morning or taking the dog out before the other gets out of bed is so appreciated. Now that is true love…and like.

Bottom line, we just get along better. I guess Justice Ginsberg was right. We both have become a little deaf…except when we’re parking the RV. That’s a whole different story.