The Same Page
There are a lot of things people assume would be difficult about living with your partner in a 36-foot RV.
The lack of privacy. The lack of personal space. Working within a few feet of each other. Traveling together. Driving together. Eating together. Spending weekends together. Waking up together, going to bed together and, on many days, being within shouting distance of each other for nearly every hour in between.
The question practically asks itself: How do you spend that much time together without driving each other crazy?
We don't have a particularly profound answer.
Jon and I have been together since 1997. We liked spending time together then, and almost thirty years later, we still do. Living in roughly 300 square feet hasn't uncovered some previously hidden inability to tolerate one another.
That doesn't mean we don't irritate each other. We absolutely do. Sometimes what appears to be the beginning of a serious disagreement between two people who have spent most of their adult lives together is actually just one of us being hungry. We've learned that one the hard way. Before examining the state of our relationship too closely, it's usually worth making sure everybody has eaten.
Marriage is complicated like that.
A Lot of House, Not Nearly as Much Time
Before we lived in an RV, we had plenty of space. We lived in a large house in Lake Placid, New York. There were rooms we could disappear into, doors we could close and enough square footage that something left lying around didn't immediately make the entire house look messy.
We miss that last one sometimes.
We're both capable of being messy, although I'm generally the neater of the two. Jon may have a different opinion about that, but he's not writing this essay.
In a large house, you can leave a few things out and deal with them later. In an RV, a couple pairs of shoes, some mail on the counter and a sweatshirt in the wrong place can make it look like we've collectively abandoned all standards of civilized living.
That bigger house also belonged to a very different period of our lives. We both worked in hospitality, which meant long hours and demanding schedules. Even then, we spent a lot of time together. On our days off and after work, we generally wanted to be together. We weren't two people with completely separate lives who suddenly had to figure out how to coexist when we started traveling.
Still, separation was naturally built into our lives. We went to work. We dealt with our own days. Things happened when the other person wasn't there, and later we came home and told each other about them.
Then we moved into an RV.
The house got dramatically smaller, but our shared life got much bigger.
Together. A Lot.
There isn't much separation anymore. We live together. We work together. We travel together. We plan where we're going next together. When something breaks, we're both there. When we pull into a new place, we're both there. When we see something extraordinary for the first time, we're usually standing beside each other.
Even during the workday, we're often only a few feet apart, but most of the time that works surprisingly well. We can both be sitting in the RV, concentrating on work and barely notice the other person is there. We're physically in the same small space while mentally occupying completely different ones.
Then somebody gets on a Teams call.
Apparently, it is possible to forget that the person sitting six feet away can hear your entire meeting. That's when headphones go on, looks start being exchanged, or something gets tossed in the general direction of the person on the call as a subtle suggestion that perhaps he'd like to take his meeting somewhere else.
After almost thirty years together, communication comes in many forms.
Then there's something we've come to call the dance.
It usually happens in the kitchen. I'll be standing at the sink when Jon needs something from the refrigerator, or he'll be at the refrigerator just as I need the sink. One of us moves out of the way, except we've somehow managed to move directly into the next place the other person needs to be. I move left. He moves left. I move right. He moves right.
It drives Jon absolutely crazy.
After nearly thirty years together, you'd think we would have developed some instinctive ability to move gracefully around one another in a small space. We have not. We just keep moving in the same direction until eventually somebody gets out of the way.
We dance.
