Ella met a lady in a cafe and, in the time it took me to stand dithering at the counter deciding what it might be that Australians call a normal filter coffee she had had a lovely conversation in which it transpired this lady had been on holiday with her husband for 2 weeks and was ready to kill him. At that precise moment he wasn’t there because she had sent him off to look round some gardens as she figured they needed a bit of breathing room. Hearing that we were 10 weeks in to a trip she wondered how on earth we were still talking. 

I guess you can never be fully sure how you are going to get along sharing the same space almost every second of the day for so long. We hit a bit of a barrier last week and had the closest we’ve come to an argument. Some couples argue a lot and shout and make up and get along that way. We tend not to. We don’t really argue. That’s not to say we always see eye to eye and always get on – we just don’t seem to have the necessary pieces to our personalities that would combust when brought together. Sometimes I’m sure that if we both flew off the handle about a particular thing, then made up, we’d end up resolving the matter far quicker than our normal method – our normal method is second guessing the other person. We were probably second, third and fourth guessing one another last week before I let slip with a comment that hadn’t been passed through my normal set of several filters first. So Ella went for a walk to figure what hadn’t been said. (Most people “say” stuff – we more often “don’t say” things which makes it much more tricky but allows for far more wiggle room.) When she came back and made sure I’d eaten – always wise – we figured we were going a little stir crazy and needed to stop trying to think what the other person wanted to do all the time and instead, when asked what I or she would want to do, to say what we actually want to do rather than what we think the other person wants us to say we want them to think we want to do.
It was good to get that cleared up. 
Two months in – one blip. Still learning after 29 years.