What a Roadtrip Taught Me About Marriage:
Before you marry someone, I highly encourage you to travel with them. When I say travel, I don’t mean a vacation (no poolside margaritas on this one). No - I mean the nitty-gritty type of traveling. Moving over 2,000 miles together in a Mini Cooper will accomplish this. A few years ago, my partner, Krisztian, and I did just that! We packed up our most prized possessions into a tiny car and traveled for 5 days through the U.S. Since we moved from LA to Salt Lake City two weeks ago today, I’ve been reminiscing about our last big move. Here are my biggest takeaways:
1. The straightforward path isn’t always the right one. Before our cross-country trip Krisz and I decided that while moving, we'd visit a few national parks and cool cities along the way! We created a list of places we each wanted to visit + checked routes, then compromised on stops to find things we’d both enjoy. This meant stops to New Orleans for beignets, Austin to see the largest bat colony in North America (under the Congress St Bridge), the Painted Desert National Park & the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, and a final stop at a Meteor Crater in Arizona that shook the southwest about 50,000 years ago. We added several days onto our trip for these stops when we could have driven straight through, but I wouldn't change it for the world. Driving straight through would have been “moving to another place.” The stops along the way made it an adventure! But finding a partner willing to compromise + maximize the trip experience (in our perspective) is the key. If you’re not as crazy about National Parks but share a massive love for pizza joints, maybe you plan your route around that! When it comes to marriage, I think this is true on such a grander scale. If marriage is one big road trip, what are the stops you’ll make (literally + figuratively) along the way?
2. You get to decide what’s beautiful for yourself. I know you’ve heard “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but when I read dozens of blog posts about how boring Texas would be to drive through, I really started to lose hope. It just didn't make sense to drive around it - that detour alone would prolong our trip by several more days... but we were SHOCKED at the overwhelming beauty of the state. Maybe we took some good roads, or maybe we just traveled at the right time of year but we loved it. There were farms, wildflower fields, and old ranches decorated with custom metal gates branded in their family name. You get to decide what’s beautiful in your marriage, too. Maybe you haven’t ticked off every box society says you need to have a loving, fulfilling + beautiful marriage (a house on a corner lot with a picket fence) - but you don’t need to. What makes your relationship loving, fulfilling + beautiful is for nobody else to decide. Turning inward to yourself first, and then toward your partner, you can decide the values you want to incorporate into your life and relationships.
3. There will be unexpected chaos - learn how you both act under pressure. On the second day of our road trip, a tube in the engine became disconnected. The car wasn’t able to calculate the amount of gas in the engine, it began to shake anytime we went over 40 mph and ALL the engine lights were going off. Since it was a Mini Cooper, only a Mini dealership could really evaluate it. It was a Saturday and all the Mini shops had closed. Pep Boys sent us away in defeat. We already booked reservations for the rest of our trip & the dealerships were closed the rest of the weekend. So… we kept going. Slow + steady, with an engine running on hope more than good mechanics. It meant shorter stops for food and later arrivals each day after long, slow hours of driving - and I know we both felt nervous - but I just remember laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. Especially as the windshield temp read 112 degrees as we passed through the Mojave desert. We never got angry or cursed our luck. We just knew we’d keep going as long as we could and get it fixed the day we came into LA (it was our very first stop in Socal!). Thankfully that plan worked out!
Now with COVID and the state of… well, everything, there’s more unexpected chaos. It kind of feels like the whole WORLD is a jam-packed Mini Cooper, rattling any time we start to pick up the pace. Thankfully now, just as we did then, we’ve approached it with curiosity - but that definitely doesn’t mean we haven’t felt nervous or scared. Staying positive, thinking of creative solutions, and intentionally supporting each other through wild times means that even when the world feels impossible and scary, there's always someone to lean on.
Did you find this blog post helpful? Do you have a crazy road trip story to share?! Let me know in the comments!
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