Once we made the decision to go travelling, Pete and I started looking at other blogs online for tips on planning, budgeting and not murdering each other along the way. One of the reoccurring themes for avoiding homicidal outbursts was the ability to compromise. As anybody who knows me will attest to, I am quite stubborn and do not concede easily so I thought a blog post exploring the ideas we have for compromising whilst we travel would be fun. If nothing else, we can look back at this and laugh at our own naivety from our respective jail cells following the attempted murder trials.
Early on, we both decided that Pete should do the majority of the writing for the blog as he is by far the better writer (case in point), and I would have the much easier job of managing the Instagram (shameless plug 1) and Facebook (shameless plug 2) accounts. Up until now, I have mostly left Pete to manage the blog in its entirety, with my biggest contributions being to help chose appropriate pictures (read: make sure I don’t look like a troll in the pictures Pete decides to post) and proof read before posting (if you call reading his drafts and offering absolutely no helpful input, proof reading). But given the topic of this post, I thought I would give this whole blogging thing a go and then give myself a pat on the back for being a shining example of compromising* in action.
I think it’s fair to say that I am the more apprehensive out of the 2 of us. Although I have always loved to travel and visit new places, I have never travelled long term before, whereas Pete spent 6 months solo travelling in his late teens, and moved to Canada for a year in his 20s. I am also a meticulous planner, I love to create itinerates and spreadsheets. Basically, I am the stereotypical Type A personality. Pete, on the other hand, is Type B. Hence we came to our first chance to put our compromising skills to the test. I wanted to book all of our flights, transfers, trains hotels and hostels upfront and Pete wanted to take the fly by the seat of your pants approach to our travel planning. We went back and forth on this for a while and in the end decided that during the European leg of our journey, I would let my planning-freak flag fly but we agreed that for the South East Asia leg, we would take a more laissez faire attitude with just a loose plan of the route we would take but no real dates. This had 2 advantages, it would ease me in to the long term travel experience and it would, hopefully, save us money on one of the more expensive part of our trip. And with that, we overcame our first compromising challenge, gold star to us!
While I am under no illusion that there will be times when we disagree and feel like we never want to see the other’s face ever again, I am confident that we are well equipped to work through it. My confidence comes from the fact that we very rarely argue and any disagreements we have at home are resolved quickly with open and honest communication. I think our ability to compromise and communicate developed very early on in our relationship. Pete and I met at work in West Bromwich, which is to the UK what Mordor is to Middle Earth. We were both working away from home, with Pete and I travelling from London and Liverpool respectively, and were staying in a rundown hotel close to work. Due to this, we spent the first 10 months of our relationship living on top of each other, sharing a miniscule hotel room 5 days a week, as well as working with each other every day. Most people we mention this to, say they could never live and work with their significant other but we enjoyed it. We were able to challenge each other at work without bringing that in to our relationship outside of work. We are very familiar with spending the majority of our time together, in less than ideal living spaces and I think this experience will stand us in good stead for the adventures to come.
And it doesn’t hurt that we actually really like each other. We are that cliché couple who are best friends and enjoy doing everything together (Vom!)
I guess at the end of the day, we will learn as we go. When I think of all the amazing things that we are going to get to experience together, it’s definitely worth putting up with the scores of disagreements we are bound to have. We just need to make sure we remember that when we are ready to bash each others skull in.
*I was convinced this should have read “compromisation in actionâ€, as this sentence just doesn’t sound right to me, but a quick google search told me that I 100% made that word up. As made up words go, I think it’s up there.