Why couples fight while travelling
Redrawing the Boundaries with Your Partner
Whatever arrangements you’ve negotiated over the years with your partner during your settled years, nomadding will necessitate a whole host of new agreements. The most important agreements that you’ll have to come to are:
1. Personal space
People need to know that ‘this is my space, this is your space, and this is our space’.
2. Being realistic
Knowing that when space is limited and resources are limited, space will inevitably be violated, even with the best of intentions. Some couples find themselves tested in odd ways. They might discover that circumstances will force them to go to the toilet in front of each other, especially if the weather is bad, or if someone gets sick. And, to be blunt, it’s di cult to hide explosive diarrhoea in an RV.
3. Things that have to be joint responsibility out of sheer necessity
The Top-Ten Reasons Couples Fight
In spite of people’s general impression that they are unique, the same rubbish tends to play out in the majority of relationships. Probably because unless you had extremely enlightened and communicative parents or teachers and you were an attentive student, the majority of people aren’t taught how to have relationships.
They’ve usually done things by being exposed to (often bad) examples, or they’ve winged it and made a right mess of things. It helps if you know that your arguments with your partner are not special.
1. Accuracy of recollection
These are arguments that start when people have very different memories about what was said, by whom, to whom, about what, and what, if any, agreements were made. These are the arguments where someone is likely to say, ‘Oh, if only I’d recorded that conversation.’
Given that smartphones today come with the capacity to record, there’s no excuse not to record conversations that might have major implications. It might seem weird at first, but it forces people to up their game and actually say what they really mean and stick to a promise if they make one.
2. Agendas
You might think that you’re doing the same thing for the same reason. You might not be. Agendas aren’t always deliberately hidden. Sometimes people aren’t clear or don’t communicate clearly about why they want something, even though they think they have.
3. Sometimes it’s just innocent bad communication and misunderstanding
This leads to a ‘Why are we in Goondiwindi?’ conversation.
‘OK, So, remind me again. Why are we in Goondiwindi?’
‘I don’t know. I thought you wanted to go to Goondiwindi.’
‘I didn’t want to go to Goondiwindi. I only wanted to come to Goondiwindi because I thought that you wanted to go to Goondiwindi.’ ‘I didn’t want to go to Goondiwindi. I only wanted to go to Goondiwindi because I thought that you wanted to go to Goondiwindi.’
At this point either laughter or a heated argument ensues, depending on the current state of the relationship.
4. Cooking
‘I can’t eat that.’ ‘I won’t eat that.’ ‘Why are you the only person in the world who can burn water?’ ‘Why do I always have to do all the cooking and the washing up?’
5. Family
‘You’ve always hated my sister.’ ‘You’ve always thought my brother was a loser.’ ‘I really don’t want to drive a thousand kilometres just to catch up with your stupid cousins.’
6. Interior design
‘I’m no expert but I really don’t think the burnt amber curtains go with the lime green walls.’ ‘Why do you keep buying these knick-knacky pieces of crap?’
7. Money
This is so self-explanatory we’re not even going to give an example.
8. Sex
Ditto. In serious cases both sex and money issues need the intervention of expert help.
9. The children
Don’t think that just because they’re out of sight, they’re out of mind. Your children will continue to be a part of your lives wherever you happen to be nomadding. If you’re still arguing about them after all these years then nomadding isn’t going to change that.
10. Tidiness and cleaning
This is a major issue for several reasons: People confuse ‘untidiness’ with ‘unclean’. The two are related, but not at all the same thing. You can have a perfectly clean things that are a mess, dirty stuff that looks ordered, or both. People’s standards of what constitutes tidy or clean vary tremendously and even if people have similar standards, they’ll only clean what they can see.
Short people tend to ignore high places, tall people tend to ignore low places. Also, when dealing with a couple the ‘clean freak’ of the two ends up doing ‘all the work’ and can tend to be a bit of a martyr about it. And crucially, when you live in an RV every bit of dirt shows up, because while you can hide things in a larger space, a small space has no ‘give’. For more about cleaning see page 206
Who Gets the Blame?
The ‘It’s your fault’ arguments can get ugly. The only way out of these is that people need to:
- Negotiate who is responsible for what.
2. Honour those responsibilities.
3. Accept that when someone is responsible for something, the non-responsible party has very little right to criticise the responsible party. After all, if they could do a better job, maybe they should have taken a responsibility in the first place. It’s all about drawing the line and establishing healthy boundaries.
Growing Together
One thing we hear time and time again is that, while nomadding couples might face a challenge or two on the way, they deal with these challenges together, as a team. The result is that couples find that they not only grow as individuals, but together.
It’s not that a pre- nomad life necessarily drives couples apart (although, to be frank, it often does), but when you factor in year after year of focusing on careers, mortgages, children and all sorts of other stuff attention is not necessarily on the couple.
Credit: The Grey Nomad's Ultimate guide to Australia, New Holland Publishers, RRP $32.99 available from all good book retailers or online at www.newhollandpublishers.com.