Our First Trip Together

Okay everyone, time to vent some of my fears to you. “But Julie, isn’t that what you always do?”, I hear you asking. Okay…maybe.

Anyway, my fiancé and I are going to Orlando, FL at the end of the month and I’m very excited, but also a bit anxious. So, you know, still on brand. We haven’t traveled together before and we are both very stubborn in our ways of problem-solving. He thinks I never listen to his solutions and I think he never listens to mine. We end up fighting and making a scene before one of us is adequately able to explain our position to another. “How are you guys going to make a marriage work?”, is another question I’m hearing. Well, that’s a big reason why we are going on this trip alone.

A summary of our life before we jump in: He recently moved in with me at my mom’s house. We eventually want to get our own place but for now, the three of us are managing together. Being that I have Cerebral Palsy and often have trouble navigating or doing things by myself, like cooking, I need my fiancé’s help with certain tasks.

For example, a couple weeks ago, I was making dinner and I asked for his help getting some potatoes out of the oven. He said he wasn’t even going to check on them because there was no way they were done yet. Hence the back and forth argument. Since I needed his help, I couldn’t just override his concerns and check the potatoes myself and I was frustrated for relying on him. Eventually, I brought my mom into the fray and she agreed to check on the potatoes. This small instance reveals the larger dynamic in our relationship.

This trip will remove the third party element. We are going to be forced to navigate situations on our own. That is a scary concept. While I’ve been working on my own independence, so I can become less frustratingly reliant, I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t put much work into uprooting our problems as a team.

There is a whole system we’ll have to go through, navigating the airport, making sure my walker and equipment get checked, navigating the parks (we are both terrible at directions so I am legitimately concerned that we are going to get lost) and other logistical elements. I’m worried that we’ll just end up exploding into a series of unproductive arguments and neither of us will have a good time. I know we have to listen to each other, but despite whatever language tricks we use, often neither of us feels heard.

It’s a difficult thing to confront for sure but this trip is something we have to do to figure out how we are going to work in the future. In truth, this will be my first trip without a parent, someone whose judgements and suggestions I just went along with. We’ll have to learn to hear and trust each other’s opinions. A lot of that learning will be done on the fly, too! But that’s how we tend to handle things.

I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on this! If you want, feel free to drop a comment below!