Being with your Significant Other 24/7
January 5th, 2010
When people daydream about living life on the road and becoming a workamper, they imagine seeing new sights, meeting new people and maybe sharing those memories with their better half. What they may not realize, being used to seeing their wife or husband only part of the day after work, is that once you make the plunge and hit the road you will now be with that person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week 365 a year.
Stating it like that makes it seem like even the prospect of it a terrible thing. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Jessica and I, before we ever got started in this lifestyle, had plenty of chances to be around each other ALL the time.
We actually met and became friends in film school where our first experiences around each other was working together on film projects. Then we worked as still photographers, traveling up and down Florida's coast for days at a time, keep in mind that we were still just friends at this point, so our working relationship became well established before our romantic one.
After years of being friends we finally acted on a spark that we were both reluctant to tell each other about, and thus began the journey of Jessica and Duncan. And then after a few years of living together we decided to tie the knot. We both had the travel bug, we went to New York, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Vancouver together. A bit of time later, Jessica came to get a job at the advertising firm that I worked for, where we even shared the same office. So I guess that you could say we had some practice living and working together.
In this society we have almost become perfectionists in the art of being around others without being aware of their existence at all. We can walk past a person without so much as making eye contact, and giving a smile or greeting is completely out of the question. We have built a bubble around ourselves and the idea of having someone in that space every minute of the day, can be unsettling. I know, I know, eluding to the notion that you might not want to be around your Significant Other every minute of every day sounds cruel, but some people like to have their private time.
Jessica and I are lucky, we enjoy eachothers company and have the ability to see when the other needs their space and not get offended in the process. Sometimes all it takes to "getaway" is to put on some headphones and listen to music, or take a walk by ourselves. Again, the key is for the opposite party to not take it personally!
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