On Journeys

Joseph Campbell thought that every great story was, at its essence, a story of the Hero’s Journey. A protagonist receives a call to leave his ordinary world for a journey into a scary and wondrous land, his subconscious manifest. He finds friends and foes, tempers his character in the fires of inevitable tribulation, achieves his ultimate goal, and returns  a changed man, gifting his boon back to the world.

Real life is, however, not so easy to fit to the contours of this plot. Sure, we’re all heroes on our own journeys, but most of our lives are just “the ordinary world” part of the story. We get up, go to work, have dinner with our spouse, watch an episode of Great British Bake-Off, and fall asleep. Rinse and repeat. I’m not disparaging of this. We are very lucky, in some ways, to not have adventuresome lives.

Sometimes, though, we receive our call to adventure: we get a job in a new city, or we reach a life milestone, or, as in our case, we feel the tug of wanderlust, and a journey is embarked upon. A trip–a good, long, adventurous one–can also be a journey. And so, when I was thinking of what I wanted from this blog and this trip, I thought of Joseph Campbell and his Hero’s Journey. But since this journey is also a honeymoon, I think it is fitting to see our relationship as it’s hero, rather than either of us. And if I were to set an intention for this journey, it would be the strengthening of that relationship. So, with all this in mind, I think perhaps my first post on here should be about the ordinary world of our relationship, so that when we look back after our journey, we can see what changes our boons have brought us.

Aaron and I moved very fast. We met, fell in love, and moved in together all within about a month. We were talking about marriage about a month after that, and were wed after we’d known each other for a year. Granted, it was, as most of you know, a no-countsies wedding for health insurance purposes. But then we got countsies engaged not long after that. Basically, it was love at first sight. If you eyerolled when you read that last sentence, I don’t blame you. But even if you don’t believe in love at first sight, you can see that things moved very fast between us. In some ways, this hasn’t really affected anything. We have a very strong emotional and intellectual connection, and I don’t think it would be much stronger had we known each other longer. We’ve been open and communicative from the start, and we speak the same language. We have the same bond that couples who move at a more sensible pace do when they get to this point in their relationship.

But in other ways, there are things that only time can do to a relationship. The constant friction of two personalities rubbing against each other eventually smooths out the rougher edges of each. Trust builds. Roots take hold. A strong bond becomes less brittle. Even though Aaron and I have a very good relationship, it is still so new, and that newness gives it vulnerability. We still get jealous, we are still navigating how to fight, we are still discovering each other’s sensitivities and quirks of personality. I think we’re both still worried that the other is a figment of our imagination. We haven’t had enough time to develop the sort of instinctual trust and deep intuition you get from day after day of coming home to each other.

But time, despite what some would have you think, is not linear. Time is counted in moments, and moments multiply on journeys. A week passed in an office job is half as long as a week in the coffeehouses and backstreets of a city you’ve never been to, because each new discovery there is another moment in your memory. I’m hoping this journey gives us the boon our (almost) two years together has not yet: enough moments to brace against our relationship’s vulnerable novelty, enough memories to lay down a foundation for a shared lifetime.