I caught up with a friend the other day. We mostly talked about me, I’m ashamed to say. And now that I think back on it, I think he might have needed to get something off his chest. Two or three times, he brought up the fact that I was really lucky to be “sorted” in the relationship department.
Recently I’ve been focusing on all the bad things about relationships and how hard they can be to maintain, so today I’m making a list of all the great things about them!
1. Someone to share the cooking with. I fed myself and myself only for over a year, and I don’t really know WHAT I was eating. I remember surviving on jam sandwiches for lunches (can’t touch the stuff now) as I was living on a shoestring. About $30 a week kept me fed – half of what I spend today, four years later. I assume I ate a lot of pasta and stirfry… and eventually learned to give up on looking for packages of meat small enough for one, and just buy larger packs and freeze half of it.
In Whakatane, I didn’t eat a lot – mainly because our days were so busy, I barely had time to eat my fruit, muesli bar and sandwiches. I did not cook once my entire time there. The first night I was nervous, the second I was anxious due to having a bad first day, so all I ate was a tiny salad. The other nights we either went out or cooked group dinners. Cooking for one was just not appealing.
2. Hugs and cuddles when you need them…! And someone to warm the bed.
3. Someone to look after you when you’re sick. Who wants to make their own soup, get up to turn the light off, have a shower, change the channel, etc? And, in cases like today, take me home, make me a saltwater mouthwash and conjure up lunch after I got THE most heinous mouthache after eating half a Moro Gold while grocery shopping. (No, I didn’t eat before paying. Shell was doing $1 chocolate bars when we stopped to gas up.)
4. In my case – someone to drive me around 😀
5. Someone to bounce stuff off. I imagine it’d be pretty lonely living alone (or with crappy flatmates) and not having someone on hand to constantly act as your sounding board on dramas and dilemmas of all kinds.
6. Someone who’ll do all the fun chores, like change lightbulbs and take out the bins.
7. And last but not least, someone to take turns at getting out of bed and retrieving late night snacks from the kitchen …
Very cute! 🙂 Relationships are a lot of work — but like you pointed out, they definitely have a lot of rewards!
[…] And in 2009 I asked what you’d do if money was no object, contemplated the life of an army wife and counted my relationship blessings. […]