My now ex-husband and I are polar opposites in many ways, but one of the big ones is in how we like to travel. It could be a point of tension, but instead it has led to one of the best lessons I could learn about relationships.
He is a “get to the gate two hours early with my breakfast in hand” kind of guy. I am on the other end of the spectrum - I pull into the airport on two wheels, fly through TSA pre-check and arrive at the gate just in time to board.
He starts getting anxious hours before he’s supposed to leave for the airport, checking the weather and traffic repeatedly. He’s packed the night before, clothes ironed and laid out so he doesn’t have to think about it in the morning. I am always doing one last thing before I leave, thinking I can cram in more before I head out, never checking traffic or the weather, and packing on the morning of the trip.
For our honeymoon, he was in charge of making the arrangements, and he was adamant that we leave the day after the wedding (instead of lingering for a day or two in town). He made us reservations at a hotel downtown so we would be closer to the airport in the morning and arranged for a car to pick us up at 4am.
<insert record scratch sound here>
4am? The day after our wedding??? I was not excited about that at all.
At the time, I was part of an morning radio show, so I knew what it was like to get up early, but I was not on board with getting up that early for a flight out of the Birmingham airport at 6:30am. Going through security at the Birmingham airport has never taken me more than 15 minutes. I tried to persuade him to let us sleep in for an additional hour, but he was not moved by my pleas. He wanted to be guaranteed that we were there early Sunday morning because if we missed our flight, we wouldn’t be able to catch another one until Tuesday.
I called my best friend Gail to complain, and as she tends to do, she helped me to see it from a different perspective. She stopped me in my tracks when she said these wise words: “You only have to be wrong once.”
Her point was that while it did suck to have to get up early, that in the grand scheme of things, it would be way worse to miss our flight. Did I want to dig my heels in and demand an extra hour of sleep if that put us vulnerable to missing our flight? Did I want to make my new husband a nervous wreck by insisting on my way? Did I want to have that hanging over my head that I had traded a little extra sleep and cost us two days in St. Lucia?
When she put it that way, I knew I needed to get with the plan to get up early and be a good soldier. Overall, I was losing one hour of sleep - but if I was wrong, the consequences would be huge.
So, as predicted, we sailed through the airport security in record time and sat down at the gate with two hours to spare before boarding (before the coffee shop even opened!). While I was tired, I hadn’t ruined our trip just to make a point or just to get my way. It’s a lesson that I remember often, and I haven’t missed a flight yet.
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