I read several books about marriage before our wedding, so I don’t remember which one this comes from, but one suggestion I came across was to regularly try new things with your partner to keep your marriage exciting. It didn’t matter what, just as long as there was novelty involved.

The Modern Love Machine and I have done enough camping in our time to both enjoy it. It had been a while since either one of us has done any serious camping, so we’ve been trying to accumulate enough gear to get back into it. Between the two of us we have two awesome mattress pads, one good and one bad sleeping bag, one good backpack and one old-school frame pack and, um, that’s about it. Good gear is effin’ expensive.

We borrowed a tent and joined our friends for a marriage celebration up in the nearby Smoky Mountains held on the land of the bride’s aunt. The celebration included a potluck meal, homebrew beer, cornhole and camping — quite the appropriate celebration for the couple and friends involved.

We had a great time laughing and chatting with friends, indulging in good food and drink and just being merry. When the MLM looked like he was about to fall asleep sitting up, we trudged off to the tent we had fortunately already pitched. He fell asleep fairly quickly. I lightly dozed while half-listening to the chatter still going on. I have no idea how long I lightly dozed — maybe an hour — when I heard the first drops of rain on the tent roof.

The weather forecast had predicted rain in East Tennessee all week, but these were the first actual drops I’d witnessed. Murphy’s Law. The drops picked up intensity and then slacked and then picked up again. I was wide awake now watching and listening for any hint of lightning and thunder or evidence of the tent leaking. After about two hours, the MLM woke up during a particularly heavy round of rain and started moving around. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘What,’ I asked, knowing the answer would be there was water somewhere in the tent, and in fact there was at the edges, seeping in from the ground.

We sat there for a little while trying to redirect the water as best as possible. ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ I confessed. ‘I do too,’ said the MLM. The rain slacked off about 15 minutes later and we decided to make a dash to the outhouse the homeowner had built on the property for just such an occasion. (She hung her framed master of music degree on the wall inside). We held hands and dutifully remained on the lookout for snakes and took our turns at the outhouse. With the rain still holding off, the MLM suggested we load as much as possible into the car so that we could keep as many things as possible dry.

We loaded our belongings and returned to the tent. We looked at the water inside, and the MLM said, ‘Why don’t we just go home?’ It was about 4:45 a.m. I love camping, but I loved the MLM so much more at that moment for saying that.

I think we hit the road around 5:15, with another wedding guest who got soaked to the bone in his tent in tow. We were in our own bed by about 6:30 or 7, and slept for three more hours. I think that’s enough novelty for now.

P.S. It’s been exactly two months since the MLM and I got married, and this may sound weird, but it feels like it’s been six months. That’s not an indictment on our marriage. I absolutely love being married to the MLM. I think it’s that with both of us back to being mired in work and mostly mundane life, our blissfully happy, carefree and exciting three-week wedding/honeymoon break feels like ancient history.