This week has gone by so fast. My cousin A was supposed to visit on Monday, but she got a nasty stomach bug on Sunday and couldn’t travel after all. We had made a restaurant reservation for Monday evening that we decided to keep even though she couldn’t make it. We figured it could be an impromptu date night, and I was quite looking forward to it all day. It turned out okay: food was good if not great, and we had the place mostly to ourselves, but something was off about the evening. It felt like M’s thoughts were elsewhere, and I just felt invisible. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and once we got home, I let myself get totally distracted by chatting with a friend online instead of spending time with M for about an hour, after which we proceeded to watch the latest episode of The Walking Dead as we had agreed earlier. The evening wasn’t a bad one by any means, but neither was it what we had expected.

I woke up insanely grumpy on Tuesday, and couldn’t really put my finger on it. It took me pretty much the whole day to figure it out, and once M came home from work, we finally took a moment to talk about it. I told him about having been disappointed by the restaurant portion of our “date night”, and he told me much the same about what came after. We both felt better afterwards, and decided to give it another go on Saturday.

The rest of the week until the weekend was exhausting, and on Friday evening I was so beat that I went to bed quite a bit earlier than normally and slept like the dead. Saturday, however, was perfect. Lots and lots of extremely good together-time, yummy Chinese food and a movie we both enjoyed. But the best part was, we were both there, present, focused on each other. Such a huge difference compared to Monday.

It’s so easy to get distracted by everyday things. We both have a lot of things going on that have relatively little to do with our relationship with each other, and we spend the majority of every day apart because of work, my language course, our hobbies, and our friends. Not to mention the occasional alone time we both require. It’s easy to accidentally bring that disconnect into our time together as well, but I think for us to stay happy together, we really need to try and not let that happen. Saturday was living proof of how incredibly good it can be when we succeed.