The kinds of issues you face out on the road are great for relationships, because you’re almost always in agreement about the basics. You know you need somewhere to stay that night; you just have to pick a hostel. You know you want to surf and she wants to do a volunteer project; you just have to find a beach and an assignment and decide what to do first. If you dated her for three years before your trip, you already knew you were in agreement about most things, otherwise you would have broken up long ago. The challenge of travel is of choosing what you want in a world full of options. The challenge of marriage (and really, adult living) is keeping the feeling of joy and discovery and excitement alive in a situation where you have closed off a lot of your options, and where you have real obligations that curtail them even further. It’s stress, boredom, ennui, and silence that tear apart marriages, not excitement. You may have married the right person, and I hope you did, but you have no way of knowing based on this. So come back in five years and tell us how you put up with the challenges of being bored — they’re much harder than the challenges of traveling.