When you've been married for more than 25 years and been together for 29 years as a couple, maybe you get a chance to understand each other a little bit better; maybe you're still together because even though it's hard and difficult to navigate life, you're generally heading in the same direction.
What I have found with my amazing wife, Alison, is that she encourages me to be a massively better person than I would otherwise be, and she always encourages me to embrace the discomfort of things and move along.
We would talk for ages about how we're going to be two old people shuffling along the road with us in our Zimmers (if we're blessed and lucky enough to get there), although I know in the back of my mind I'm going a lot sooner than Alison is, and I think she's ok with that realistically.
Until we get there, though, we stress each other out just a little bit and push each other a little bit harder.
Alison understands that I say yes to things and go to places and then get there and think, 'Why the f*ck*ng hell did I come here?'. I talk to her briefly about it on the phone, and she tells me, ' Man up, buttercup, deal with it and come home because it makes you better".
Taking risks and feeling the stress makes you better and pushes you forward, which probably, within reason, makes you live longer.
Last Saturday, we drove to Manchester to see a gig at the Co-op Live Arena, Sam Fender. The gig was really good, the venue was terrible, the journey was awful, and the weather was the worst. It was pouring with rain and horrific winds.
Alison drove that night. She doesn't really like driving in that weather, but nobody does, and by the time we got there, we were a little bit frazzled, but we got to see something that we will remember for the rest of our lives, and then we got to drive home.
It would have been much easier for us to light the fire, get a takeaway, sit in, and watch the telly, but we'd never, ever have remembered that night if we had done that.
We'll never forget the trip to the Co-op Arena to see Sam Fender.
It's interesting, isn't it, to embrace this principle.
In the book The Comfort Crisis, the author explains that we are in the middle of a crisis created by our need and our desire for comfort all the time.
In these pages, I call it Netflix and Deliveroo.
Everybody thinks that success is the ability to sit at home eating a takeaway and watching a series. However, the opposite is true; success is the ability to go out into the terrible weather and, find something magical and then return and remember it.
Blog Post Number - 4025