I’ll give you a real positive one:

My wife and I are on our honeymoon. We visited 3 countries. The last one is where our last name is from (i.e. mine, that she took in marriage). It’s my first time visiting; her second, but first to this particular part where my family originally comes from, which she’s also always been very interested in.

As it happens, my family was a major part of a very central part of the region’s history, and there is a museum of sorts dedicated specifically to it, and to our role in it. It was not really part of why we came, but since it’s in striking distance and since we have a very unique name that is not well known outside of this country, and the. Causes confusion over both its spelling and pronunciation, we thought we might as well visit. Thought it would be fun to go to a place where the name was not only well known but the focus of a historical tourist site.

We rented a car specifically to make the trip. Got about a half an hour out, more than half of the way there, and then in the middle of nowhere we had a tire blowout. This was a place with no cell phone reception, and we lost the entire day trying to get a tow truck, without even getting the rental car issue resolved. It was a brutal, punishing complication in our trip. We never made it to where we were going, and were very lucky just to get back to where we were staying in the middle of the night, after some twelve hours of frantic struggling. When we did finally get a hold of roadside service, they were ridiculously poorly organized and constantly promised us things that they never delivered on.

Younger both of us would have been tortured. Impatient, panicking, probably fighting over it too. Us now, in our mid thirties, stayed in relatively bright spirits all day, laughed at all the craziness, and enjoyed the meaningless adventure for what it was. We were, to be sure, physically exhausted and emotionally drained, but we remained a team and kept our perspective on it all throughout. Even when we occasionally hit peaks of frustration and exasperation, we never even slightly turned on one another.

Getting older can be a beautiful thing, if you let it.