To me, the point of relationships is to grow constantly. Even after marriage, you and your significant other as individual people should be growing. Together, you should also be growing. There should always be surprises and new things in relationships. I'll admit, once you become accustomed to each other they probably won't appear as often—but there should still be things that are new, exciting, and unknown you and your significant other are learning about one another. Or, at the very least, growing. Sometimes you'll hit obstacles that will cause you to grow closer and overcome them together, whether that obstacle is physical, mental, or even just disagreements between one another. That's how relationships should be.

Yesterday gave me a huge headache. Between the boyfriend putting things off all week and it frustrating me because all the errands that needed to be tended to piled up to yesterday, and then getting annoyed with each other because we weren't sure if an assignment for our class was due at 9pm or 11:59pm and we thought we were cutting it close, and also between him telling me to "calm down" as a joke constantly for the last week and a half when I was neither stressed, angry, or upset—my patience was wearing thin. I was getting annoyed, and being really snappy (being told to "calm down" when I'm already calm rubs me the wrong way).

But then, to top it all off, our plumbing system decided to take a—no pun intended—huge crap.

Whether it was the recent snowstorm we had, the pipes not being insulated correctly (I wouldn't put it passed our landlord), the fact that we didn't drip hot water enough during the freezing and below temperatures, or the fact that our piping is shared with four other houses...I don't know. I don't know what happened, but our toilet got clogged on Tuesday. Hey, no big deal. It happens. We're used to it. Later that night, the toilet started to work perfectly fine.

Wake up Wednesday, toilet starts acting strange. Also something we are used to, and we think nothing of it. It fills really high, then drains out really low and won't fill back to where the water normally sits. We plunge it throughout the day on and off thinking that whatever is making the toilet act weird is just lodged and it'll move after a while. Well, we were wrong.

We didn't know this at the time but the other houses on the lot were having the same trouble—and they were also adding to the problem just as much as we were. Since our house is the smallest, though, we got most of the problems. Like, after plunging so much, it started to back flood into our tub, and at one point our kitchen sink. The tub back flow never drained, either. Then the pipes under our kitchen sink started to leak. And then, at one point, when we were trying to plunge, water started to come up from under the toilet through the floor where the wall and tiles meet.

That's when we decided to stop, call our landlord, and pray the house didn't completely burst at the seems overnight while we slept—unable to shower or even wash off, since the sink piping was leaking, the disgusting toilet water we had on us from cleaning up what flooded onto the floor.

So basically, what I'm trying to get at in the midst of yesterday and part of today completely sucking—we were a boyfriend and girlfriend of 2 years stinky and disgusting, covered in toilet water and who-the-hell-knows-what, unable to shower and unable to pee. TMI, but we ended up each peeing into respective plastic cups and dumping that into a leftover empty liter soda bottle we were about to recycle.

That's when I decided to stop being annoyed with Jeremy, because the situation at hand was so gross it beat out my annoyance. But, hey, we got to experience something extremely strange (and, yes, gross as I said) together.

I did, however, bawl at one point last night and tell him I wanted my mom. And neither of us were able to make it to class today since we had to be present for the plumber the landlord sent out to fix the sewage (she's sent a person into our house before without telling us, so we aren't exactly comfortable letting her workers come and go), and also make sure our cats didn't escape.

Good news is everything is in working order again, the plumber was a pretty chill guy, we both showered as soon as the guy left, and we both feel better now.

Growing and learning experiences...how fun! Ha. But mark my words, when the only toilet in the house no longer works you will definitely reach an all-new level of partnership with your significant other.