Marriage in 320 Square Feet

A couple of weeks ago a man asked me about the way Dawn and I live. We've been full-time in our RV for almost two years now. We live together, work together, travel together, and do nearly everything together, all in about 320 square feet.

He thought about it for a second and said, "You must be really good people."

Dawn and I got a good laugh out of that. We are pretty good people. We also like each other, which helps a lot. What actually makes it work is that we've gotten damn good at being uncomfortable, and at not making each other responsible for the discomfort.

Underneath all the stories about water softeners and golf cart parades, that's what this life has taught us. A small space doesn't create problems in a marriage. It takes away the places you used to put them.

A big camper is a small house

People see our rig from the outside and tell us it's huge. For a camper, it is. Compare it to your house instead of your camper and it gets small fast.

We have four rooms. My office in the back is about five by eight feet. The bedroom is a bed slightly smaller than a king with a narrow path around the edge. The bathroom is maybe six by four. Everything else happens in one room: living room, kitchen, dining room, the dog's bedroom, and the spot on top of the fireplace where I balance a softbox light on a stand it was never designed for whenever we record.

(If you're curious, it's a Brinkley Z 3515. Look up the floor plan and you'll see our whole house.)

The day we recorded this episode was a pretty good demonstration. A camper was backing into the site twenty feet from us. The dog was barking. We were moving lights and cameras from the bedroom into the living room and trying to make a tiny space look decent on video. I told Dawn this is exactly what marriage and running a content business in 320 square feet looks like. You can't leave anything out, because the space shrinks every time you do. Everything has a place, and every project means moving things out of one place and into another.

The outdoors becomes part of the house. We chase warm weather for exactly that reason. We haul good lawn chairs around the country so there's somewhere comfortable to sit outside, and we choose places where outside is worth being in. When the weather keeps us in for a week of rain and cold (we hit snow in Texas a couple of years ago), the whole thing gets infinitely harder. In a regular house, you can each take a room and still be home together. Here, that option barely exists.

The hours apart you don't have

When I asked Dawn what the hardest part of this life is for our marriage, she didn't talk about the bathroom or the closet. She talked about needing room to be with herself.

That's the real constraint. Physical space matters, and the bigger limit is emotional: having somewhere to be with your own energy when something is moving through you.

Most couples have a buffer they never think about. Two people get up, go their separate ways, and spend eight, nine, ten hours apart. Whatever got stirred up in the morning has a whole day to settle before it ever has to be dealt with in the same room. A lot of marriages run on that buffer without anyone noticing.

We don't have it. On the day we recorded, our time apart was Dawn's workout at the campground fitness center, my ride on the road bike, and our showers. That's about it.

Dawn put it better than I could: there are more ways for triggers to come up when you're together almost constantly. And there's no easy way to avoid speaking up for what you need, because there's nowhere to go and quietly wait for the feeling to pass.

You could see that as the cost of this life. We've come to see it as one of the gifts. The buffer most couples rely on is also a place to hide. Take it away, and you find out fast whether the two of you know how to handle what you've been hiding.

Five feet from the stove

Dawn has had some grief coming up recently. One morning she was sitting in her chair with her coffee, a few feet from the kitchen, and a lot started surfacing. Feelings, and what she describes as messages coming to her. I was five feet away starting breakfast, clinking pans and making all the noise a man makes in a kitchen.

She didn't ask me to stop. She didn't get up and leave. She stayed in her chair, stayed with herself, and cried.

She said asking me to stop would have pulled her out of her own experience anyway. And she trusted that I'd feel her without her having to announce it.

What she didn't do is the move almost everyone makes. The ego's first answer to a crowded feeling is to blame the crowd. If you'd just give me some space. If you'd just be quiet. If you'd just get away from me for a little while. Dawn said it plainly: it's really easy to fall into that blame game. And in a house with four rooms, the other person is always right there to take the blame.

What she's learned instead is to be assertive about her needs inside herself. She meets herself where she is, no matter what's going on around her and no matter what I'm doing. Sometimes that means going to the bedroom and closing the door. Sometimes it means staying right where she is. She goes with whatever feels right in the moment.

The room you need to feel what you feel is something you give yourself. Square footage has very little to do with it. A woman who needs the whole house quiet before she's allowed to cry will find the house is never quiet enough. A woman who can meet herself in the middle of the noise has all the room she needs, in a camper or a mansion.

For me, the other half of that morning matters just as much. My job wasn't to fix her grief or narrate it or make sure she knew I'd noticed. My job was to stay present and keep making breakfast without needing her tears to mean anything about me. That took me a lot of years to learn. A man who reads every shift in his wife's mood as a verdict on himself can't share 320 square feet with her for long. Neither of them would survive it.

"I'm going to watch the Wild game"

Needing space doesn't have to mean anything is wrong. Sometimes, I still just like to watch hockey.

Sometimes Dawn's in the bedroom and I'm out here, or she's out here and I'm in my office, or one of us takes the workday to a coffee shop or a park. I did a lot of that while I was finishing the book and needed hours without interruption. Sometimes one of us goes for a walk alone. Sometimes I say, "I know we were going to hang out tonight, but I'm going to sit by myself and watch the Wild game," and Dawn says, "Cool. I'm going to read a book."

And sometimes it really is about needing to be apart from each other for a bit. Two people who love each other still get on each other's nerves in a space this small. The difference is that it doesn't have to become a story. Wanting a couple of hours alone is a need, and the other person can accept it without taking it personally.

Then there are the times nobody chose. A couple of months ago I had COVID, and the bedroom became the infirmary for three days. We've both had our rounds of being sick. When Dawn's on her period and needs to lie down alone, she needs the bedroom, and the rest of the house is suddenly one room.

It's a little like a pressure cooker. You have to handle a lot of things delicately, with a lot of grace, and with a real willingness to flex for each other. Dawn says this life has only made her better at speaking up for what she wants and needs, and I'd say the same. There's simply no way around it anymore.

The walls are thin

Living this way means hearing everything.

We try to balance busy places with quiet, out-in-the-country ones, and the park we recorded from is one of the loudest we've ever stayed in. All week it's calm. Then Thursday afternoon rolls around and the weekenders arrive.

That's my name for them. Full-timers like us live in our rigs. Weekenders roll in Thursday or Friday to camp and party until Sunday, and you can spot them easily: the beer usually gets cracked open before the camper is finished being set up. (Campers, you know I'm right.) This park runs events every weekend in its busy season, and the weekend before we recorded, they held a golf cart parade at ten at night. Everybody lined up their carts and drove around the campground honking their horns while we were trying to go to sleep.

Thin walls let the weather in too. We now sleep with insertable earplugs from a company called Hears, and they've made a massive difference with noise and rain. (We're not affiliates, though we'd be open to it.) They don't do much against a real thunderstorm.

The thin walls reach into the other side of our business as well. Dawn and I create adult content together through Dawn of Desire, and a couple of hours before we recorded this episode, we were filming. The bedroom sits at the end of the camper closest to where everyone drives by, and right outside the wall, a kid was running a remote control car back and forth. So we put music on to drown it out and kept going.

That's most of what this life teaches about noise: you don't get to control it. Most days it's quiet. Some days the timing is terrible. You learn to roll with it, because the alternative is spending your life angry at things that were never yours to manage.

The dent in the truck

This summer we had three nights in a row of severe thunderstorms. Tornado warnings and storm alerts going off in the middle of the night, three nights running. The day after the third night, I had about 300 miles to tow the camper.

Moving the camper is the most stressful part of this life for me. I did it on three nights of terrible sleep, then tried to squeeze into a tight site at the other end. My brain wasn't working. I angled the camper too tight behind the truck and crunched the two together.

We have a nice little dent in the back of the truck now. It almost looks like it's supposed to be there. Dawn says the only way you'd notice is to compare it to the other side, and when I offered to put a matching one over there, she declined.

What I keep coming back to is that I didn't have to drive that day. One of the great freedoms of living this way is that, short of a hurricane, we really don't have to do anything. If I was that wrecked, we could have stayed another day. Nothing was forcing me except the part of me that sticks to the plan and pushes through, because pushing through feels like strength.

Pushing through that day was the old habit of overriding what my body was telling me, dressed up as strength. The truck wears the evidence. If that happens again, I'm taking the extra day.

Letting go of perfect

Some of the best moments in this episode came out during the game at the end, and a couple of them belong here.

When I asked who gets more frustrated when a campsite doesn't turn out the way they expected, Dawn claimed it, then added, "not anymore." She used to expect every one to be perfect. She's come a long way toward accepting that what will be will be, and it'll be fine, and she gave herself a well-earned pat on the back for it. The last time she got irked was when we arrived in Coachella to a park full of open sites and got placed right next to another camper with kids, beside the exact spot where she'd be spending three months outside. It turned out fine. Quiet neighbors, and a friendly little boy who said "Hi, Andrew" pretty much every time I stepped outside for three straight months.

The same thing showed up when we talked about who's more likely to wake the other up at night. That's Dawn, who gets up every night and doesn't really open her eyes on the way. I told her what I used to notice wasn't the getting up. It was the nights she was frustrated about being awake, and I could feel it in how she walked back to bed. Heavier heels, as she put it.

Those nights are mostly gone. Some of that is better sleep, earplugs, and a lot of changes we've made to support rest. Dawn said the bigger part is learning to actually surrender and accept life as it comes. If she's awake, she's awake. She sleeps a little later if she needs to, and she says she never feels as bad the next day as she used to.

That shift is bigger than it sounds. A woman who used to carry the weight of everything being exactly right can now lie awake at 3 AM in a camper and be fine with it. She'd tell you she isn't done, and she isn't. Neither am I. That's what this life keeps pressing on in both of us: you can fight what is, or you can live with it. Only one of those lets you sleep.

Plumbing a house with a garden hose

A lot of what shapes our marriage on the road is plain logistics, and the most surprising one is water.

It's amazing how much of our life revolves around Dawn's hair. Hard water wrecks it, and in a camper you don't have a whole-house water softener. Our kitchen has a regular faucet and a big farmhouse sink, and when you turn it on, water comes out just like at home. Outside, though, there's a garden hose running from a spigot into the camper, and whatever water that campground has is what we get. Sometimes it's really hard water.

So we run a portable water softener inline on the hose, which protects Dawn's hair and the camper's plumbing from scale. Then a shower filter catches the minerals the softener misses. The morning we recorded, before washing her hair, Dawn asked me to check whether the softener was still doing its job, because her hair had felt sticky the day before. That's a normal conversation in our house.

For drinking water we travel with a reverse osmosis system. (Before anyone heads to the comments: yes, we know RO strips out the minerals your body needs, and we remineralize it.) In a house, that system would be plumbed under the sink. Here it sits outside in a big black tote hooked to the hose, and we walk out, sometimes in the rain, to fill our jugs. We don't go to the store for drinking water. We go outside.

Laundry works about the same way. Our rig has hookups for a washer and dryer, but putting them in would eat the closet or my office, so we skipped it. We have a small portable washer that lives outside, we air-dry a lot, and we use campground laundry when it exists. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we stayed for five weeks, it didn't. We got by until it got too humid to dry anything, and then on a rainy day Andrew drove 25 minutes each way to a laundromat with nine washers and one and a half working dryers to get our sheets and towels done. Afterward we found a brand-new laundromat with no sign out front, right on the road we drove past every day. It never showed up on the map.

About a year ago, the camper was in the shop and we rented a house for a month. It was amazing how luxurious it felt. Forty steps to the bedroom. A bathroom with a real counter. In here everything is four steps away, and the bathroom barely fits one of us at a time, which makes getting ready for bed on the same schedule an interesting dance. (The Brinkley has more counter space than a lot of campers give you. She was still running hair tools out of the sink the day we recorded.)

Less stuff

We only have so much space, and we can only haul so much weight. So we don't buy much, and there's a real freedom in that. I call it enforced minimalism.

It changes small things too. When I asked how we'd ever surprise each other with a gift in a space this size, Dawn pointed out that the bigger obstacle is that we shop together and I handle the finances, so it's hard for her to surprise me at all. If I said, "I have something for you, don't look in that cabinet," she wouldn't look. She'd rather be surprised when I want her surprised. In practice, we just don't do much gift-buying.

Dawn has swung back a bit on clothes. She wants options again, and she has a lot of them, because our life still covers cold weather and warm, workouts, and nights out. She loves organizing, and she's turned her little side closet into a creative project, figuring out exactly what each storage piece can do for her.

Stilettos in a campground

One of the reasons Dawn needs a real wardrobe is that we still dress up.

I'll put on a suit. She'll put on a little black dress that stops about half an inch below her ass, and a pair of red-bottom heels. We walk out of the camper, climb into a one-ton diesel truck (nothing says classy like a one-ton diesel), and drive off to dinner while the weekenders look up from their beers.

I've never seen another person in a dress and stilettos in a campground. Dawn loves it. She loves the looks, the "what in the world" faces, blowing people's minds a little. When the gravel pad is too rough for her heels, she carries them and changes later. Once I carried her.

What I love most is where it comes from. Dawn said it best: it happens because she's so comfortable being herself, and people can feel it. That's a long way from the girl who grew up learning that everything about her had to be managed and approved.

We stand out in other ways too. Most people in a campground are on vacation. RV stands for recreational vehicle, and for very few people it's home. So when I'm outside on a Thursday morning deadlifting from the barbell and bumper plates we haul around the country, and a guy wanders over with a question about my truck, he doesn't understand why I tell him we'll have to chat later.

And when people learn we do this full-time, the next question is always the same: what do you do for work?

Dawn has started having a lot of fun with that one. Her answer is one word: "Porn." Then she watches their heads tilt sideways like a golden retriever puppy.

It's true, and she says it without a trace of shame. Dawn of Desire is part of how we live and part of how we make our living. If you're curious about that side of our life, it's at dawnofdesire.com. If you're not, that's completely fine too.

Who's more likely to

We ended the episode with something we'd never done on the podcast: a game of "who's more likely to," holding up cards with our names on them. A few results, for the record:

• Forget a step packing up to move? This turned into a dispute about a microwave plate. The real answer is that we're both pretty good at it, because we each have our jobs.
• Forget something and have to run back inside? Andrew. We both agreed instantly.
• Let go of frustration faster? Dawn says it used to be Andrew, and that she's come so far she doesn't even keep track anymore.
• Initiate a fist bump? Dawn, by a mile. We fist bump every time she gets a new subscriber, and she instigated several during the recording.
• Get sappy with tears in their eyes for no reason? Andrew. No contest.
• Remember something differently than it happened? Dawn. She'd tell you she has no idea what I'm talking about.
• Laugh somewhere inappropriate, like a funeral? It used to be Andrew. Dawn has lost enough of her filters that she might win now.
• Who's kinkier? We both said Andrew, which is probably because Dawn started from zero.
• Who's expanded more since we got married? Dawn, easily.
• Forget how thin the walls are? Dawn. There are people all over this country who heard more than they expected when they parked next to a big Brinkley.
• Get turned on by the other doing something non-sexual? We each said ourselves. Andrew gets turned on just looking at Dawn. Dawn gets turned on watching Andrew light a cigar or do handyman work around the camper.
• Come up with the best video ideas? We each said the other.
• Speed? Andrew, partly because Dawn almost never drives. She's been pulled over three times in her life, and both tickets were for speeding she didn't mean to do.
• Better cook? We each said ourselves, and we're both right. Andrew does the grilling, the smoking, the fish, the eggs, and the sourdough. Dawn does the creative cooking. We call her creations Dawn's Concoctions.

Dawn's cookbook

Speaking of Dawn's Concoctions, here's a fun one for anyone who made it this far.

Dawn's recipes lived everywhere: Instagram, Pinterest, her notes app, screenshots in her photos. She had about 1,300 recipes saved on Pinterest alone, and she'll be the first to admit she hasn't made anywhere near all of them. Too many options turns into overwhelm, and cooking from Pinterest meant scrolling up to the ingredients and back down to the steps over and over.

So one night we sat down and built her a cookbook app using Claude AI. Dawn had never done anything like this before. We imported all of her Pinterest recipes, and it pulls in screenshots and photos of printed recipes too, then puts everything in the same clean format with the font and look she picked. When it imports a recipe, it moves the amounts from the ingredient list into the steps, so step eight says "add the quarter cup of flour" instead of just "add the flour." She can tag recipes by ingredient, so when she wants something with ground beef and sweet potatoes, she types those in and sees every option.

It still needs a name. Dawn loves being creative in the kitchen, and she's the one who brings home all the new recipes. Now she has a place to keep them.

What actually makes it work

That man called us good people, and I understand why. From the outside, it looks like it would take saints to share this little space for two years without killing each other.

What it takes is two people who have stopped needing the world around them to be quiet, convenient, and under control before they're allowed to be okay.

Dawn crying in her chair while I make breakfast. Me finally admitting I should have stayed put instead of pushing through 300 miles on no sleep. Dawn lying awake at 3 AM and letting that be fine. A golf cart parade at ten at night and two people with earplugs, laughing about it. The camper just made all of it impossible to avoid.

Most of you reading this have plenty of rooms. Some of you have a whole floor between you and the person you married. And some of you are using that space the way people use the buffer of a workday: as a place to put things so they never have to be felt in the same room.

You don't need to move into 320 square feet to learn what we've learned. You just need to stop using distance to manage what's coming up in you. Meet yourself where you are, even with someone clinking pans five feet away. Say what you need without making them the problem. Let the things you can't control be the weather they are.

The room you've been looking for was never in the floor plan.

The book

The episodes are going to get a little more serious over the next few weeks, because the Infinite Devotion book comes out on November 10. It's done. The proof copies are on their way to me now. If you want to know the day it's out, go to infinitedevotion.com/book.

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