I’m sure somewhere a file kept on me during kindergarten reads, “Does not share with others.” With shame, I remember a selfish moment of gobbling down a Three Musketeers bar after my mother told me to share it with my friends. In school, whenever we did a group project, I bossed everyone around and took over all the work so that the project would be done “right.”

Even as a professor, I’m mostly on my own. I plan my syllabi, lecture, lead discussions, and grade by myself. Sure I have a department chair, dean, and chancellor to answer to, but they’re generally not overseeing my every move, and I like that.

Hmmm….no wonder I’ve been single for so long.

So if someone told me that this summer’s greatest adventure would involve me, my boyfriend Jacek, and his giant cooler of Polish sausage crammed into my new Mini Cooper, I would have guffawed mightily.

Jacek and I have been dating for over a year now, so we decided to put our relationship to the test by taking it on the road. Both he and I have family on the east coast that we hadn’t seen for several months. I had ordered my Mini to be picked up in North Carolina and Jacek had ordered his sausage in Toronto.

The plan was to drive to Virginia to see my parents and then drive to North Carolina to trade in my current car for the Mini. Then we’d motor on up to New York, visit Jacek’s family in Buffalo, pick up the meat in Toronto, and head back west.

Ah, the best laid plans.

On the last day of our trip east, my car’s engine started squeaking and smelling of burnt rubber. The next day, the car’s air conditioning died, but in all other respects, except for the cracked side mirror, the chipped windshield, the broken front seatbelt, and the fact that it had been declared a total loss at one time, the car was in great shape.

More nerve wracking than my old beater car making it another hundred-odd miles to the Mini dealership was the fact that I was bringing a boy home to meet my parents for the first time in seventeen years. Questions raced through my mind: Would my parents like Jacek? Would he like them? Would my parents’ birds crap on him and scare him off?

The answers to those questions are yes, yes, and thankfully, no. Everyone got along like peas and carrots (as Forrest Gump would say), and my folks and I introduced Jacek to the wide world of bluegrass and grits.

As it turned out, my Mini was stuck on a port in Charleston, South Carolina and wouldn’t be available to be picked up for another week, so we traveled north in my mom’s car to pick up Jacek’s order of sausage in Toronto.

As we spent more and more time on the road north, I noticed I was willing to share items I had been previously unwilling to share. At first, I offered to share my toothpaste to save packing space. Soon after, I noticed that we were drinking from the same water bottle in the car, and I wasn’t even checking the bottle for goobers. At dinner, I’d remove all the offending items (olives, mushrooms, onions, and any vegetable from the squash family) from my entrée and place them on Jacek’s plate to be devoured. Granted, it’s not much of a sacrifice to share something I don’t like anyway, but it felt good to give him something he liked. We arrived in New York in good humor.

Except for the Midwest and Western states, I’d never been farther north than the Mason-Dixon line in the U.S. I expected gruff people and good pizza and wasn’t disappointed on either account.

When I took a photo of Jacek’s childhood home in Buffalo, the current owner appeared on the scene to yell at us. I’m not exactly sure what he expected us to do with the photo (I was prepared to guilt the guy into submission by telling him about Jacek’s 85-year-old mother who wanted to see how the house was doing), but the owner finally backed off after a few minutes.

Later, after piling the olives off my white pie from Fat Man’s Pizza onto Jacek’s plate, I realized that genuine sharing in any relationship involves a kind of protectiveness that is both selfless and selfish. At the moment of confrontation between Jacek and the homeowner, I wanted to protect him both for his own sake and for mine because I knew that as long as he was around, I was protected too.

And that’s a tough lesson for an independent-minded, non-sharing person like me.

Thankfully, by the time we picked up the Mini Cooper, Jacek and I had shared so much that we didn’t mind the close quarters of the Mini for the three day trip back to Montana. We knew instinctively when the other was hungry or needed to make a pit stop. I really enjoyed this level of intimacy (even beyond letting myself fart in front of him).

Most importantly, I enjoyed learning to share. I, a fifteen-year veteran vegetarian, allowed several pounds of frozen pork to share my new Mini’s cargo space with my matching LL Bean luggage. And, incredibly (to me), I let Jacek drive the new car. Even though I clung for dear life as we curved around Montana’s mountains, I knew I was safe.