Two Bathrooms

The bathroom was barely big enough for both of us. My wife and I were brushing our teeth at the same time before going to bed.

She smiled. I smiled back. There was a lightness between us, a flirtation that felt both familiar and distant, like hearing a song I hadn't realized I'd stopped playing. We used to do this every night. The closeness hadn't required effort. It had only required being in the same small room.

Back home in Lisbon, we don't get to share a bathroom anymore.

Our apartment has many bathrooms. The main one, connected to our bedroom, has two sinks. For the first few months after we moved in together, we used it the way it was designed. Side by side in the morning. Her products on the left, mine on the right. The ordinary choreography of two people getting ready in the same small room.

Then I started waking up earlier. My mornings shifted toward five AM, sometimes earlier, and my partner was still deep in sleep at that hour. Running water, the electric toothbrush, the cabinet opening and closing. I didn't want to be the reason she woke up. So I started brushing my teeth in the second bathroom, the one connected to the room we'd turned into a wellness space where I do morning yoga and meditation.

It made sense. It was considerate. It was practical.

At first, just a toothbrush and toothpaste lived in there. A small outpost. Then the face wash migrated over. Then the shaver. Then the face cream, the sunscreen, the vitamin C lotion. Eye drops appeared on the shelf one morning. A nasal spray. A hairbrush. Hand towels, folded neatly, that I don't remember buying.

Some items I moved. Some my partner placed there, quietly, without discussion. As if the apartment itself was deciding. Over six months, what started as a single toothbrush became a fully stocked second life, a bathroom that no longer felt borrowed but always mine.

The thing is, it works. We operate on different schedules, different rhythms. My wife's standard for cleanliness runs a few notches above mine, something she would confirm without hesitation. Two bathrooms means fewer moments of friction, fewer small frustrations over a wet counter or a towel left somewhere it shouldn't be. The logistics of our mornings got smoother. The system became efficient.

And something else happened that neither of us planned for. The flirting stopped. Not the big kind, not affection or love or closeness in the ways that matter most. But the small, ambient kind. The bumping into each other at the sink. The catching her eye in the mirror while she's doing her skincare routine. The playful argument about counter space. Those unscripted moments that happen only because two people are standing in a small room at the same time, doing ordinary things.

I miss it. I'm not sure I miss it enough to move everything back. But I miss it.

We travel often, my partner and I. Over the past year, over fifteen countries together. Hotels give you one bathroom, usually with one sink. There's no system to optimize, no second room to retreat into. The proximity is built into the architecture. That night in the hotel, the flirtation that surfaced so easily, it wasn't something we'd lost. It was something we'd designed out of our daily life, one reasonable decision at a time.

On that same trip, sitting in a coffee shop one afternoon, I noticed something. Every table around us was occupied, but the room was almost silent. Nearly everyone was wearing headphones. Laptops open, worlds closed. Two people sat across from each other at the table beside ours, both plugged in, both somewhere else entirely.

There's a difference between a coffee shop and a restaurant that I hadn't fully appreciated before. At a restaurant, you hear the couple next to you debating where to go on holiday. You overhear a birthday toast, a disagreement about the bill, a laugh that pulls you out of your own conversation for a moment. The ambient texture of other lives becomes part of your experience. At a coffee shop now, that texture has been engineered away. Everyone has curated their own private auditory world, and the room full of people feels emptier than a room with nobody in it.

When did we start treating proximity as a problem to solve?

The pattern is everywhere once you start looking. Noise-cancelling headphones that seal you inside yourself on a crowded train. Curated social feeds that show you only what already confirms your thinking. Grocery delivery so you never have to navigate the awkward dance of the checkout line. Separate bathrooms so you never have to negotiate the counter. Each one, individually, makes perfect sense. Each one removes a small friction. And each one takes with it some unplanned moment that could only have happened because two lives were briefly, inconveniently close.

The things we optimize away are often the things we can't get back on purpose. Flirtation at the sink doesn't work if you schedule it. Overhearing a stranger's conversation loses its magic if you seek it out. The value was in the accident, in the unplanned collision of two people existing in the same space without an agenda.

I think about our apartment, those two bathrooms, and I see a version of something much larger. The slow, sensible removal of every rough edge from daily life until the surface is perfectly smooth and strangely hollow. Nobody chose this. I didn't sit down one morning and decide to stop sharing a bathroom with my wife. A toothbrush moved. Then a face wash. Then everything else followed, one reasonable decision at a time, until the distance was simply there.

My partner and I are closer than we've ever been. The love is deeper, the partnership stronger, the daily life more harmonious. Two bathrooms didn't weaken anything important. But they did remove something small and warm that only existed because of friction, because of inconvenience, because of being in each other's way.

We come home from trips and return to our separate routines. She goes to her bathroom, I go to mine. The apartment is quiet and organized and calm. And sometimes, brushing my teeth alone in the second bathroom at five in the morning, I catch my own eye in the mirror and notice there's no one smiling back.