Can we travel together?

I was thinking the other day about the whole "make sure you can travel with them before you date them" adage and it got me thinking about what my travel partner must-haves are. (It's a similar list for friends, but I think friends have a lower expectation of how close you'll be while on the trip.)

1. Roll with the punches. After a lot of thought, this is king. Travel inevitably involves things going wrong. You want someone who's resourceful, organized, proactive and able to make the best of whatever situation you end up in. 
2. Emotional intelligence. Know yourself, help when you can, communicate clearly. On one of my first trips with my husband I remember saying, "I'm frustrated and angry right now and I'm going rage for 3 minutes and then I'll be absolutely fine again, so just go for a walk and come back when it's over." And likewise, I've also been the one handling my travel partner's meltdown. But if I'm always the one handling your meltdowns... NO. If you can't ever be caring or accommodating when I'm having a tough time... NO. If you become inconsolable and silent for hours (or days) from a travel setback... NO.
3. Vision of shared joy on the trip. More of an item zero thing here, but we should both find this trip better with other there... If only one of us does, the "wait, am I just an unpaid tour guide?" alarm should be going off in your head. What things do you want to do there specifically with this person? Knowing the answer to that will also help you plan your activities.
4. Eating together. Food drives so much of my travel bug that traveling with a picky eater is extremely difficult for me. I acknowledge pickiness is a continuum, remembering the time we were the guests of honor at a big Japanese meal and they offered us the eyeballs of the whole fish we'd ordered.
5. No being weird about money. I feel like I'm pretty good about "you get this one, I get the next one" while still taking account of any income disparity ("you buy breakfast and I'll buy dinner"). But if you've got an issue, just say so and I'll be chill about it. We can get the calculators (or Splitwise) out, and I promise you you're going to end up paying more than if we hadn't. Also, many countries (hello Germany and Japan) have a lot of cash-only businesses; you refusing to carry cash and instead complaining they don't take Apple Pay is giving "American Karen trying to pay for her tea with US Dollars in London" vibes... NO. 
6. Compatible day-/trip-flow levels. Some people really like having every minute planned, some want to have no plans at all. We need to be in some kind of agreement with that. I generally hate a heavily planned trip with lots of destinations, but I've done it when the situation warrants. Like in Guangzhou where we know no one and don't speak a word of Chinese. The food-driven tour we went on was a whirlwind but in a good way. 
7. Compatible together-time levels. The first time I traveled with my parents as an adult, we went to Europe for 3 weeks. It took us a bit of time and chafing to figure out that the ideal day was some kind of daytime activity and then dinner together, with the rest of the time apart just doing whatever we wanted. My husband and I could sleep in, they could get up early... We could go out to the gay bars after dinner, they'd sit in the square drinking wine and people watching... Trying spend the whole day together was not the move. 
8. Be a grown-up, cuz I'm not playing den mother. Keep track of your own damn passport, show up to important things on time, charge your phone, proactively do some legwork for the whole group, and fer feck's sake I speak German and we're in China, don't expect me to do all the talking when we're interacting with locals – you know as much Chinese as I do. 
9. Willing to put skin in the game early. The more people coming on a trip, the more difficult the trip cat-herding becomes. But even when it's just one other person, don't go charging hotels and tickets until you're certain the other(s) actually have the time off and the funds to go. The easiest way to deal with this is to make sure they've put down their own credit card for a plane ticket or a hotel or some part of the trip. On the flip side: be wary of the person who says "you can totally have one of the rooms in the giant VRBO house I've rented for Bear Week…" if they aren't asking you for cash pretty quickly, they might not have the house at all, or they might have invited two dozen friends for a 6 bedroom house and you're not going to know you've got no place to stay until it's too late to book alternatives.