Adventure is a State of Mind
Who doesn’t want to be closer to those they love? Who doesn’t want to deepen the friendships they have? Travel is one of the best, and most fun, ways to strengthen relationships.
Love Languages
It probably won’t surprise most of you that travel is my love language. Well, technically travel isn’t considered one of the official five love languages. My top love language is quality time, and my favorite way to do that is travel. So, I think it’s safe to say travel is my love language.
Even if you don’t share the same love language, travel is a powerful tool for strengthening your relationships with others. Whether it is with your partner, a cousin, an old friend, or a new friend, travel provides multiple opportunities for learning more about each other and growing closer through the experiences of exploring the world. It’s likely to happen even without consciously focusing on the relationship, but it helps to understand how and why you’re growing closer while you’re adventuring together.
Strengthening Our Bonds
Relationships are complex, so there are many different activities and experiences that have the potential to strengthen our bonds with others. Here are some of the ways that travel can deepen those relationships:
Getting to Know Each Other: Spending time with others, in any setting or situation, is how we get to know them. But travel can accelerate this process.
There are many reasons why each of us are motivated to travel. We learn about ourselves and those traveling with us during our travel adventures, whether or not that is our goal. This is because travel takes us out of our ordinary, daily routines. If you wake up every morning and brew yourself a cup of coffee before sitting down to read the news, you are unlikely to learn much about yourself because you can engage in that habit almost without thought. For good or bad, most of us spend a significant portion of our days in similar unconscious routines.
Don’t go through life, grow through life.
Eric Butterworth
When we are someplace unfamiliar, however, our normal, daily routines are useless. And it is outside of those comfortable routines that we begin to learn about ourselves. For example, the process of trying to find coffee may teach you how you handle problem-solving and frustrations before you’re fully caffeinated. Or trying coffee made in a different manner than you do at home may teach you more about what you like and don’t like.
And as you’re getting to know more about yourself as you travel, you and your travel companions are also learning things about each other. There is the potential to see your travel partner differently as they are thrown into situations unlike any you’ve seen them in before. And they’re seeing you in a different light, as well.
For example, maybe you and a friend regularly get together for lunch or to watch a movie, but you’ve never done anything together outside of your home town. Maybe the two of you decide to take a trip to Spain together. Neither of you speak much Spanish, and there are multiple occasions when you need to ask someone for directions or some other minor assistance. Maybe your friend who has tended to be the leader in choosing restaurants and movies at home feels unsure of herself when she does not speak the language and tends to hesitate and let you take the lead. And maybe you realize that it is actually fun to try to communicate in a different language, even if you make a fool of yourself, and you bravely approach complete strangers to ask for help.
Learning different aspects of ourselves and others helps us to see ourselves and others as more fully formed human beings. Most of us dislike being known only for part of who we are – “She’s the one who _________,” is a limiting statement. Knowing more about each other tends to deepen the relationship.
Communication: If you’ve ever traveled anywhere with anyone, you know how important communication is to the success of any travel adventure. Having a direct conversation about travel preferences and styles when planning your trip can prevent misunderstandings. And once you leave home, communication is key to adjusting when things don’t exactly go according to plan.
Whether we want it or not, travel provides us with numerous opportunities to practice our communication skills. Difficulties may arise from the beginning, depending on your style of researching and planning a trip. For example, are you a maximizer or a satisficer? What about your travel companion?
If you have different styles, the maximizer may become frustrated when the satisficer doesn’t want to spend hours researching hotel options. Communicating openly about expectations, however, can help you each modify your behavior and expectations and/or find a way to utilize each individual’s strengths.
Once you’re actually on your adventure, good communication becomes crucial in avoiding misunderstandings. It doesn’t do anyone any good to hide the fact that you’re exhausted and need to go to bed early, you’re starving, or you’re completely castled-out and would prefer to take a hike in the woods rather than visit yet another castle. Similarly, if you find something you’d like to do that wasn’t in the original plan, being open about stating what you want is far more effective than subtly hinting and then later complaining about something you wanted to do but didn’t get to.
Obviously, these are basic communication skills that are a part of any healthy relationship. What travel does is provide a low-stakes opportunity for practicing them and consequently improving your relationship. Why is travel a low-stakes opportunity as compared to non-travel life? Most travel adventures are expensive, but they don’t come close to the expense of some of our partnerships outside of travel. For example, when I was still working, my business partner, Melissa, and I bought an office building together. We also shared several international trips together. In all of these situations, we had to discuss and make decisions about how we wanted to spend our money and whose responsibility it was to do different things in the process. There was significantly less money involved in all of the travel decisions combined than there was in buying and maintaining the office. Our shared travel adventures, however, helped us to learn more about each other’s styles and priorities when making such decisions and gave us opportunities to practice negotiating our differences.
Conflict Resolution: This is actually part of communication, but it’s important enough to single it out. Being in a relationship with someone means, at least some of the time, managing disagreements. The word “conflict” sounds big and scary to some, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, practicing conflict resolution with small disagreements helps develop the necessary skills to handle larger conflicts when they do arise.
Again, travel provides us with many opportunities to practice. From the beginning when you’re planning where to go, you and your travel companions may disagree about certain things. Perhaps you both want to visit France, but one of you is picturing laying in the sun on a beach in the south and the other would much prefer to hike the snowy Alps. Or maybe you agree on the places you want to visit, but there is disagreement on how much time to spend in art museums versus visiting pubs and cafés. Experience with resolving these sorts of conflicts will make it much easier to resolve bigger conflicts that sometimes occur between friends, partners, and other family members.
Shared Novel Experiences: For many years, research has demonstrated that doing something new with a partner improves the quality of the relationship. In other words, doing something new together makes couples feel more positive about their relationship overall.
How does this work? Experiencing something new and different releases the neurotransmitter dopamine in our brains. Dopamine is often referred to as the “feel good” neurotransmitter since it’s associated with motivation, pleasure, and reward. Because one of the primary activities of our brains is looking for meaningful associations to make sense of the world, experiencing an increase in dopamine while sharing an activity with someone will result in associating the increased pleasure with that person. In other words, new experiences = dopamine = feeling good = good feelings connected to everyone associated with that experience.
Opportunities for Shared Support: Spending time with someone provides opportunities to be emotionally and physically supportive of each other. This is especially true when some of that time may include experiences that are slightly stressful or outside of your comfort zone.
As you might expect, having supportive relationships is associated with improved mental health, and travel provides many opportunities for you and your travel companions to support each other. Whether it is helping each other with large suitcases, sharing your stash of protein bars while waiting in an airport, or providing a listening ear while your travel partner thinks aloud about an upcoming life change, travel adventures are full of times you can support others or be supported yourself.
Obviously, there is no guarantee that those you are traveling with will be supportive, but hopefully you’re choosing to travel with family and friends who are. And if your current travel companions are not supportive, you’ve learned something from the experience and might want to choose someone different to travel with the next time!
Shared Memories: Stories connect us to others. Think about your siblings or childhood friends. What do you often do when you get together after a long absence? Tell stories from your past. And what happens at family reunions? We tell stories about family members who are there as well as about those who are no longer living. What is history, after all? Stories.
Stories help us to define the groups in which we belong and with whom we identify. In fact, one of the ways to help a group to become more welcoming to outsiders is to learn each other’s stories.
When we travel with others, one of the most meaningful souvenirs we bring home are the stories. Because they are shared stories, they strengthen the bond with our travel companions. The stories add an extra layer of meaning to our relationships with those who share those stories. For example, I was recently discussing a wine-tasting opportunity with my friend, Shelley, which reminded us both of our “wine breakfast” tasting in Domazan, France. Because of our shared experience, our discussion of other wine tastings had an extra layer of meaning (and laughter) to it.
Couples who have been together for decades frequently have a shared language of short-hand phrases related to years of shared memories. “Don’t forget to get that stuff at the store this time,” has a world of meaning to it that those outside the relationship can only guess at. Similarly, sharing travel adventures with friends and family often results in shared private jokes. Ask any of our family members who traveled to Greece with us this past summer about when you should eat baklava, and they will likely answer “on a Sunday” with a laugh. To get the humor, you had to be there.
Humor: Which brings us to humor and laughter. Snickering instead of bickering is one of the best things you can do to preserve a long-term romantic relationship. Travel, just like life, can be stressful at times. It also, however, can provide lots of opportunities for laughter. Sharing that laughter with family and friends is one of the ways to strengthen your bonds with those you love.
Being able to laugh at yourself and share that laughter with your travel companions creates the perfect environment to nurture stories and connection. Ask a group who has traveled together in the past to relate their favorite memories, and they are likely to tell stories of things that didn’t go as planned, but they’re also likely to smile and laugh while doing so.
Why It Matters
Most of the research on relationships is done on couples. No surprises there. The good news is that most of that research is also applicable to other adult relationships, such as friendships.
Regardless of whether we’re talking about romantic relationships, family relationships, or friendships, our relationships matter. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running and most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever done, concluded that the factor having the greatest impact on happiness is relationships. The study revealed, “close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.”
Relationships are also important to our physical health. In his TED Talk, the current study director, Dr. Robert Waldinger, explained that people’s level of satisfaction with their relationships at age 50 was a better predictor of physical health than their cholesterol levels were!
Conclusion
Strong, healthy relationships matter. Many of us can identify people we care about and would like to have a stronger bond with. Even if we are blessed with lots of positive relationships, it’s important to continue maintaining those bonds to keep them strong.
Travel is a powerful tool to strengthen our relationships. It provides novel experiences to learn about ourselves and others, opportunities to support each other, and chances to practice and develop good communication and conflict-resolution skills. Through travel, we also create shared memories, stories, and (hopefully) lots and lots of laughter.
Who would you like to be closer to in your life? Could you plan a travel adventure together to strengthen that relationship?
Author
