What creates bonds

I never come back from travelling unchanged, even to a place as insignificant as Trois-Rivières. Last week proved remarkably insightful for me. The conference was a glorious success. Lesson number one: the leader of the conference actually gives the tone to the conference. A stressed out president conveys the stress to the organizing committee, the committee looks and acts stressed and the participants feel it too. This year, there was no stress flowing down from the top and the conference went smoothly, happily and joyfully. In my endless analysis of the styles and types of leadership, I learned a lot there. I suddenly realized that the stress of the preceding years was not indispensable, that the task could be just as successfully completed without the panic mode.

Lesson number two, which I will use if I’m ever again in a relationship: shared experience is what makes a relationship precious; the things you go through together, you experience together, especially if it is unusual, or hard, or emotional. A bond forms between humans under particular circumstances that is just stronger than any other. Hence the feeling that soldiers develop and that they forever search again in civil life afterwards. I think what will make a relationship strong and special is not the 101 ordinary mornings when you woke up together, it’s the time you braved you fears together and went skydiving, it’s the morning you got lost in the Hawaiian brush and walked for four hours before you found your way again, it’s when the dog died and you both cried so hard.
So what I learned this week is that for a couple to build strength, the unusual experiences must be shared. If they are lived apart, I believe the relationship will become that much weaker.
This would appear to contradict a prior finding of mine, that happy, healthy couples were the ones who were careful to maintain an individual life, with friends and hobbies not necessarily shared by the significant other. So I'll ponder about that and I'll get back to you. Then again, I'm not uncomfortable with two opposite theories being true at once. Welcome to quantum physics.

What else did I find out? A lot, but it will come out little by little. I rushed this one just because I had a panting public that was pressuring me (oh the slavery...)