B minor

Travel forms tight bonds among people. A passing thought crossed my mind recently:  I became close (or much closer) with many of my really good friends because of a shared travel experience. It may seem like a pretty obvious thought. And I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to some pretty amazing places in my life. (The experience isn’t limited to friends. I also realized I became a lot closer with colleagues after traveling together, too.)

This yarn of thought then continued unraveling. I began to wonder about life 150 years ago, and what it was then that made people form tight bonds. If the whole escapade of flight and cross country/continent leisure travel wasn’t possible, what was it that formed lasting relationships?

Travel seems to work this way for a number of reasons:

1. shared experience – doing anything together provides opportunity to reminisce forever
2. prolonged experience – enduring 2+ days of nonstop anything will have an effect
3. close quarters – it’s hard to disconnect / find alone time while traveling
4. no privacy – it’s hard to pretend to be anything other than what you are when all of the above are happening

It’s hard to replicate these conditions in the average day-to-day, so how do we form the tight bonds (the incredible relationships) that are borne out of incredible adventure in our daily lives? Can we?

(footnote: this is a running theme for me – trying to connect the dots on why people become friends with some people and not with others. expect more on this subject later. also i looked briefly for other writing on the psychology of travel, but didn’t find anything compelling. let me know if you do.)