Relational Glue: The Power of Shared Experience

People, whose relationships beat the odds and hold strong over time, have stumbled upon one of life’s grand secrets.

Relationships need glue.  And one of the strongest glues available are shared experiences.

On one level, it sounds like common sense.  Attend to a relationship, and it will thrive.   Husbands, plan regular dates for your wife, and marriage will feel more and more like that first year.  Parents, make time for your kids and watch how their eyes light up.  Long distance friends, Skype one another more often and the miles between you will actually shrink.  And mentors, make memories with your youth to set a foundation for friendship that will carry you into the days when you both have grey hair.

My UrbanLife adult volunteer team engaged in a powerful, shared experience last night. We dyed Easter eggs together.   How can an experience, fueled by vinegar, a dozen eggs and a .99 cent package of dye tablets be characterized as powerful?

 

This is how simple, yet complex, it gets:

Attention leads to connection.  For a portion of the night, we all attended to the same activity.  Engaging in a shared experience together communicates that, at least in the moment: I AM HERE WITH YOU.  Additionally, shared experiences provide opportunities to establish common ground quickly.  Conversation that might be challenging in neutral space, becomes easy for both parties.  Simply describing what is going on in front of you fills any potentially awkward space.

On a biological level, we connected. As we shared an experience, our physiology reinforced our connection. It has happened from the beginning of our lives. Babies’ heartbeats begin to mimic the rhythm of their caregivers, when resting in their arms.  Breathing rates become more similar.  And at the cellular level, Mirror neurons take in information and fire subconsciously, allowing us to interpret one another’s positive body language and mimic it back.  In the eye contact and posture, a fly-on-the-wall would have certainly described our group as connected last night.

On an emotional level, we connected.  Volunteers experienced surprise when they walked into a training meeting, only to see that we were dying eggs.   A couple of them possibly felt low-level anxiety because this was a new activity to them. We all laughed when Ricardo dropped and cracked one of the eggs.  And we lamented the fact that we would not be able to eat the hard boiled eggs later, because I had left them out too long.   Most of these emotions were shared, in identical time and space. 

We created a positive memory. Memory is anchored both in our emotions and in our bodies.  On a basic level, successful and thriving relationships involve amassing a greater percentage of positive and reinforcing experiences than negative or neutral ones.   While, dying eggs may not have been the highlight of my leader’s month, it was definitely positive.  Because it was, and because it reinforced learning of valuable skills that night, my bet is that they will be back for the next gathering.

Shared experiences are like relational glue.