This week my husband and I went on a solo anniversary trip to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree and decided to get WAY outside our comfort zone. I gotta tell you it felt fucking fabulous.
I think a lot about what makes a long marriage work and succeed and thrive. I’ve written a book about it. I’ve created a podcast about it.
I subject Nick Aster to strange personality tests and trust exercises. I want to win at this marriage thing.
One of the things I learned while writing How to Be Married was that newness and adventure can help thicken the glue between couples, especially as you get stuck in routines involving kids and school runs and caring for aging parents.
Scientists have long insisted that maintaining novelty in a marriage contributes to a couple’s general well-being, their happiness, and the success of the partnership. New experiences activate the brain’s reward system, flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine, the same chemicals that are released in the brain in the early throes of romantic love (and also incidentally when you do a lot of cocaine). Continuing to adventure and try new things helps remind a couple of the feelings that made them fall in love in the first place.
I talk to a lot of couples about how their ennui has led to open marriages and polyamory (I got a lot of friends in Brooklyn). I hear their rationales and I am always of the mind that you should do you, but it’s just not for me. I’m usually too tired for date nights and sex with the person I’m married to and I do not have a kink for juggling other people’s schedules.
We’d have to try something besides sex with other people.
So while we were in Joshua Tree (celebrating our ninth wedding anniversary in the same national park where we had our second date) I suggested we hire a rock climbing guide (we used Joshua Tree Guides). Now Nick Aster used to be a very adept rock climber in the days before marriage and kids where he had all the time in the world to pick up the ladies at the Mission Cliffs climbing gym in San Francisco. I climbed a few times with him when we first started dating but I have never ever been climbing outdoors. And poor Nick hasn’t set foot in a climbing gyn since we started breeding.
This was both and adventure and a way to help Nick remember something he used to love.
Also I head that rock climbing is an excellent butt workout and I could use some glutey love.
We started the day bright and early (with a bit of a hangover to be honest after a surprise wine tasting the night before). Our guide Ty was a delight and he started us out on a fifty foot rock that wasn’t all that daunting but still kicked my ass.
Nick on the other hand flew up it and I gotta say that it’s incredibly sexy to see your spouse do something they love that they are very, very good at.
I am not very, very good at rock climbing, but I don’t care. I looked at it the same way I look at skiing. I will not look beautiful or practiced doing it, but I will get the job done and enjoy myself.
Next up Ty decided to take us over to something a little more challenging, 100 feet in the air challenging. Let me reiterate that I am not a person who has climbed on rocks outside of a fancy gym before. But I got all of the encouragement from my sweet husband and our nice guide and I love positive reinforcement.
Look at this video of me!
Nick Aster and I were giddy from adventure endorphins. These are a very real thing. And even though none of this was new to him, this place and these climbs and doing them with his wife were all new and novel and Joshua Tree is a place that truly does inspire all of the awe.
Our last climb was the trickiest. Ty was going to be the lead climber and then belay us from above on the top of Intersection Rock, a 150 foot monzonite monolith that many rock climbers consider the birthplace of climbing in Joshua Tree. We would be totally exposed with nothing but air beneath us AND then repel down the rock face ourselves. I almost chickened out my friends. Ty asked if I would be demoralized if I didn’t complete the challenge.
“No,” I told him. “I’m an intensely secure person.”
But I kept going.
It was so hard and belaying over the side of a sheer drop nearly made me pee my pants! But I loved it. And I loved doing it with Nick.
I’m not saying we are gonna scale cliffs every day (I’m a little beat up to be honest) but there’s something to this adventure thing. Researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook once recruited fifty-three middle-aged couples to test this theory. One group was sent out on a pleasant but run-of-the-mill date night once a week. The second was sent off to do something completely new and “exciting.” The couples who engaged in the “exciting” evening showed a much greater increase in marital satisfaction than the group that simply had a “pleasant” date night.
So maybe try something slightly unpleasant and new and scary once in awhile.
I love this!! Eager to hear other readers share some ideas for out of the box dates
Karaoke dates are really fun! I enjoy the adrenaline rush of singing in front of a new crowd and my husband and I met at karaoke night so it’s fun for both of us. He claims to like hiking but we haven’t done it much so he tells me we are going to start going more now that our kids are in elementary school and we have several state parks near us. His parents have a mountain house and there’s a small waterfall we go to now and get a little braver at venturing further every time.