Why did we stop doing the one thing that made us feel alive together?

[From my diary]November, 11th 2022“On that mountain peak, I felt alive,” he said once, as we were going through photographs from our “good old days,” some time after we had decided to separate. We went for mountain hikes often when we first started dating. We actually met on a hike [with our common friends], and over the next few hikes we connected. We kept going out into nature almost every weekend that second summer, the first one after we moved in together. But then we stopped. I put on weight and hated myself. I am not sure if it was a symptom of the alienation or something that accelerated it.Standing next to something vast, out in nature, gives people a rush of feeling alive, and doing it beside someone tends to pull the two of them closer. Our hikes did that for us. Then we stopped going. For a long time I have wondered whether giving it up was a sign that we as a couple were already fading, or one of the things that made us fade. My best guess is that it was both. When the hikes stopped, so did the main thing that kept us feeling alive next to each other.Marvelling together“Feeling alive on the mountain” is not only a popular poetic expression; it is a scientifically grounded concept. Dacher Keltner has spent years studying awe, the feeling that comes over people in front of something vast: a mountain range, a canyon, a sky full of stars, an ocean, a desert, or even Manhattan. Awe has a few particular effects on us. It shrinks the self, but not in a negative way; mostly it feels like relief. After being close to something huge, people come away with a stronger sense of being alive. Those giant things tend to pull us closer to one another, leaving us more generous and more inclined to belong to something.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerMy ex-husband and I were, without ever realizing it, awe-seekers together. We met on a hike. The early part of us was built out of weekends in the mountains, the two of us small under something enormous, and that is not a small way to fall in love.Keltner has written about this from his own life. He and his brother were awe-seekers too, and when his brother died, he found that much of the feeling had been bound up in the person he shared it with.I knew that feeling all too well. Shortly after the divorce I started going to the mountains regularly, and I kept catching myself looking for the guy I had met back then, the one I used to hike with.He was nowhere to be found.The symptom and the causeI still cannot say exactly whether the hikes ending was a symptom of the trouble between us or one of its causes.The research does not pick a side either. There is a long line of studies, going back to the sociologist Dennis Orthner in the 1970s, on what shared activity does for a couple. Couples who do involving things together tend to be closer and more content, and couples who drift into doing everything apart tend not to be. The study that fits my question best came later. Crawford and his colleagues followed married couples for more than a decade and found that shared activity and marital happiness move together, each one a cause and a consequence of the other.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerThat is the loop I could feel too. We hiked less because something was cooling, and it cooled faster because we hiked less. There was no clean line where the one turned into the other. They fed each other until the weekends were empty.The same research adds one condition worth keeping. Shared activity only helps when both people actually want to be there. Ours was that kind. We both loved it, which is probably part of why losing it took so much with it.The weaker oneI did love hiking. But I was usually the weaker one, and I would fall behind, and falling behind made me feel less like a partner in the thing than like the one slowing it down. There is a reason for why that stings. Abraham Tesser’s self-evaluation maintenance model describes what happens when someone close outdoes a person at something that matters to them: the nearer the two are, the more it threatens how that person feels about themselves. Being outpaced by a stranger on a trail would have meant nothing to me. Being outpaced by the man walking beside me, over and over, was a different kind of ache. Had it been his skill at something I had no stake in, I could simply have been proud of him; the same model says a talent in a domain a person does not care about becomes a gift instead of a threat. But keeping up mattered to me. So instead of sharing in his strength, I measured myself against it, and came up short every weekend.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerAnd not all of it was about him. A slope that matched his fitness gave him the easy, absorbed state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow, which arrives when the challenge is matched by the ability to meet it. The same slope outran my fitness, so it gave me strain instead. Same mountain, different fit.When the marvelling stoppedSomewhere in all of that, the shared marvelling stopped too. Not only the hikes, but the thing the hikes were for: standing together above the clouds, dwarfed by the same view. With nothing to look at, the mirror I used to pass without a glance became something I studied, and did not much like, as I also put on weight. What it doesn’t meanIt does not mean the weight was why he stopped loving me, or why I stopped feeling loved. I kept telling myself the opposite, because it was an easy explanation, deeply rooted in the mainstream Western culture.But bodies do change in every long relationship.Regarding this, there is another interesting finding in the awe research.Standing in front of something vast shrinks the sense of self, and it even shrinks how people judge their own bodies to be. On the mountain I was small in the good way, next to something enormous, and my size was nowhere in my thoughts. It was afterward, in the emptied weekends with nothing vast to stand under, nothing left to look at but my refleciton in the mirror, that my attention fell back onto myself, and I turned it into something to dislike. The self-hatred did not come from being overweighted (or not as tiny as before).It came from losing something that previously made other problems look unimportant: a good, exhausting hike that used to knock all dark thoughts and frustration out of my head.Coming back downI have kept going back. For a while I told myself it was for the exercise, or the quiet, but that was never the real reason. I went up to look for him, and for the two of us we used to be up there.Anthropologists — e.g., Arnold van Gennep — called it a rite of passage: the pilgrim leaves the ordinary world, climbs into somewhere set apart, and comes back down into it changed. People have walked that shape up sacred mountains for centuries, in the name of their religion. My solo hikes were a small, private version of the same thing: A pilgrimage of grief.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerI never found him up there. I did not really expect to. What I found, over a lot of weekends, was that I could climb up carrying him and come back down without him, and be all right.I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS app for journaling through difficult moments.Thank you for reading Divorced me! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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