Social Interaction
My wife gave me a favourite T-shirt. It says, “You Read My Shirt, That’s Enough Social Interaction for One Day.” It describes me to a tee (pun intended). I’d rather be off on my own – running, for instance – than trapped at a dinner table with two couples, strangers I don’t know.
My wife and I recently returned from a cruise. As she booked the trip, I couldn’t think of anything more dreadful than being confined on a vessel with everyone but my wife a stranger. But I agreed to accompany her. Our cruise was in the Galapagos Islands on a 100-passenger ship, a small vessel by cruise ship standards. And, full disclosure, we sailed with Celebrity Cruises. They’re a company known for offering a premium experience. We had a day’s excursion in Quito, Ecuador, before the cruise began. That’s perhaps where the genius of Celebrity Cruises started on our trip, and the spark ignited. The 100 passengers toured Quito in small groups, each with a guide and driver on a motorcoach specifically for their group. After obtaining our numbers and mingling with other passengers in the same group, we noticed that we’d been grouped with fellow Canadians or expatriates.
Throughout the day, dinner that evening, and travel to the islands the next day, we began to establish a natural, friendly relationship with two other couples: one older and one younger. By dinner of the first night on the ship, we’d staked out a table and ensured the six of us were together for each of our meals. On excursions off the ship, we arranged to be in the same tenders when we did the same options. As the week progressed, the bond within “our gang” grew stronger. As the cruise neared its end, we talked about what we’d do in two years. On departure day, I admit to being quite sad to say goodbye to our four friends.
How do I account for why we developed such a friendly relationship so quickly? Humour. It’s fascinating what happens with laughter in a social setting. An oft-cited finding from a 2004 article in “Current Directions in Psychological Science” by Psychology professor Robert Provine, PhD, is that laughter is 30 times more frequent in social situations than in solitary ones. Early on, my wife entertained us with anecdotes from our early years of travel, many of her stories from the holidays when we toured on a tandem bicycle. She had the two couples in stitches. We got to the point where we’d tease one another good-naturedly. We shared a lot of laughs in our short voyage together.
Time will tell whether we meet up again on a future cruise with our four friends. Regardless, the experience of our comradeship on the Galapagos Islands cruise was something that enhanced our experience and made the trip that much more special.
