“Over the life of a climber, good romantic partners are a dime a dozen, but a good climbing partner is worth their weight in totems.” – Said some dude around the campfire one night that probably didn’t have very many dimes because he certainly never had that many romantic partners.

I guess you can call it not shitting where you eat, or not mixing business with pleasure. It’s a bit murkier than that for me because my long term climbing partners are always people that I’m emotionally connected with, either previous to climbing with them, or within a few outings once we realize we’re compatible.

This makes sense as they’re people that you trust your life with, share your breakdowns and your triumphs with, people who you ask questions about what should be done next and actually listen to them. You’re out with them as a partnership and every weak link brings the whole team down. Those long term partners are the ones where the weak links either never existed or got hammered out through a series of hammer blows during the red hot fire of freaking the fuck out on a climb together.

For me, it’s deeper than a romantic partnership where I want to support the other person in living their life in the way that maximizes their experience and supports their path towards whatever their ideal self is. As awesome as that is to do, a non-climbing partner is not normally someone that I can set fire to the world around me just to see if I’ll come out unscathed, which is basically what climbing hard is, and there’s something missing from that.

In a climbing partnership, you’re (literally) tied together by your shared goal, my partner’s strength becomes my own and my weaknesses become my partners. I can’t think of anything truly more intimate than that.

So obviously mixing relationships with climbing is the way to go then, right? Become that perfectly mixed ball of danger and rebirth every time you survive the firestorm of a route, a fight, or a road trip to see the family. Like all amazing things, they tend not to fizzle out, but crumble like the first pitch of the Atlantic Wall or any ice pillar video that passes through my social media feed. This is actually sometimes preferable because the pain can be shut away and you go out climbing with your other climbing partners (who no doubt are bitter at you because of the recent lack of climbing outings as you and your now-missing partner coalesced into a single route-devouring machine) and flail the pain away.

The problem is what do you do when the relationship is gone but the climbing partnership remains? Go out climbing? With the person who you’re trying desperately to not cry about whenever there’s a lull in the workday? As always, leading would be fine because there’s nothing but the moves of the route while on the sharp end, but the belays? The sitting there and dealing with the pain that rises with each moment of pride at their climbing? Feels somehow less than healing.

And what about the decoupling of various aspects of an emotional romantic relationship? The trusting in aspects of the relationship that are now gone and how the breaking of that trust is seared into your brain and begins to have an effect upon the things you want to still trust out on the rock, ice, or wall. It’s hard to admit how much implicit assumed trust is apparent in a climbing relationship until the breakdown of a romantic relationship brings those into high focus.

This was one of those posts that I had hoped would build itself into a conclusion that would be at least an idea if not a “full-on learned life lesson that we all should take note of,” but alas it is not.

I don’t know what the way forward is. No doubt I will bumble through different perspectives of the “best” thing to do, fail, flail, and reset and try again. Maybe a quick list of what the options could be?

– Climb with that partner because climbing is king and your emotions are secondary so they should just stay at home and eat 7-up cake.

– Take a break from climbing with your partner until things settle down inside you and tentatively step back into it as if you’re meeting again for the first time. Set limits and stick to them because remember kids, the person you should trust least in matters of a hurt heart is yourself.

– Take a break from climbing altogether (This one sounded stupid even before I thought it, let alone typed it)

– Focus upon roped soloing climbs so that you can have all the breakdowns and feelings of abandonment that you want without having to subject one of your other partners of this. (free soloing should be left for less emotionally laden times)

– Climb with that partner in the gym but not on bigger outdoor objectives where a car ride, an approach, a descent, a multipitch route could set the groundwork for a fantastic fireworks show of silence.

– A combination of all of them.

– A combination of none of them

Somehow that didn’t help at all and if anything brought me further away from any feeling of “ah ha!” but life is that way more often than not. I’m constantly amazed that even though I know I can stand on top of a massive climb that took everything out of me and feel nothing, I somehow believe that placing everything into words will help. If anything I see less of what I wrote and more of what I could have written in addition, to better dig into these things. The journey of a thousand steps takes a few steps to realize it’s actually ten thousand steps. How much closer were you before you took those first steps? I mean, perceptively?

I guess I can leave you with this. Knowing now, what I know about how I’m feeling now, would I go back and do anything differently?

No. Not even a little. There’s an honor in going up on a climb and bailing, so there should be an honor in having to bail from a romantic partnership…

right?