It’s dark.

Your butt hurts.

The foam cushion of this chair is not thick enough to sustain 2 hours of uninterrupted sitting.

Especially when you’re locked in a battle of wills, unable to move for fear of breaking the spell.

When you’re young, in love, and at the movie theater, the only question on your mind is…

Is tonight the night we finally hold hands?

It’s been 30 minutes and so far you’ve moved your hand from the knee opposite your date to the knee closest to them. You glance down and see they’ve done the same. Still, a chasm exists.

You’re staring at the screen, but you’re not looking at it.

What movie are we watching?

The only plot that matters is the epic will-they, won’t-they you’re engaged in.

Did they move their hand again? Towards you, or further away?

You can’t look down again, it’s too risky. Too obvious.

Don’t be lame. Play it cool.

Your palm is sweating. Nothing you can do about that, now.

You slide your hand down your pant leg and on to the seat. It’s been nearly an hour. This is it, the point of no return.

I’m going for it.

You let go of the chair and with it your safety net. How long will you let your hand dangle in the chasm before you awkwardly backtrack into your own space?

Before you can answer your own question, you feel a warm, sweaty embrace.

Fingers lock and a burst of happiness rushes through your body as you release an hour’s worth of tension.

This is as good as it gets.

Not so different

Everyone remembers their first time holding hands with a childhood crush, but that ritual doesn’t end during childhood.

Adults with otherwise mature lives – jobs, car payments, mortgages, children from previous relationships – engage in strikingly similar hand-holding rituals as their junior high counterparts.

What is it about the first time you hold hands with a love interest that’s so special it requires an elaborate procedure?

Nothing.

At least, there’s nothing terribly special about holding hands. It’s the ritual surrounding the hand-holding that matters.

Returning to Rituals

Dr. Caitlin O’Connell is an animal scientist.

In her latest book Wild Rituals, she defines a ritual as “a specific act or series of acts that are performed in a precise manner and repeated often.”

She goes on, “While each section within the ritual in and of itself isn’t always meaningful, the total result is.”

Furthermore, Dr. O’Connell says ritualized actions are typically exaggerated versions of normal behaviors.

Consider elephants, her specialty.

Two elephants will often greet each other by placing their trunks in each other’s mouths. It’s something akin to a human handshake.

Except it’s quite a bit more dangerous, because their trunks are sensitive and the other elephant could bite down.

When they don’t?

Trust is formed.

That’s what our elaborate hand-holding ritual does. It builds trust and fosters connection.

We all discovered the power of rituals in our own way during the pandemic.

What We Tried

In the early days of isolation, many people developed routines that involved a mid-afternoon walk, an evening Zoom call with family, or weekly stay-at-home date nights.

Dr. O’Connell writes:

“[Rituals] became the anchors that grounded us during tragedy and that connected us to one another even across oceans.

Our frenzied, fast-moving world of places to go and people to see shrank to a short list.

Without constant distraction and endless plans, we sang from our balconies together, had socially distanced conversations with neighbors over the fence, gardened, joined online baking groups, and made sourdough bread, even saluting healthcare professionals with a chorus of sound every evening – all to participate in rituals of perseverance and hope.”

And that worked, for a while. But as the pandemic wore on it became increasingly obvious that we are not meant for isolation.

The Internet is a magnificent tool and it does many things well, but it is not nor will ever be a full-stop replacement for connection and community.

What Worked

I struggled with this in the dozens of workshops on virtual communication I ran for corporate teams, college and grad students in 2020-21.

As a human connection specialist, I found myself in a strange situation, teaching human principles via video conferencing software.

My most successful strategies were those designed to remove as much friction as possible, by introducing new rituals designed especially for remote work.

For example:

Zoom looks social because you see so many faces at once, but it’s really just broadcasting. One person talks while everyone else listens.

The technology isn’t set up for what happens during real conversations, when people cut each other off out of excitement (or rudeness), break off into little side conversations, and build energy together.

To solve this issue, I advocated passionately for smaller conference calls or breakout rooms. Reduce the amount of people on a call to less than 4 if at all possible, and make sure everyone in the room is pre-focused on a similar topic. Then ensure everyone gets a turn to be seen, heard, and feel valued for their contributions.

Other strategies involved training people to look at the camera, not at the screen, to simulate eye contact. This is simple, but not easy. Lack of eye contact is devastating to social relationships.

In Reclaiming Conversation, researcher Sherry Turkle describes the problem:

“Without eye contact, there is a persistent sense of disconnection and problems with empathy.

The parts of the brain that allow us to process another person’s feelings and intentions are activated by eye contact.

With all this to consider, what are we to make of the fact that when we have our phones out, our eyes are downward?

We’ve seen more and more research suggest that the always-on life erods our capacity for empathy.

Most dramatic to me is the study that found a 40 percent drop in empathy among college students in the past twenty years…”

It took a global pandemic to get people to realize this for themselves, but they have.

Loneliness, depression, and anxiety are through the roof since March 2020.

We may not have realized what we were losing in a world with both screens and regular life, but in a world with only screens?

We’re distraught.

What’s Next

It’s clear that rituals are a powerful antidote to loneliness, isolation, and anxiety. But as the world opens back up, will we remember the lessons of the pandemic?

I return to Dr. O’Connell:

“Rituals are a lifeline during a crisis, but at all times we need fulfilling rituals to avoid feeling disconnected and alone.

Even in this high-technology era, we remain inherently social animals, and what we seek is true connection in whatever form – with a stranger, with a neighbor, with colleagues, loved ones, and family.”

It was an absolute honor and joy to sit down with Caitlin on my podcast for an hour to discuss rituals and the lesson we can learn from the animal kingdom about connection and community, even if it’s just holding hands.

We also chatted about the bone conduction properties of elephants, the value of pausing, how important it is to travel if one can afford it, and how vastly different perspectives can make us feel more connected, rather than less.

Listen here or watch below:

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