Skydiving for Couples

Let’s start here: Diamonds are nobody’s best friend. True story.

Do we have your attention? Cool. Let’s look at it this way: What’s the number-one reason that most people purchase expensive trinkets for their soulmate? They’re looking to impress them. Sure, the goal is generally to impress them with how much they’re loved, but the choice of a shiny bauble is all about the initial “wow” factor. No? And a diamond seems like it’ll last a good, long time.

We’re here to tell you that the most lasting, most valuable and most “wow”-worthy gift you can give to your partner is a gift that’s shared. And that skydiving – surprise! – is the best of the lot.

Assume that a physical object will make more of an impression on your paramour than a one-time experience? That’s is an easy mistake to make. The logic usually goes that something you can hold in your hand will last longer than a few minutes. That seems like a surer bet than an experience that happens once before being filed away in memory. Somewhat unexpectedly, Recent research has proven that assumption completely wrong.

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According to Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has been reviewing the data on money and happiness for more than two decades, it comes down to a single phenomenon: adaptation.

“We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed,” Gilovich explains, “But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them.” That has an unfortunate consequence: the ring that embodied ‘diamonds are forever’ when you picked it up at the shop quickly becomes part of the background noise of your lover’s daily life. Darnit.

When we’re talking about the difference in emotional framing between a “thing” gift and a “doing” gift, it’s important to think about how much happiness each delivers. Several of Gilovich’s psychological studies delve into that. It involves something called the “Easterlin paradox”. What the paradox describes is that a “thing” gift does net some subjective experience of happiness, but there’s a ceiling. Adaptation kicks in. A “new normal” is established. The thing gets a little dirty; a little shabby; a little irritating to keep track of. And happiness goes down. With experiential purchases, that doesn’t happen. Cool, huh? Receipients of “doing” gifts actually stated that their satisfaction with the experiences they spent that hard-earned money on actually went up.

Counterintuitive? Sure. But scientific as all-get-out. Fer sure.

So now let’s stop talking about skydiving as a gift and let’s talk about skydiving as a shared experience. Skydiving for couples. That’s what you’re here for, anyway, in’ntit?

Another key reason that experiences beat out stuff in the gifting department is that they pretty-much have to be shared to be valuable. Doing something on your own is nice, but it doesn’t have the emotional sticking power of sharing that moment with a loved one. Shared experiences connect to the people around us, and – if that experience is as landmark as, say, making a first time tandem skydive – they create an unbreakable bond.

“We consume experiences directly with other people,” explains Dr. Gilovich. “They’re part of the stories that we tell to one another.”

The upshot? Skydiving for couples is the experience of a love-of-your-lifetime. It’s the best way to next-level your relationship. We dare you to consider making skydiving part of your shared love story!