Interesting views there Wendy, I can certainly relate to the "you are most likely to get emotional" ....yes, I do feel more tempted to 'give up' and instead be hugged, comforted and encouraged when things get tough in his presence, but yeah it also means we feel we can very bluntly and directly say what we feel/think when mistakes are made, and anyone familiar with such situation, emotions do tend to get quite magnified in the mountains.
But there are some positives....my boyfriend and I have been climbing together since 1998, luckly for us we climb similar grades and we're not overly competitive with eachother, but that doesn't really mean we get complacent and don't progress/challenge ourselves - the 'who gets to lead' situation hasn't really been an issue for us, as I seem to be more confident on some terrain (slabs, snow, corners etc) and he seems more confident in other situations (cracks, o'hangs, steep faces), so we look at it as 'complementary' set of skills. But when we both see a line that we both want to lead, we keep it fairly civil when choosing the leader ;-) ....but what I do like about this climbing partnership the most, is that we've come to really know and understand how eachother climbs and what that climber might be thinking to some extent and so we can often fairly accurately predict a situation and act upon it without us having to say much at all - things just flow. I can always tell when is not my partner belaying me on a climb for example.
I have not really climbed with other females, I sometimes wonder what that's like - would that improve my climbing to some extent? dunno... |