Deep Sea Lovin’
There are a great many similarities between scuba-diving and a relationship, indeed, even being in love. They both seem like straight forward things: you put on the rubber, the thing goes in the mouth, you try not to swallow too much and in the end everyone has to dry off-and that’s just the diving. With a relationship: you meet a girl, you kiss her and you’re in love. Right? Well actually they’re both a bit more complicated than that, and the truth is you don’t know how deep the water is until you jump in.
Allow me to explain…
I once met a scientist by the name of Luke McGuinness and he explained Nitrogen sickness to me. It’s not that Nitrogen makes you sick, at least not normally. Assuming that you’re not reading this at the bottom of the sea, then the air you’re breathing right now will be about 78% Nitrogen and that’s perfectly fine. But when you dive, the increased pressure causes more Nitrogen than normal to dissolve into your blood. All that extra gas disrupts the electrical signals in your body and it causes divers to behave a bit like they’re drunk. In fact, it’s actually known as the martini effect.
It sounds playful, but the reality is that it’s actually a pretty dangerous thing. It causes divers to be less aware of their surroundings and make poor decisions. It causes them to do things that are illogical. Which is why I think it’s a bit like falling in love.
When everything is fresh and exciting, it is so easy to find yourself behaving in a manner that is totally out of character; taking chances that you’d never risk and doing things you would never normally do. At least when you’re under water, people can’t hear the stupid lovy-dovy crap.
Like diving, it is fun, it is carefree and it is very, very easy to get hurt.
However, with enough practice, it can become totally safe and you can enjoy the thrill of the adventure. But even for experienced divers, and indeed lovers, there is always more danger.
If a diver decides to resurface they must do so carefully. Because if they rise too quickly, all that dissolved air in their blood can bubble out faster than is safe, this is known as ‘the bends’. In very severe cases, the gas cannot escape from the lungs fast enough and a thing called ‘barotraumas’ occurs, which means the lungs literally burst in their chests. To avoid this they use decompression chambers. There are moments in life when all at once you run out of air; a look, a ‘need to talk’, something that they do where you know the waves are about to pull you under.
Have you ever opened a text and felt like your chest could burst?
If only there was some sort of emotional decompression chamber that could safely bring you from the depths of romantic fiction to the level of life’s realities and allow you to bypass heartbreak along the way. I guess time itself is the best shot at emotional decompression we’ll ever get.
But for all it’s perils and for all the dangers, life on land is boring, especially when one finds themselves in a dry patch-or in my case, the middle of the freaking Sahara. So danger be damned, the payoff will always outweigh the risks. Somewhere, your diving partner is waiting to take your breath away, somewhere the water is warmer.
