This blog is about relationships, but not those that you’re thinking about.
By “relationships”, I mean any prolonged association between two humans, but I am narrowing this down to outside the family and the romantic/sexual domains.
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| Photo by Cory Schadt on Unsplash |
This blog is about relationships, but not those that you’re thinking about.
By “relationships”, I mean any prolonged association between two humans, but I am narrowing this down to outside the family and the romantic/sexual domains.
The reason for this is simple (pun intended). While doing research for this blog, I found a surprising dearth of literature about this topic. There are plenty of articles about the family or romantic / sexual relationships, but not as much research has been done on the vast majority of other associations that you might have.
Simplifying these relationships will help you spend quality time with the people that truly matter (including family and romantic partners, but also friends and colleagues you truly like) and spending as little time with others that don’t. It will liberate you from all the toxicity that comes with bad relationships, with bad human contact.
In the context of this blog, relationships can be classified into the following types (regardless of age, gender and/or racial differences):
- Friends
- Acquaintances
- Work colleagues
- Clients
- People you meet in a specific context only (say a ju jitsu class or the barista at your favourite cafe)
- Complete strangers
This is a group of humans that form the vast majority of the people you know, but those with whom you don’t have extensive expectations.
Despite this lack of extensive expectations though, these relationships might not be simple.
Relationships are inherently complex because humans are inherently complex. You by yourself are very complex. You contradict yourself, you have countering needs that also change over time, you are pushed and pulled in various directions at any given time.
Adding the complexity of another person into your own complexity makes the entire concept of “relationships” mind-numbingly complex. What do you want? What do they want? Its impossible to figure out and very hard to test the accuracy of the answer you do get.
The good news is that relationships, though complex, can be simplified substantially based on the one thing that really matters.
Trust.
The quality, strength and sustainability of any relationship is just based on this one factor. Trust.
Intuitively, you know if you can trust any person and how much to trust them. This takes time and repeated observations but the goal of any relationship is quite simple: build trust or protect yourself from bad characters. Note this works both-ways, we need to build trust for them and for you. They need as much protection from you as you do from them.
This is NOT easy to do and it is a time consuming process. It needs careful examination and requires you to be objective.
E.g. if your boss is shouting at you, what drives their behaviour? Clearly there was some action in which you fell short, in which you broke their trust (it might not be your fault but that’s what caused it from their perspective). So is there something you can do to increase trust? Can you make your initial goals and deliverables about the work you are doing clear and simple so that both of you are on the same page? Can you establish mutual trust?
As I have stated above, but maybe worth repeating, every relationship is different but if its a longer term one, then its quality, strength and sustainability is dependent mostly on trust.
Thus, the key to simplifying relationships is to be objective about this. Take a close look at any given relationship in your life and ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you trust this person?
- Does this person trust you?
- Is the level of trust that exists in this relationship appropriate for the context that the relationship exists in?
- If not appropriate, would you be willing to make changes to make it more appropriate?
- If not, can you exit the relationship?
If you can’t exit immediately the relationship, then you might have to accept the bare minimum and try your best to exit at the earliest.
Remember, you cannot please everyone all the time. So, pick your battles and don’t feel the need to please everyone.
You have plenty of relationships in your life, each one of differing qualities. The good thing is that in your gut you know which one is going well, which one isn’t. In your gut, you can easily answer the above list of questions for every person in your life.
To simplify your relationships, stick with people you trust and who trust you.
If you don’t have mutual trust with people of most importance to you (e.g. your boss, gym instructor etc), you can try to improve this trust.
But the better route in my opinion is to deepen relationships where mutual trust is easier -> improve the quality and importance of these relationships by spending more time and energy with these people.
One caveat though — be vigilant. There are dodgy people out there waiting to exploit you by pretending to be trustworthy but who actually aren’t.
The good news is that it is simple (pun intended) to weed these people out — they are only in this relationship with you for their own sake and if you ask them for a favour or not give into their needs (material, emotional, physical) and if they are no longer around, then you can know that they are the dodgy people trying to take you for a ride.
Simplifying your relationships will help you spend quality time with the people that truly matter, which includes spending some nice alone time! Trust your gut and you will know the answer. You might have to make some painful short term decisions to exit toxic relationships, but in the longer term you will be all the better for them.
Stay strong.
Sukhi
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