Relationships as Patterns, Relationships as Fair Exchange

I just bought new batteries for my handy portable tape recorder. You may notice that the writing style of this post is a little different than my usual; that's because I dictated, then transcribed it.

One of the most important realizations that I've come to in the course of thinking about human beings, human behavior and human relationships is an idea that came to me suddenly while I was reading Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind: that is, the realization that relationships are not things.

Relationships have no discrete identity; talking about a relationship is not talking about a thing that actually exists. When people conceptualize relationships they conceptualize them as things, but what they actually are is repeated patterns of human behavior: some combination of human needs and human reactions to those needs, between two or more people, that result in a self-reproducing cycle of action.

One of the most important decisions I've ever made -- and I made it pretty recently -- was to stop trying to define relationships and instead to use language only to describe them. That means I've come to accept that calling something a relationship - calling someone a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, or a husband or a wife - has no substantial effect on the nature of what's between you and them.

You could argue this point, and if you did you'd be looking at the question in a more traditional way; to some extent, your objection would be valid. Naming something has an effect (and it's a meaningful effect) but naming a relationship doesn't have an effect on many of the most fundamental principles and forces that create relationships. When I say this I'm talking about affection, and talking about attraction; I'm talking about love*. These are things that cannot be willed into existence, things that have to happen as a reaction to the behavior and (to a lesser extent) the looks of another person.

When two people say things like, "Let's be in a relationship -- do you want to be my girlfriend? -- do you want to go steady?" what they really mean is "Let's execute a plan:" a plan that's often poorly understood and profoundly flawed. This is the plan that they've internalized as "How to make a relationship work."

Typically this plan has to do with commitment. Commitment is a beautiful thing if what you're looking for is a partnership, but the fuel of relationships is emotion and commitment is not an emotion. The same can be said of communication -- an incredible tool to facilitate living with someone in close quarters or negotiating contracts. Unfortunately, contracts do not make girls wet; contracts do not make boys hard. That's not to say that relationships are exclusively about sex, because they're not; more to the point, sex isn't exclusively about sex.

There are people out there who get very, very upset if you suggest that relationships are not about commitment and communication, and a lot of that has to do with fear. From a very young age we are fed a false dichotomy; we are taught that we must accept that realtionships are either built on intimacy, communication and commitment or that relationships are entirely random. Coming from this perspective, it's easy to understand why people might be uncomfortable with the idea that relationships aren't just something you decide to do. What it ignores is the idea that other people might be able to predictably influence our emotions -- that a balance of passion might be something that can be created deliberately in a relationship, might hinge on a set of skills which can be learned.

We are taught that deliberately influencing other peoples' emotional reactions is manipulation, and manipulation is evil. What I'd like to suggest in counterpoint is that putting someone in a position where they want to be with you, where they are powerfully attracted to you and fascinated by you, is one of the most powerful gifts that you can give them. This idea - inspired passion as a thing of value - leads me to say this:

The conventional view would have us believe that the principle of exchange at work in a relationship is commitment for commitment, but the reality of human behavior suggests that the real principle at work is commitment for passion. In exchange for the passion your partner inspires in you, you offer them your continued commitment -- and they do likewise.

Fair's fair.

*Footnote: "affection, attraction, and love" are the obvious/conventional fill-in-the-blank words in this context. My actual ideas about the emotions involved are sort of unconventional, but that's fodder for another post on another day.