The word “relationship” is very popular in many aspects of our society, not the least of which in the sphere of psychology and related fields where it is most predominant. We hear people talking about their relationships with spouses, partner, children, parents, teachers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and even enemies. We even hear people talk about their relationships with animals, like pets or wild animals, nature, but also of inanimate things, like rocks, ideas, feelings, and thoughts. In this blog we will discuss the definition of the term, relationship, the current use of the term, the past use of the term, and the possible future use of the term. We will also discuss how relationships are extremely important, how they differ wildly among people, how they may change or deteriorate as well as how they can develop and mature.

What is a relationship?

The term “relationship” is an abstraction, and as such is not a concrete, factual phenomenon. Like many other words and concepts, relationship is undefinable. We can see elements of the phenomenon of a relationship, we can see the effects of a relationship, we can have thoughts and feelings about relationships, but we will not actually be able to define this term and the phenomenon to which it refers. The fact that a relationship cannot be defined suggests either that it is a meaningless concept or that it is a very meaningful concept. We would vote for the      latter.

As we attempt to render a meaningful and practical understanding of a relationship, it is notable that it is a relatively recently used term. As I have perused the use of the term relationship, I note distinctly that the term was not used very much until about the middle sixties, possibly as a result of what we should “cultural revolution” of the sixties. The essence of this period of life, at least in America, everything was up for grabs, everything was challenged, and there evidently grew a spirit of togetherness. This togetherness was seen on both sides of the spectra in America including politics, religion, democracy, and business. My suggestion is that relationships formed around ideas, whether religious, political, cultural, or otherwise.

Popular psychology also erupted during these turbulent years with some very popular books, periodicals, and TV shows depicting relationships as being the core of these shows. While soap operas beginning in radio and migrating into television were always popular, the term relationship was rarely used until the sixties. Since then, it has exploded in all media and in most all couples. During my earliest years in psychology, I didn’t hear about relationships, but then the term exploded with almost everyone who came to my office talked about the fact that their relationship was not working. I continue to find it interesting that people complain about how their relationship isn’t working while what they really mean is that their partner is not what they think he or she should be. It still amazes me that many people, at least the men I see in my office, refer to the lack of a “relationship” in their marriage essentially means a lack of enough sex.

Granting that we cannot define a relationship, this together with the fact that it seems to be so very important, how can we understand the term and the concept the term represents.

The core of a relationship

While we can’t exactly define a relationship, we can see the ingredients of a relationships, the value of a relationships, different kinds of relationships, and the dangers of relationships.

Ingredients of a relationship

• Understanding. This is perhaps the most important ingredient of a relationship, namely that the parties understand each other, meaning they understand what the other person thinks, feels, and does.
• Friendship. Friendship might also be somewhat undefinable, but the core is that of companionship, meaning a fusing of two people together in a way that is good for both parties.
• Cooperation. This means that two people work together to make a project work. This could be a project that makes things better for both of them or makes some other kind of improvement in their lives or community.
• Maturing. This is perhaps the most challenging thing about a relationship because people grow in different ways, sometimes even in opposite directions. Yet maturing and changing is a necessary part of a relationship, and even more so as we grow older together.
• Physical. Sex is, of course, sometimes an important ingredient in a relationship, but for some couples it is not the core of their physical connection. Furthermore, some people need hugs to sustain a relationship, others need a friendly handshake, and others need to challenge each other physically with work or play.
• Conversation. Of course, we make our living with conversations with the people we see in our office, and these conversations are often filled with joy and sorrow, which are the ingredients of all love. Conversation can actually include silence, like when good friends simply see the cloud formation or hear the songs of birds. In such cases silence can be an effective and beautiful means of “conversation.
• Common experience. This is often the glue that makes a relationship work and ultimately grow. This includes work, play, talk, silence, physical experience, or emotional experience.
• Love. Here we run into another undefinable phenomenon for which countless books, stories, conversations, music, and poetry have attempted to define love, all in vain. We suggest that at least some of the ingredients listed above make up what love is. While necessary in a relationship, we admit that love grows or fades in a relationship.

The value of a relationship

• Physical health. It is generally understood that physical health is largely due to good sleep, good food, good exercise, and good social contacts.
• Emotional health. It is good to be independent in life. It is equally good to be dependent in life, of course dependency is properly understood as needing to love and to be loved. A relationship ideally enhances emotional and social maturity.
• Vocational success. Relationships enhance one’s view of oneself, one’s confidence, acceptance of failure in work, and financial security. If a have a good relationship, I find good work, do good work, and receive good pay.
• Contribution. If you have a relationship with someone, whether intimate partner or an occasional friend, you may find a way to make a contribution to the world in some way. The more challenging the endeavor, the more important it is to have a colleague at your side.
• Peace of mind. We, as humans, are not designed to be “islands to ourselves.” Rather, we are designed to be a combination of independent and dependent. People who find both of these ingredients feel at peace with themselves most of the time and at peace with the rest of the world most of the time.

Kinds of relationships

Before the 1960’s when the term relationship began to be popular, the populace did not think of relationships as a unitary concept. Nor did most people think of personality differences, much less the popular tendency to render mental illness-based diagnoses in a way of understanding people. Rather, people were seen largely as independent elements doing one or more things in life, such as working hard, playing tennis five times a week, making a lot of money, raising kids, or a myriad of other things. If we look a bit more closely at how people assessed people, we did not see much of an understanding of the unique nature of individuals, the commonalities among people, or how people related to other people. It was more common to see a person who was “something,” like an engineer or a plumber, like a father or a mother, like old or young, like male or female, a lover of animals or a lover of water sports. Equally, people were seen to have what we might call a “relationship” to these things or roles. Before the 60’s relationships were not so much about two people as they were about one person relating to some physical thing. People did not “work on” relationships, they worked to get better at working in the office, parenting children, or taking care of personal finances. Let’s look at the kinds of relationships that people have that are not with people:

Property

There are people, I among them, who have a relationship with property, however odd that might sound to you. People like me, who love property, and value property see property as alive. I am not a nature lover, but my wife certainly is. I see with Deb the same relationship to her gardens and all of nature the way I relate to property that is human-made. This valuing and having a relationship with property, indeed, can be problematic, showing itself in undue care for property (or gardens) “to a fault,” which means relating to property at the cost of neglecting other things, like people. But love for property and thus having a relationship with property, is not materialism. Some brave people might say that property or nature is more important than people. I know of someone for whom nature is his “partner in life” as he has not been to successfully establish and maintain an intimate partner in life aside from nature.

Learning

As I write about the man whose life’s partner is nature, I am reminded of the many people I have known who have relationships with learning. Some of these people value learning by reading, others by writing, others by developing athletic skills, and yet others who really enjoy learning to improve in their profession or trade. Again, this relating to learning can be problematic if it is done to a fault. I know of one very intelligent psychologist who knows more about Sigmund Freud than anyone else that I know. We might say he has a relationship with Freud, but more accurately, he loves to learn more and more about this foundational psychologist. We can look at these people as caring more about learning than they care about people, which would actually be the case for the Freud admirer having been married unsuccessfully multiple times,  but it would be better to see that Mark simply loves learning, loves Freud in particular, and is truly fond of learning.

God

I use the term, “God,” instead of “religion” because we have in the term God a substance that is akin to people, but also to property and learning. People who have a relationship with God may use the term, God, or may not, or they may interchange the word God with Nature, the Universe, or something representing a Creator or Sustainer. A church that I used to attend had as its mantra, “We exist to foster a growing relationship with God.” Some would ask, “Just what does it mean to have a relationship with something that defies logic, defies description, and may even defy truth” for agnostics or atheists who see the whole God thing as fantasy? Nevertheless, we need to look at all of human history to find the concept of a god is almost universal, sometimes “to a fault” like all relationships. Philosopher/theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, refers to such people as “mystics” or “aesthetics” who never do anything concretely, but here he is attacking those who get lost in abstractions more than people who really feel a deep relationship to God.

Work

Indeed, many live for work, and we must say that they have a meaningful relationship to work, whether that work is cognitive or physical. I feel this relationship to my work, even at age 82, as many people do. The spouse of a patient of mine works full-time at 75 even though he has had some serious medical problems that are aggravated by his working. This person has no friends, no plans, no hopes, no activities, and not much at all, apart from his work and a tangential relationship to his spouse. More positively, many people love their work so much that they make a genuine contribution to the world, perhaps without ever have much of a relationship with another human being. We need such people, who like a physicist I know who works 10-15 hours a day on finding a way to contain nuclear fusion, knowing that his work for maybe 50 years will not be completed because of the complexity of nuclear fusion.

Play

There are several possibilities of having a relationship with play. There are, of course, professional soccer players or some other sport, who seem to value their particular sport more than anything else. Vince Lombardi once said, “Winning is not the most important thing (in football games). It is the only thing.” I loves sports, mostly those in which I can participate, but I am not much with knowing who is playing, how good they are, and what team has acquired the best recruit, but know of many men who read the sports page for hours and end up knowing more about play, plays, and players than I know about psychology.

Aside from professional, college, or high school players, there are people whom we say have a “player temperament,” namely someone whose life is oriented to engagement, experience, and excitement. They may be good at one sport, but more than likely, they are just fair at many sports, or may not care about sports at all. They just care (relate to) play in all its forms.

Family

When I do an Intake Evaluation for a new patient, I gather the individual’s present concerns, his current life situation in work, play, and social engagement in order to have a good picture of this person so I can be of help with the challenges of his life. At the end of this initial interview, I ask people what they value in life. Almost everyone says, “family” often adding the phrase, “of course,” as if everyone should value family first and focus on their family relationships. But the farther I probe with this questioning of one’s value, the more I see that family relationships may not actually be the most important thing in their lives. As with all relationships, people can value their family relationships “to a fault,” often the fault being exhaustion physically and emotionally as they give more to their family members than is good for them to give. In all of such cases there are dangers in relationships.

Animals

You have heard, “a dog is a man’s best friend.” I once did a “funeral” for an acquaintance of mine whose “best friend” was, indeed, his dog. He spread ashes around the place he had taken his best friend many times. I learned sometime later that he had named his new dog “Johnson,” which gave me pause…. You don’t have to have a dog be your best friend to value dogs, cats, or spiders as things with whom you have relationships. Animals have come to be a predominate relationship for many people. are people who see animals just as sacred as humans. When I see pet owners walk with their dogs, most often carefully in all respects, I see their relationships with these God’s creatures.  

Other kinds of relationships

In the field of psychology, I see people who have relationships with a variety of things including thinking, theorizing, feeling, deep emotion, talk, silence and a host of other things. In summary, perhaps there as many relationships as there are values in life. Certainly, I have missed the kind of relationship that you might have.

Dangers of relationships and enhancing relationships

Dangers of relationships

We can speak generally that the danger of any relationship, whether human or otherwise, is when the relationship limits one’s experience in life, limits his/her capacity to love more broadly, and tends to deteriorate the person physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.

You can know when your relationship has become dangerous by seeing one or more of these signals:

• You feel increasingly lonely. Your relationship has encroached on your social life to such an extent that you avoid people or people avoid you
• You feel physically ill or fatigued. You have loved this thing or this person so much that you have given too much to the relationship, which means that your body is in some kind of danger, whether mildly or seriously
• The relationship itself is less fulfilling. In fact, it may be that you find yourself having put more into the relationship than is good for you to do. You might be inclined to complain about the relationship, whether that is a person, a group, an activity, or a product.
• Nothing compares to the relationship, so you become more and more involved in the relationship, which contributes to having reached a certain limit for what this thing or person can do for you.
• You get depressed, which might better be said to be less interested in the relationship, and possibly less interested in much of anything.

Enhancing relationships

• First, recognize that the thing or person with which you have a relationship is good for you, that you love this thing or person, and that it has given you meaning. In other words, it is not wrong for you to love property, people, or whatever.
• Avoid the tendency of “giving up” on your relationship. Just note that you have a tendency to “love something to a fault”, which means it has begun to show signs of the need for other loves, perhaps loves that are not as vibrant or natural, but loves that are necessary in life.
• Avoid the tendency as well to think that other people should have the kind of relationships you have. I am not a “dog person” and rather dislike the tendency some dog owners have of yelling at their pets, but I see that they like those creatures as much as I like writing. It might be hard for you to see that someone really does not have intimate relationships with people, but you might note what relationships they do have.
• Always value your first love, as “first love is best love,” but loving only one thing is not enough. So, recognize you have a “love problem,” as we say of things that have caused us trouble.
• If you scan the universe, however large or small your universe might be, you will see that you could both find new loves and enhance your first love simultaneously.
• In all of this keep in mind that relationships are the result of loving, love is never wrong, love can grow, and there are many ways to love.