In one of the previous posts, I talked about Social Media and how interconnected we are these days with others. I was referring to social networks and how much we are in touch with each other with the use of the Internet and technology. In this post, I am going to be a bit old fashioned. I am going to talk about different interconnections that we have been knowing as relationships. Sometimes, the time spent in a relationship can be a minute or less, and sometimes, it can be a life long affair. We are social animals. We are connected with others in different relationships. We give them different names. The strength, color, and quality of the relationships differ based on the type of relationship, and many other factors.
Most common relationships are (grand) parent-child, siblings, spousal, in-laws, etc. These are formal relationships. Besides this, when you are connecting with someone, there is some sort of informal bonding, which I generally refer to as also a relationship, the most common being a friendship.
Relationships Juggad:
- Every relationship goes through some cycle. It has ups and downs. There is hardly any relationship without ups and downs.
- Remember my last post? There are three forces in play at any point in time: Creation (positive), destruction (negative), and preservation/balancing (neutral). The same is there in any relationship. There are things that help the relationship grow better, and there are things that create problems. They keep coming here and there. You are the preserver; you are the balancer, and it is your responsibility to balance the positive and negative forces that are playing in the relationship. Hold on, I am not done. There is one more balancer/preserver who is also a responsible stakeholder in that particular relationship. These two Vishnus (Lord Vishnu is the God who preserves or balances.) in one relationship make the job I guess more challenging. (You need one Super Vishnu to manage these two Vishnus if you want relationships to function better. We will talk about its challenges in a bit.)
- Traditionally, most relationships have offered overall more benefits than the costs. The balance is shifting as advances take place in society, and material is taking over the mind, and the mind is taking over the heart. Relationships are becoming weaker in offering benefits but are getting more burdened with costs. The average number of persons in a household has dropped from around 4-6 persons a century ago to around 1.5 persons in a household. What we are taught by capitalism and the modern education system is anti-relationships. The technology is also making it a bit worse.
* We are taught that greed is good (influence of market-based society) so consciously or unconsciously we try to get more than the other person in a relationship. We have two Vishnus but we don't have the benefits of the wisdom of two of them. Instead, each of them is trying to get more from the other. This has made most relationships I-centric instead of staying We-centric. Relationships are good when we are we, and not two Is. Relationships flourish when they are focused more on giving than getting, and win-win over I-win-you-lose.
* We are taught too much about rights and wrongs. Education has taught us how to objectively find right and wrong. We think we know what is right and what is wrong but have failed to understand that most of the time, there are many shades of gray between pure white and black and we are a bit color blind. Most of the conflicts in relationships occur because both persons think individually he or she is right and the other person is wrong! Education has made us stubborn. We are too tight to accept that I can be wrong or the other person can be right. This is another killer for relationships.
* Right vs Responsibility. For democracy or any system to flourish, citizens have to be equally aware of the responsibilities instead of just demanding the rights. The same is true at a relationship level too.
* Equals- we want to be equal. We want to create a society of equals. This is a noble concept no doubt but this has added risk in many relationships. In most (Grand)-Parent-child, siblings, or spousal relationships, the concept of equals is a risk to the relationship. In every relationship, the give and take are for different things. As a parent, your give-and-take is likely to be very different than give-and-take from the child's end. Traditionally, the power, control, respect has to be more on the parent side, and in return, the love, care, shelter, protection has to be going more towards the child. These days, as soon as a child is more than 10, power-control-respect gets challenged. There are times of making decisions, and the child starts posing as an equal, though he has very little wisdom, education or experience. The child also now starts asking for power, control, and respect on an equal basis. This strains the relationships between most parents and their teenage kids.
* Traditionally, each side in a relationship has a clear distinct role. A man worked and a woman made home. The man earned and the woman raised kids. A woman cooked and a man built or maintained other things in the household. A mother taught children certain things and a father taught other things. This distinction created an interdependence that kept a relationship on a solid footing. Both sides complemented each other, now they compete! And, in competition, usually, someone wins and the others lose. In relationships, there needs to be a win-win. - Our society has made us more competitive. Our system rewards winning. We are taught costing and accounting very well so we can make sure if we got a good deal or not. We want to be in profit. This attitude creates a significant risk for a relationship. In a relationship, you want to have a win-win. Both need to be happy.
Another big problem in using accounting in a relationship is everything is subjective. There are no clear measures. A husband generally thinks that he is doing more but is getting less in return. The wife thinks the same way! For most couples, if you ask both partners individually, it will not be surprising to find that each one thinks he or she is getting a bad deal in the return. Everything in life or a relationship is not about getting a better deal! Most of the time, you give someone a good deal and you will also get a good, if not better, deal in return. It needs to be first Give and then Get but we have reversed this. We want to Get first before we Give! - Like everything else in nature, relationships are also set to start rotting as time passes. Everything else being the same, the nature of a relationship by default is to get bad. In the beginning, the relationship looks at the strength, and good, of each other but as time passes, the focus shifts on weaknesses of each other, and what is bad about the other person. To keep a relationship healthy and growing, it needs effort and attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment