Interpersonal Relationships
I should, perhaps, be one of the last to write any definitive treatise on interpersonal relationships. This musing is nothing more than observations. Like many others I have had all sorts of interpersonal relationships with others at various levels; I fell intensely in love, but never married; I have had close interpersonal relationships with varied kinds of bosses; through college and high school teaching I have had endless personal relationships with students from all backgrounds in life; I have received several teaching awards; I have been fired; I have had strong interpersonal relationships with many and varied pets. These experiences led to the observations which follow about interpersonal relationships. These observations are food for thought, not any masterful last words about the topic.
Diversity and change are constants through the evolutionary process. This process is billions of years old and continues, not on human Time (which is so infinitely short) but evolutionary Time (which is infinitely long). That interpersonal relationships are unstable to varying degrees reflects the dependency of these relationships on diversity, change and time.
Perhaps there is no such a thing as perfect interpersonal relationships, but simply gradations where some are stronger or weaker than others, and all as unique as the unique individuals who comprise these relationships. Though instability reigns more than stability in relationships, these experiences generate some of the most valuable experiences in life. Humans are essentially herd animals, maybe the most herd like in existence. Total human hermit-hood is rare, and perhaps represents a total failure to achieve meaningful interpersonal relationships. Any other degree of hermit-hood is probably simply a variation of interpersonal relationships.
Love is probably the most intense interpersonal relationship. Only a fool would try to define love. It happens if we are lucky, but the good luck may not survive time or circumstances. While love may, at least originally, be an intense thing, the intensiveness of it generates considerable stress. The good stress may end up bad stress over time. Half of marriages in the United States don’t last. While this is disappointing, it is not surprising. People change over time and these changes over time can tighten or loosen the bonds. In most cases the bonds probably loosen—the ‘perfect’ fit is no longer perfect and the ‘perfect’ fit may have been a tad illusionary at the time it happened. Thus most marriages probably adapt to each other’s changed peculiarities, some successfully, and others unsuccessfully. The individual peculiarities can be physical or behavioral or both.
Courts try to decide who is at fault to what degree and who gets what in a divorce. It can be every bit as messy as the initial love affair, every bit as intense, but now the feelings involved are bad, not good. The culprit is almost always change. None of us are the same person we were ten years ago, or even the same person we were yesterday. So what is so surprising that two people, once such a good match, could, over time, be less of a perfect match? It has been a big mistake for human cultures to demand no change, when it comes to matters of love. “Till death do us part’ is hardly a helpful or realistic description of love or marriage. Even those half of the marriages which do not end in divorce are often not the same kind of bonding as when first married. Who could really know to what extent many of these ‘lasting’ marriages are as much co-existence, marriages of convenience, or simply a form of companionship after a while. And why should anyone really care about another couple’s current interrelationship? I can remember my parents getting peeved at each other and not speaking to each other for days, but attend social gatherings in which nobody would know there was anything amiss. We mostly know very little about other people’s interpersonal relationships.
Policies aside, Barack Obama has the most intriguing interpersonal relationships of most any President we have ever had. There doesn’t seem to be a label-able group he doesn’t seem to genuinely like. And yet that very non discriminatory ability to form strong interpersonal relationships with about anyone, of any sort, generates some of the most divisive politics over time, as first one group, and then another become genuinely angry that he continues to bring more and more diverse people under ‘the tent’ of deserving citizens. Every time he tries to include the excluded into the tent of ‘accepted citizens with full rights’, this angers those who are not about to accept as equals those who they for so long have found loathsome. There is a good example of how strong interpersonal relationships with diverse groups in a population can destroy one’s likability to many who frown on all that chumminess. Of course, in this present age, the size of the pie (natural resources) is not growing while the population soars. The increased competition for limited resources doesn’t exactly bode well for toleration of others in general, let alone suggest others, past denied, now be allowed at the trough.
It is interesting that, in some respects, interpersonal relationships with pets can be more durable and constant than interpersonal relationships with other people. That seems strange. And angers many people that it even exists. “It is only an animal’, is not an uncommon battlecry of those who find these kind of relationships absurd. So why do these strong interpersonal relationships even exist at all? Pets, by their genetic capabilities, keep things rather simple. Their love tends to be unconditional. No matter how dumb, stupid, or moody we tend to be at times, a pet still just adores us. We may change over time, but the pet doesn’t really care, we are still their provider, their protector, and little else matters to them. While it is common for marriages to dissolve, it is uncommon for a relationship between a pet and owner to dissipate. A lot of this same relationship between parents and their kids often exists. Offspring are looked at, to some degree, as a creation, a truly remarkable feat to have accomplished, and here, like with pets, the offspring are given unconditional love—but only sometimes. Again, others may use the term ‘spoiled’ referring to someone’s kids, but that is more akin to the “it’s only an animal” comments.
The strong ties between parent and offspring are not all that logical. Physical resemblance might be there but mostly not all that much except for obvious things like skin color. Personality-wise there is even less consistency. For most parents and a particular child, a closer fit personality-wise could probably be found elsewhere. Were it not for the very long formative stage of life for human offspring, the strong bonding would not be so strong. Then there is the cultural responsibility for being a ‘good’ parent, which boils down to an obligation to be there for a child, at least until they pass from their formative stage of life. If raising a child can often be a messy, frustrating, drawn out process, letting go can be equally a messy, frustrating, and drawn out process. Parenthood is one of those best of all possible worlds and worst of all possible worlds, depending the the day, moment in time, and year.
My own observations are dependent on having had teacher-student relationships with thousands of young people transferring from their formative stage of life to their productive stage of life. If one likes theatre, this is hard to top. Parent-offspring relationships, like any other kind of human relationships, are not cut and dried. Their is no ‘best’ way to be a parent anymore than there is any ‘best’ way to be a teacher, a coach, a teammate, a friend, a boss, an employee, and so on. Each person in a personal relationship is unique and so of course the relationship itself is unique. It would be difficult to pass judgement on anyone else’s relationship with another. But we do it all the time, especially those people who go through life with braces on their brain, using their own personal beliefs as a benchmark to judge others. Of course personal beliefs are hardly facts, often have no solid rational basis, and just represent nothing more than a learned personal belief. All of us are guilty, some more than others. Live and let live is a healthy attitude in any society but almost impossible to attain. How peaceful any society is depends on just how much that society can achieve widespread tolerance of diversity. Of course this has nothing to do with criminal acts committed by one person against another.
Most interpersonal relationships are time dependent. They come and go with time. Others are there for life, but hardly in the same form, degree, or any other particulars. For lengthy relationships, most often there will be nostalgic remembrances of the good ole days. It takes decades for us to mature, and it takes even longer for us to die. Death is really by a thousand cuts, unless it comes suddenly by disease, accident, or murder. It is hard to say when we first started to die, just as it is hard to say why any personal relationship starts to fade. There is inherent sadness in a fading relationship but if change and diversity were not the operative reality of God’s evolutionary process, we would die of boredom—-it would be the same ole, same ole, same ole until death. Some people cling desperately to the same ole, same ole, until death and that seems sad too. Forced separation, via death or any other means often cements the intensity of the relationship for life. All thoughts of the departed one remain at a constant level of positive intensity. Naturally the price paid for retaining such a positive intensity of a former relationship was steep. A new spouse replacing a one who died young has every reason to fear the emotional attachment of the new spouse to his/her former spouse. Their new relationship will undergo the stresses associated with time and change, while the memories of the deceased spouse will be forever riveted in a time capsule that does not change.
The three stages of life anyone who lives a long time goes through——the formative, the productive, the terminational—are by their nature ones in which our interpersonal relationships are quite different. We often go from great dependance to great independence, and then back to varied degrees of dependency again. Success in our productive years often means a rougher time in the terminational years, when all the productive years’ successes are history, and we are left with influence, power, titles—relegated off to the side lines, mostly irrelevant to much of anything. That is a huge shift.
For some the terminational years are a perfect fit, a chance to live life day by day, with less stress, less responsibility, less battles, a chance to reflect on what life has been all about, and if our lives have been lucky—we use gratitude as the fuel to keep us contented. For others, the terminational years are filled with regret that the productive years have ended. Expecting interpersonal relationships with others to be the source of contentment is a risky venture. Like it or not, in our terminational years we have less and less real contributions to make in any relationships, except maybe spousal ones. And even that is problematic in that when a spouse dies first, the adjustment to being single may prove way too much to handle at an older age.
The most lasting interpersonal relationship and the most meaningful interpersonal relationship is the relationship we have with ourselves. If we cannot manage to amuse, understand, and entertain ourselves, then contentment can be hard to come by. By the time we reach our terminational years, and in fairly good health, if we cannot come to grips with our own limitations regarding interpersonal relationships with others, then we are on the road to frustration. The complaints begin, and more and more we feel like nobody is paying us enough attention. Laying guilt trips on others, who we feel pay us too little attention, rarely generates good results. I can still hear my dad telling my mother, “If I die and leave you alone, don’t you dare go live with either of your sons. They both have a busy life to lead, and you will feel neglected and left dangling off on the sidelines. You have enough money to get into a quality group living situation and that is where you will find as much attention as you want every day.” His point seems well taken. Why would anyone want to place themselves in a position where whenever they open their mouths, another person kind of feels “Now what?”. It is better, in the terminational years to have people visit only if they want to. That will be a good visit. Any other kind of visit, engineered via guilt trip pressures, will be disappointing. Ask many grandparents who remember the days when the grandchildren couldn’t get to see them enough, and yet once the teenage years arrive, kind of mumble about too many forced visits to see Grandma and Grandpa. The reality is that many Grandparents use young grandchildren as a tool to ensure their own kids come to see them more often. We are always looking for culprits in faltering interpersonal relationships and this is silly. Time changes the nature of most interpersonal relationships. We have to deal with it, not try to swim back upstream in a relationship.
Again, if we can understand ourselves, and improve our own ability to amuse, entertain, and motivate ourselves, then we are never really alone. Actually, in old age, the less we are any threat of a clinging relationship with others, the more likely others will engage us, and at their own level of intensity. I live in a building with 140 units. Some times younger residents will invite me to a party on the spur of the moment. Other older residents have asked me “Why do they invite you and not other older residents?” I always smile and say, “because I never agree to go”. What kind of sensible pleasure is it to go places where people feel sorry for an aging situation and force themselves to chat with us for a bit? For the most part, the older you get the less meaningful the conversations become, the more childlike they become, the more inane, the more disingenuous. Blah, blah blah rules the day.
Lack of meaningful personal interrelationships between two people by no means reflects any wrong or right on either person’s part, at least most of the time. Given the wide range of diverse personalities amongst humans, there is no surprise most people are not a good fit for close compatibility for all that long a time. On the other hand, there is also no reason why most people need be adversaries either. The question gets reduces to “what are our responsibilities to others who are not our own ‘cup of tea’?” For the most part we probably do well to ask, regarding anyone, “Have I done anything to them which has hurt them in any way other than not being chummy with them?” If the answer is no, then no ‘crime’ has been committed. And this goes both ways. We may wish to have a particular person be more friendly or close to us and they just won’t. They have committed no ‘crime’ either.
As herd animals with the ability for extensive verbal communication, humans talk a lot about each other, almost constantly. The point at which we cross the line with what we say about others is naturally a bit vague. Intent is key here. What was our purpose when we make a critical observation about someone else? Is it meaningless banter or an attempt to shed light on someone’s behavior in a given situation, or is the purpose to hurt the person is some way which is not necessary at all, and simply damages the person’s reputation or status in life? There is a difference between talking about someone’s peculiar oddities and calling them a jerk or a no good person. For example, Sarah Palin’s many personal oddities are of little interest or import except her personal oddities, allowed to become law, hurt a huge number of persons, and not in minor ways. In the same vein, a person may have all sorts of religious beliefs and that is no reason to criticize them in any serious way, but everyone has a right to attack that person if they are trying to make their own religious beliefs the law of the land.
Thus, for any particular person, there is the question of any personal interrelationship with us, and whether this person is harmful to others in ways which are unacceptable. Ethics is always about the Golden Rule. We are obligated, by our own intrinsic ethical nature, to treat others as we would have them treat us. But we are obligated to also oppose those who would treat others badly.
Live and let live, up to a point, is a wonderful attitude. It maximizes contentment in any society. The gay marriage debate is a perfect example. Why would anyone wish to interfere with who someone else can fall in love and consequently marry? Why would anyone insist on forcing others to participate in some kind of religious ritual in public? What possible good ever comes of such intrusiveness into the personal lives of others? We should always be careful not to irritate others for no valid reason. My personal beliefs are never a valid reason to make life more difficult or unpleasant for others. We can, I reckon, get a bit silly and say “Well I believe it is wrong to kill someone, and I want this to be the law of the land.” Of course everyone should support actions which protect others from being hurt by any abrogation of the Golden Rule.
There are some personalities which most everyone likes. There are some personalities which few like or even understand. That is the way diversity works. None of us are obligated to have close interpersonal relationships with those we don’t like. Like is not even the best word. Just because we are not a close and comfortable fit personality-wise, does not really mean we don’t like them. Because you don’t want to date someone does not mean you do not like them.
People often overlook interpersonal relationships when they seek employment. If our prospective boss is not going to be the kind of person who will be a good fit for strong interpersonal relationships between ourselves and them——beware. The job may seem perfect, but a perfect job may not work out if the interpersonal relationship between ourselves and our boss is going to be incompatible. In general, it is always wise to not put ourselves in situations where we cannot be ourselves with our own peculiar traits. And likewise, if we are going to be boss over others, and be the best boss we can be, we have to learn how to respect diverse personalities and get these diverse personalities to perform at their best level. I have known bosses who manage to get the best work out of all kinds of personalities, and I have known bosses who expect everyone to march lock, step and barrel all the time. Both can sometimes work, but clearly one is more admirable than the other. There is no question but which method is more admirable.
Books are written in great detail about interpersonal relationships. The above are just some observations to stimulate thought. It just seems that the most important question we all need ask ourselves, from time to time is not how many really like us, but whether, given our own peculiar personality, whether others are being hurt by our actions, not our personality. If someone really dislikes us, and we have never done anything to them that interferes with their life in any way, we should not lose sleep over it. Life is full enough of these kind of people, whose gripe with us is simply our own unique personality. They pay a price for their inability to accept diversity. They go through life never very happy campers. They simply can’t accept diversity and they remain bitter persons throughout their lives. That is not exactly a very smart mental state to achieve in life. Bitterness is a terrible affection.
As so often, I will close with my favorite quotation of unknown origin:
“There is a way of life, a way of thinking, of behaving towards other men and your fellow creatures, towards all living things, towards the whole earth and the sky and the sun that is based on love, on compassion, on respect, on cherishing everything there is around you because it is wonderful, unique, it’s natural and good, and it evolved that way by itself, it’s got to be cherished and if we think like that and live that kind of life, we can all have our freedom, we can all have our happiness, we can all feel the sun and smell the grass and smell the flowers and look upon each other with appreciation.”
