Shaping Ourselves - Part 3 - Relationships
No, you didn’t miss a part of this series, and, yes, the previous article was originally called Part 1, but then I realized that the earlier article on aim is where I started. That only became clear after I wrote last week’s article on childhood. So, I went back and renumbered and retitled them. Consider this an example of advancing my strategic position in the laziest ways possible.
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
– Carl Jung
Last week, I wrote about how the psychological basis of strategic thinking is shaped in our childhoods. After we grow, we continue to change from the relationships that we develop. Other people can be the whetstones that sharpen us, not only our intelligence, but our courage, caring, discipline, and trustworthiness. However, we must always remember the importance of fun. Before people can trust and respect us, they must enjoy associating with us. In life, what we don’t want to do soon becomes what we cannot do. If we are no fun, people won’t want our company, much less to partner with us.
We have our own personal pyramids of relationships. The foundation of those pyramids are our life partners. On the support of our life partners, we complete our bonds of family and friends. From those bonds, we find our learning, work, and professional associations. On top of everything else, we have what we do for fun, our contacts based on our “outside” interests, hobbies, and so on.
Intimate Relationships
Our intimate relationships are the most deeply emotional, based on our long-lasting commitments to another person. They also have the biggest effect on shaping us throughout our lives. They start as our bonds as children with our mothers, but, as adults, we transfer those ties to our spouses. These bonds are not merely romantic whims or sexual fancies. They must be long-lasting. Our intimate relationships are challenging because they are the most intense form of learning about “the other.” There are only two different fundamentally types of people: men and women. We must understand both if we are to see the world clearly. The most intense way we learn about the opposite sex is through marriage. Though marriages can end in divorce, the best-case scenario is that they end in death. My fortieth wedding anniversary is this year, so my wife and I are clearly aiming for the best-case scenario.
How do we have to treat each other to have long-term relationships? Through a process of give and take. Since men and women are different, we want and offer different things. As we discussed in the article on childhood, a child that always wants their own way has no friends. That rule holds with all attachments, but it is the most critical in our intimate ones. Serving only ourselves alone simply doesn’t work. We need at least one other person, not only that we play with, but for whom we play the roles we develop in life. That one role is the basis for everything else. There is a Swedish proverb that says that shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow. We find lifelong shared goals and work as a team toward those goals through marriage. We can settle for less, but we should aim at the highest ideal we can imagine.
Supporting One Another
We must extend this practice of mutually beneficial relationships to every part of our lives: family, friends, work, and so on. Families can be difficult because we don’t choose our relatives, but we can certainly make peace with them and provide help when it is needed. In ancient Greece, they recognized that the love of caring for others is different than the love of enjoying their company. We should always care about what happens to our families, even when we do not always enjoy being with them. However, we should work to make ourselves as enjoyable as possible.
We all want the people around us to be on our side. We do this by first being on their side, specifically on the side of improving our lives together. We shouldn’t support or promote bad habits for those around us, and we shouldn’t want them encouraging our weaknesses. We should care for ourselves like we do our children. We don’t want our children endangered by associating with reckless types, no matter how much fun they are. We also don't want our children to associate with those who will lead them astray, into cruelty, cynicism, or nihilism. We should choose as wisely for ourselves.
To improve our relationships, we cannot resent what we do for others. We especially cannot resent being different from one another. We learn to see our differences as the basis of our being stronger together. Those differences are the strengths compensating for weakness. We have a choice of relationships outside of our immediate family, so we must choose wisely.
Everyone has faults, but we shouldn’t develop relationships with the hope of “fixing” others. We have no choice but to live with flawed humans because we are flawed ourselves. Having different opinions. like having different abilities, is not a bug but a feature. Our opinions can, should, and will always differ from the opinions of those with whom we associate. That doesn’t prevent us from finding shared goals. Our focus on what we share is what is important. Exposure to different ideas broadens us.
Learning from Work
If we see our jobs as stupid, they become stupid, and we will become stupid in what we can accomplish. To repeat myself, what we don’t want to do, we soon cannot do. Resenting having to work for a living or what we must do for work is the same as resenting having a purpose. Only by meeting challenges and solving problems in the workplace can we become smarter, better people. We build relationships in our careers because we don’t want to live in deprivation. Most of us need the role-playing of the workplace before we can form more intimate relationships.
Our first jobs, no matter how lowly, are where we learn to work toward common goals. I, like many others, started in retail and food service where I learned about serving the needs of customers. The experience matured me more than going to school. School teaches little or nothing about satisfying the need of others. Only by working, do we learn that we can make other people happy: our customers, our fellow workers, and our bosses. We also learn that we will sometimes, unavoidably, disappoint them.
Through our work, we also get experience troubleshooting. We are forced to find practical approaches for foreseeing and dealing with problems. The routine tasks are easily mastered. The truly interesting work arises when the routine is broken. When we solve problems well, our bosses should recognize us, out of their own self-interest. If our bosses are tyrants, they will not be successful, and we don’t want to work for them. When working for a tyrant, the challenge we must face is finding new, better employment. Good work for good bosses in good organization is rewarded. We should seek jobs with more possibilities and responsibilities and more challenges. Those challenges are what will shape us in the future.
Enough for Now
The most practical strategy of all is playing the game of life with those who enjoy growing as much as we do.