How do we know if our relationships (partnerships,friendships) are healthy?
Ask of yourself: Do you honour or betray yourself while in relationship with this person? Do you grow in a meaningful way or are you just going through the motions around them, checked out? Do you feel challenged or complacent? Do you feel celebrated or merely tolerated?
Our time and energy are finite resources. Don’t be casual with who and how you spend them. The more we pour into powerful, present, intimate relationships, the more powerful we ourselves shall become.
I’ve been having a couple of really fascinating conversations around friendship and language the last few days. Over the last decade, the integration of the internet into daily life has enabled us to sustain a larger number of personal, platonic relationships than in the past–with wide variances in levels of intimacy and mutual responsibility.
The word ‘friend’, which was past reserved for a smaller circle of intimate relationships, has been commodified and diluted..and is now used frequently and casually in modern society to describe this entire, wider spectrum–from casual acquaintances to those closest to our hearts.
There are a number of problems with this, but mostly, it is that this label of ‘Friend’ no longer communicates any meaningful information about the nature of that human connection or the level of intimacy and emotional truthfulness shared. Everyone has wildly different interpretations of the responsibilities that come with the assignment of the title of friend–with turmoil ensuing.
Brainpickings, a while back, made a pretty lovely post on the subject with a diagrammatic attempt to clarify this striation of platonic relationship. It definitely was a stand out in my memory, and informed my own private approach to understanding, clarifying, and categorizing the relationships in my life (which in turn helps me appropriately invest my time & energy).
Definitely take a read of this quick little article (like 6 minute read!). I also want to drop in this fantastic excerpt from Seneca( on the subject of friendship from Letters). I came across this about 10 years ago, and it definitely impacted the way I conceptualized and approached building my more meaningful Friend-ships.
“If you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means.
When friendship is settled, you must trust; before friendship is formed, you must pass judgment.
Those persons who put last first confound their duties–who judge a man after they have made him their friend, instead of making him their friend after they have judged him.
[So] ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself…”
“You keep telling me about moderation. That a little is enough. But sometimes for some of us, a little is not enough. Because, when it comes to something like wild walks or vulnerability or truth or heart – racing conversation or ecstatic contemplation or mind bending intimacy or all that catapults us into the flow, form and timelessness of our own aliveness, I am telling you that we deserve more than moderation.”
