I sent a message to a friend one morning, and she did not reply. By the afternoon, I had noticed. By the evening I had checked twice more, and somewhere in between I had decided what the silence meant. She was annoyed with me. I had said something at the weekend, and she had taken it the wrong way. She replied the following morning. She had her hands full with a personal crisis and she had not looked at her phone for a day and a half. Nothing I had spent the previous evening being certain about had happened at all.
What interests me now is not that I got it wrong, because we all do that. It is how quickly I filled the silence, and how sure I was of what I had put into it. The message was a small thing. What I made it mean was not. That is what happens when we relate to people from the perspective of separation, and it is not confined to friendships. It is what I want to look at more closely here.
We have relationships with our partner, children, family, friends and colleagues, but also with work, money, our body, ageing, food, our home and the world around us. We have a relationship with our past, our future and, most importantly, ourselves.
To relate means, at its simplest, to make or recognise a connection. We don’t simply encounter people, things and events. We think about them, decide what they mean and develop feelings and behaviours around them. Our thoughts, beliefs and experiences all shape how we relate.
The Relationship Is Not the Thing Itself
My relationship with money is not money. My relationship with work is not my job. And my relationship with another person is not simply that person.
The relationship we experience is made up of what we think and believe about them, our memories of what has happened, what we expect from them and what we think their behaviour means. This doesn’t mean the other person or their behaviour doesn’t matter. It means that much of the relationship is happening within us.
I saw this clearly with the coaching client I discussed earlier, who had a difficult relationship with her boss. She couldn’t understand why a colleague got on with him so much better. When she changed her attitude towards her boss, he didn’t change. She had changed how she related to him, and that changed the relationship.
What We Learn to Want from Relationships
Most of my own learning has come directly from my relationships, or from challenging situations involving other people. Ultimately, the lens through which we view these relationships is important, because it entirely decides how we deal with them. In the world of separation, we experience ourselves as individuals making our own way through life.
Relationships therefore become enormously important. We need other people for love, belonging, cooperation, safety and support. From our earliest relationships, we learn who we can trust, what gains approval, what risks rejection and how to get our needs met. There is nothing wrong with any of this. It is part of being human. But it means we learn to look to our relationships for many different things.
Every Relationship Carries an Assessment
Because we look to relationships for things we need, we are constantly assessing them. Is this safe? Do I trust this person? Do they value me? Is this working for me? Am I giving too much? Do I want more of this or less?
Most of this happens without us consciously thinking about it. And it doesn’t only apply to people. We make similar assessments about work, money, our bodies, our homes and life itself. That does not mean every relationship is transactional. It means that, often without realising it, we are noticing whether a relationship feels safe, supportive, rewarding or threatening, and responding accordingly. Here are some of the things we are looking for.
Survival, Safety and Security
We need each other. Humans have always depended on other humans for survival, protection, care and cooperation.
We also look for emotional and practical security. We want people we can trust, enough money to live and somewhere safe to call home.
Love, Connection and Belonging
We want to love and be loved. We want friendship, intimacy, companionship and a sense that we belong.
The difficulty comes when belonging starts to mean I matter, and rejection starts to mean I don’t.
Validation and Worth
Relationships can also become evidence that we are good enough. Being chosen can make us feel desirable. A promotion can make us feel successful. Someone’s approval can reassure us that we have done the right thing.
The problem is not enjoying approval, success or being chosen. It begins when we use those things as proof of our worth, because anything we rely on to give us worth can also appear to take it away.
Predictability and Control
We like to know where we stand. We learn what to expect from people and circumstances, and what keeps things running smoothly. A relationship we can predict asks less of us, and most of us arrange rather more of our lives around that than we would care to admit.
We notice it most when the predictability goes. A colleague we knew how to relate to is replaced by one we do not. A routine that held the week together stops working. Someone reliable becomes harder to reach. Very little may have actually gone wrong, and yet we feel unsettled out of all proportion, because a good deal of our sense of safety was resting on knowing what came next.
Comparison and Confirmation
We use other people as reference points. We compare careers, relationships, bodies, homes, money and achievements.
Relationships can also confirm what we already believe. If I believe people eventually let me down, I will notice when they do. The relationship then becomes evidence that I was right all along.
A coaching client explained how his business was being affected by his relationship with his partner. He described her as unreliable, and he clearly did not trust her. It turned out that his distrust and doubt lay not with his partner, but with a previous relationship where his ex-partner had cheated on him. His current relationship was being shaped by a conclusion formed in a previous one. The learning point was not that his distrust was foolish, but that an old experience was influencing how he interpreted a new relationship.
The Search for Completeness
Perhaps the greatest expectation we place on relationships in the world of separation is that something outside us will finally make us feel complete.
It might be the right partner, enough money, success, security or someone’s approval. The promise underneath is the same: when I have that, I will be all right.
This is when relationships begin carrying a weight they cannot reliably carry. We are asking something outside ourselves to provide a lasting sense of completeness, worth or safety that depends on that external thing remaining exactly as we need it to be.
In the article on Unity Consciousness, I wrote that we sometimes ask another person to provide something we first need to find within ourselves. When they cannot, we usually conclude that we have the wrong people rather than the wrong expectation.
What a Relationship Comes to Stand For
This is how a relationship can come to mean much more than the relationship itself. A friendship can mean I belong. A career can mean I am somebody. A marriage can mean I haven’t repeated my parents’ mistakes. Someone’s approval can mean I am good enough after all.
Then ordinary events can take on much greater meaning. The unanswered message I began this section with is small in itself. But if that friendship means I am loved and wanted, an unanswered message can suddenly feel like evidence that I am not. We aren’t only responding to what happened. We are responding to what we think it means.
So, a useful question is: What has this relationship come to mean about me?
Why We Are Drawn to Some People and Not to Others
We rarely build relationships consciously. Sometimes we meet someone and like them immediately. Someone else makes us uncomfortable or irritated when very little has happened to explain why.
We tend to assume those reactions are telling us something about the other person. Sometimes they are. At other times, it is showing us a quality we recognise, admire, reject or wish we possessed ourselves.
Carl Jung’s work on projection, which I touched on earlier, helps explain why particular qualities in others can attract or repel us so strongly. Relationships don’t begin with a blank sheet. We bring ourselves with us.
An introverted friend fell for a vivacious extraverted woman, who simply lit up the room. At a party, we were watching her weave her magic, engaging and entertaining. Wistfully, he said to me, “That’s what I love about her. I wish I could be more like that.”
He was not describing something he lacked. He was describing something he had put away, probably a long time before, and had come to think of as belonging to other people. What he loved in her was a part of himself he had stopped using, and watching her use it so easily was both a pleasure and a small ache.
When a Relationship Becomes Part of Who We Are
Some relationships matter deeply without becoming part of our identity. Others become woven into how we see ourselves. I am someone’s wife, mother, best friend, successful colleague or dependable daughter. A career, home, income or appearance can become part of our identity too.
In the article on Self-Awareness, I wrote about levels of attachment, and the threshold that matters is the one between something being a preference and something being part of who we are. Relationships sit on that scale as well.
There is nothing wrong with any of this. The difficulty comes when we need those relationships to remain the same in order for us to feel all right, because people, roles and circumstances inevitably change.
I wrote earlier that when I left my twenty-year career, I hadn’t expected to lose part of my identity with it, and the loss felt acute at the time.
Relationships Change Because Life Changes
People grow. Circumstances and needs change. Children become adults. Jobs change. Bodies age. Friendships built around a shared stage of life sometimes lose the thing that held them together. People we love change their minds and priorities.
Sometimes a relationship that worked perfectly well for years simply stops working in the same way. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything has gone wrong. Life has moved. The problem is that we don’t always move with it.
We can find ourselves wanting things to go back to how they were. We wish they would be the person they used to be, that work would go back to how it was, that our bodies would behave themselves. If only life would cooperate, we think, then we could feel all right again. I have spent a considerable amount of my own life doing exactly that.
About six years before I wrote this series, I became an “empty nester”, and I had to do a considerable amount of work to regain a sense of purpose. After all, if I wasn’t providing for and looking after my children daily, who was I? It wasn’t so much that I wanted my children to return home; on the contrary, I was very proud they were forging their own way. What I needed was not for my children to come back, but to discover a new source of purpose that did not depend on the role I had occupied for so long.
Again, from the perspective of separation, it makes sense. If I believe the problem is outside me, changing what is outside me appears to be the obvious solution. Sometimes something outside us does need to change. We may need a conversation, a boundary, a renegotiation, or even to leave.
But there is another possibility we often miss. Sometimes the relationship or circumstance has changed, and the most useful thing we can change is the meaning we give it and the way we now relate to it.
Relationships Are Messy
None of this happens neatly. We can love someone and be furious with them. We can be attached to a relationship we no longer enjoy. We can want someone closer and also want more space. We can know something needs to change and desperately wish that it didn’t.
Relationships contain love, memories, needs, disappointments, hopes, fears and expectations, often all at once. We shouldn’t expect looking at them to produce one simple answer.
Perhaps the most useful thing to understand is that, in the world of separation, we spend much of our lives looking to people, things and circumstances outside ourselves for something we believe we need. We assess them, attach meaning to them, sometimes make them part of our identity and then struggle when they change.
None of this makes us wrong. It simply shows how much meaning, security and identity we can place in relationships without realising it. Once we can see that, we have another choice.
Sometimes the relationship or circumstance has changed, and the most useful thing we can change is the meaning we give it.
Try This: What Does This Relationship Mean?
Choose one relationship. It doesn’t have to be a difficult one.
Write down ten simple things you think or believe about that person. Then look at each one and ask: Is this something I actually know, or something I have concluded?
Finally ask: What does this relationship mean about me?
Don’t try to find the right answer. Just notice what comes up.
So far, we have looked at relationships from the perspective of separation, where they primarily exist to meet our needs. Next, we look at What Our Relationships Can Teach Us About Ourselves.
Articles in Transformational Relationships
Transformational Relationships: How Every Connection Reflects and Refines You
- Experiencing Relationship From The Perspective Of Separation
- What Our Relationships Can Teach Us About Ourselves