Relationship quotas December 20, 2007
Everyone has a relationship quota, Its a need inside us, it’s how much we need to relate to others. It’s governed by how much we can give in relationships. We will fill this need any way we can, as soon as we can usually because lonlieness is bad, and communion is good – but is that the best way?Most of the time we interact with people, we fill our quota on those that cross our path, and those we are lucky enough to interact with; this is a passive relational method, what we should be doing is filling our daily/weekly relationship quota with people we select with our minds before our hearts get involved. We want to select friends who have the characteristics we desire, I call this an active relational method. For we don’t just want what we get do we?
Attribute Goals
A way of doing it is write a list of goal attributes in the type of people we want to interact with, and give them points. eg charity worker 50 pts; likes the colour green: 20 points etc, and score ourselves each week on how many relationship points we gain, so that we actually seek the people who will give us more points. As a result of this we will end up with more meaningful relationships.
Depth
That’s great surely but 1 effective relationship is better than 1000 innefective ones?
To add to this method we could score on how far we progress relationships with measurable goals , eg shared a cup of coffee, 5 pts, hugged 10 points, gave me money 20 points, you would multiply the attribute goals by the depth to get your score.
Fast track to trust and depth in relationships
“If we never ask of our friends we will never know them.”
Me: Just then.
Why don’t we fast track relationships by asking for more from our friends – sound weird? While most of us are independent that we don’t need anything at all; needing and being needed is what all relationships are about, so naturally if we can speed up the cycle of needing and being needed, we can speed up the depth of a relationship. It doesn’t matter what we ask for or that we can fulfill our own needs, the important part of asking others is that it’s a building block of trust, and we will have a platorm of tested trust in reserve before we need to rely on it. We can judge where the relationship is at by what requests our friends fulfill for us. It doesn’t matter what we ask for, as long as it’s relevant to our needs and we can assign a score to it. As soon as the need has been fulfilled, we should return the favor ASAP to complete the cycle and build on the trust, then we will have a deeper/stronger relationship because there has been trust, tension, and release/fulfillment between the parties in another cycle. The important part here is keep short accounts or it will backfire. This method needs to be started small. A great place to start is just requesting a conversation with somebody, and rewarding them with entertainment, a joke or a listening ear, start there and build it.