Relationships are yucky, and must be so.

It comes as a big surprise to me that we, the human race, are the worst at the things that we should probably be the best at among all kinds of species in the planet - relationships. Basically being the stuff of life, over this many years of existence, we should at least have some hold over their hold over us. There should be a mandatory class taught in schools about their nature and how they work. But, so far, it's our biggest fail.     

They have a natural design - one that works itself out in context of the needs that need to be served. So if A and B have certain needs that play out between two people over time, they form a relationship that serves that need. That context justifies it. There is no great handbook of relationship formats, but there is a universality to most basic essential needs of people that specifically include people in our lives over long periods of time. And there is no great handbook of values of the sacred values we need to keep over these relationships unless they are based on how we would like it to be for us on the other side, and we all have certain basic lines we draw at respect and other such things.

With these two sets of rules, which there is no handbook for, relationships make themselves, and, yes, all relationships have motives (those needs I talked about earlier) without which they wouldn't even need to exist. When they don't have motives, it's called courtesy. Courtesy is driven by being nice, which, again, is based on the principle of what you would have done to you if you were on the other side of the interaction.  These are usually interactions you are not as familiar with. It serves those values which if violated end in hurt and rudeness. It is a good fallout of civilized interaction. It is temporary. It doesn't serve a need. Usually when it outdoes its course, it starts to get dry, something that becomes painfully obvious.

Now, motives are necessary to purpose and don't have the pseudo-moralistic stigma that is attached to them. We can't be all that charitable for reason of lack of as many resources to be charitable with and just plain wastage of time on over-courtesy. All long term and default relationships are based on need and can't exist without it. A relationship is not the cherry on the cake. It is the cake itself. With a good, well, baked cake, you don't really need any cherries on top. And a bad cake with a cherry on top is just a bad cake, nothing more.

A relationship is also strained when there isn't enough resource to meet needs symbiotically, economically, emotionally or just physical energy wise. Yes, it's as cruel a system as that. When it can't flow, it won't flow. A lot of times when that happens, we romanticise it but that won't do. We take loans of these resources sometimes when there is nothing to take from, and dig ourselves into the ground even further and then blame relationships, or the people in them, or life, or fate - but the fact is that relationships are yucky.

They are yucky because they are about allowing people to bloom, well, because people are bloomworthy - all of us, each one of us. No seed knows what it will be like till it makes it way up from the top soil, out towards the sun. It finds itself both in its very intrinsic nature to be what it is (and nothing more than it can be) and in how it gathers strength from its surrounding (sun, nutrients, soil etc.). The irony here is that we have a sorta-kinda great rule book already for these things which doesn't take into account the dynamics of what I've mentioned above - all the complexity of the seed blooming along with other plants and seeds, blooming themselves as well.

In this case, as opposed to a seed, blooming is an always-state. You don't stop blooming. You don't bloom and die, like a flower. The irony rings in when we think we bloom and die, and that when have, we deserve the upper hand in it all like some sort of status thing. The great leveller in a healthy relationship is when we don't assume this bloom-and-die stage. If we do, something inside of us has died for which we want one way support. That means our own lives are out of our own control.


The non-assumption of the bloom-and-die stage gives very relationship its life. It's not a drip-like support system. It avoids over-courtesy. Its instills confidence. It truly builds relationships to something that actually uplifts us and makes it into things that we do more stuff with. We won't be keeping relationships so that we can live on handouts of over-romanticised love and concern. Relationships will always be as strong, or weak (read life support inducing) as be the sum of individuals in them. The ones that are give us rock solid stability, which is what we need, rather than those handouts. Our self-identifying blooming selves are the only contributors to this stability, and, when so, we'd be on a journey of constant self-discovery together that makes none of us a pain in the ass to anyone else in our relationships. We'll break those boxes that we have and the world has set for ourselves to where we can remove the weird life support system logic they're built on.


Let us embrace relationship yuckiness because in it is what relationships have the best to offer. There is no rule book. We make the rules as easily as we break them. The only rule we need to follow is that we don't yank any of the rules back and forth according to convenience, or so much that we abuse them (both or either adding to the same effect). Any rule must have a yanking limit. We should create to sustain, build, progress and feed, something that we can build off after we're doing building that. Yanking rules at convenience doesn't help that.