Building Relationships
Tagged as: Dec 31I’ve come to notice recently that relationships are very similar to a house of cards.
Alright they’re not always like a house of cards, they very much can be in certain ways. When one is just starting to get to know another person, there is a lot of feeling out in conversation. Both people need to be talking and questions need to be asked. This is some basic knowledge about relationships.
Photo courtesy of flickr user privatenobbyAlmost more importantly than how to build a relationship, though, is how easy it is to destroy it. It’s important to know how relationships can be destroyed because that is the only way that it can be avoided. It seems to me that I can very easily liken the building of a relationship to the creation of a house of cards. For both creations it takes far greater time and effort to build them up than it takes to destroy them. With the house of cards all you need is an inadvertent swipe of the hand or even an exhaled breath to cause it all to come tumbling down. With relationships (whether friendships, romantic relationships, or otherwise) a simple outburst, a snide comment, a hurtful action, or even an ill-advised joke can undo all of the time and effort involved in developing a relationship.
I think that whether you’ve been on the receiving end of a one of these relationship destroyers or whether you’ve dished one out yourself, you know that they’re almost never worth it. Unfortunately I think that most of the time people don’t even know what they’ve done. They can’t see it because it’s not visual, it’s within the person. Take a look around and you’ll see cards everywhere.
I’ve definitely seen my share of failed relationships and friendships, even when they are not my own others seem to get dragged in anyway. My friend is about to go through her second divorce. There’s a key rule I live by that she doesn’t seem to get.
If you ever have to ask “is this relationship right for me?” It isn’t.
That’s a really interesting rule, and I appreciate you sharing it. I’ll definitely have to tuck that one away where it will probably get pulled out at some random time as “something that I’ve heard.”
Relationships do take effort and trust. I think that relationships shouldn’t be thought of as “failures” when they end. Like anything else, they are lessons and sometimes painful ones. Of course, you must figure out what lesson can be learned!
To add to Anne’s comment, if you feel the urge to question a relationship, it’s probably your intuition waving a red flag. I’ve had friendships fade as people change and that’s one thing. Except for romantic relationships, I haven’t had any type of dramatic end to my relationships in as long as I can remember.
I’m a big believer in communication. If I had built up trust in someone and that trust appeared to have been broken, I would ask what was going on. Then again, I’m not a snap-decision, door-slamming-ultimatum-screaming person.
Anyway, my thought is that relationships are not a house of cards - the strength comes from 2 people involved. If most of my relationships tended to end abruptly, I’d start to wonder at what was going on within myself.
Has something happened that you have come this belief?
You have some good points. It’s true that relationships aren’t necessarily a failure when they end. And even though I didn’t explicitly say that, I guess it was implied by my analogy. I definitely see that relationships are lessons, whatever the outcome.
Hm well I wrote this entry because I was noticing a few instances where things like a side comment, a too loud comment, or a sarcastic remark undermined a far greater amount of work spent building up the relationship. Not that the negative action necessarily destroyed it, but it just weighed so much more in comparison to the good deeds: the sincere inquiries, the encouraging remarks, etc.
Plus I had recently tried out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_stacking. However, I thought that the house of cards was a better analogy because it was more common.
So really the entry probably wasn’t as extreme (relationship failure, ultimatums, etc) as you read it. But I definitely see how you could have thought that I was writing about those things. I like a lot of your observations in light of that reading, though. Seeing it more clearly (hopefully) through this comment, what do you think?
I can definitely see the analogy in that the hurtful things sort of make a huge impact for their size. Like you said one little side remark can really, really pack an emotional punch. But I don’t know about the rest, especially the ratio of time spent building the relationship to destroying it…sigh…
Yeah I guess that you’re probably right that not all of this post is always applicable. It seemed like a good analogy at the time anyways.
I think that you hit right on my main point with the fact that some small action or remark can cause a huge mess.
All I know is that I, for one, mess up far too often!
Don’t we all!