The Echoes of the Mind (144) Relationships


We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone. ~ American media maven Orson Welles

Humans bond through communication: sharing experiences and thoughts. Interpersonal relationships are emergent patterns: formed by redundant, interlocked message cycles, continually negotiated and co-defined into a culture.

Human relationships are like a dance of interactions situated in time and characterized by constant change, fluidity, and movement. ~ Aubrey Fischer and & Katherine Adams

All relationships are defined by the dynamics of interpersonal sharing, giving, and taking. Emotional bonds are established and sustained through these transactions, which are effected via communication as much as by deeds. Communication establishes the parameters which bound interpersonal connection, especially dominance or equality.

Women get things done by building relationships. Men build relationships while working on tasks with each other.

Without growth via new infotainment relationships grow stale. Without interactivity relationships become dormant.

Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but it does nothing for the vitality of a relationship. Instead, by substituting memory for interactivity, a relationship risks decay, even as emotional commitment may stay strong.

The sharing of emotions most strongly binds people together. The more intense the shared emotional fervor, the tighter the bond. While mutual affinity is the strongest glue, shared pain also bonds.

Painful experiences can promote cooperation within social groups. ~ Australian psychologist Brock Bastian et al

Those that share harrowing experiences feel a mutual bond, regardless of personal dissimilarities that might otherwise preclude such emotional conviction. Vocationally, combat veterans, police, and fire fighters close rank owing to fear and stress in shared experiences.

Friends may be a kind of “functional kin.” ~ American sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis & American social scientist James Fowler

Though similarities outweigh differences, males and females establish same-sex relationships of different timbre. Women typically establish closer, more intimate relationships than men.

The bonds between men are generally slighter, as males are less expressive, at least in those emotions naturally associated with bonding. When males express intimacy, it often looks more like aggression than affection: they may punch or slap one another, or play fight, much like canine pups.

In same-sex relationships, whereas men do together, woman are together.

From a man’s perspective, there is no distinction between emotionally expressive communication and task communication; sharing a task or activity is expressive communication. ~ Peter Anderson

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First impressions are the fundamental drivers of our relationships. In a sense, it’s a little like the principle of chaos theory, where the initial conditions can have a profound impact on the eventual outcome. ~ Frank Bernieri

How people perceive one another determines the quality of their relationships. Once a person labels another as possessing certain traits, consistency is assumed; but this assumption of constancy is seldom so warranted. Human behavior is heavily context dependent. People may behave much differently depending upon the situation and those involved. The tendency to assume consistency in others is a heuristic that affords a sense of predictability, however ill-founded.