Don’t get too excited for spicy content - I’m using the word ‘love’ here as a catch-all for meaningful human relationships.
Relationships are - probably - the most important thing in life. The classic test of this is to ask:
a) What were the most meaningful, fun, exciting moments in your life?
b) Did you spend those moments alone? Or with other people?
I’ve shared about 90% of my favourite moments with other people. Dates. Family celebrations. Holidays. Business successes. Even some awesome WoW raids, tbh. Difficult times are also much easier when we have support from other people.
So it’s pretty clear that the relationships we choose to be in massively impact our lives. But the weird thing is, most of us aren’t that intentional about them. We go on diets, work out, read self-improvement books, plan our careers... But most of us ‘just end up with’ life partners and friend groups, without examining our decision-making process or wondering if things could be different.
We also don’t think about how to positively tweak or renegotiate our family relationships - we just go with the flow.
Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking about how I can be more intentional about all this stuff - without getting too spreadsheety 🤓. I’ve also read/listened to more podcasts and books about relationships and human connection. Here are some of my initial thoughts.
A lot of my advice about friendship boils down to this: people are nice but you have to go first.
90% of the time, when we take the initiative - like “hey there’s a cool movie on at the cinema, want to go next Thursday?” - we’ll get a positive reaction, because most people are basically pretty nice + want to have a fun time. So strike up conversation, host a dinner party, send follow-up texts to people you’d like to hang out with more.
Don’t sit at home waiting for someone else to make the first move.
We should also be intentional about keeping in touch with good friends. I try to prioritise this over non-essential work, gym sessions, solo Netflix binges, etc by rearranging my calendar if a friend wants to meet up. I’d recommend having a spreadsheet or Notion page to keep track of when you last contacted each of your friends, and check it every now and again. Calendly also makes it easy for people to ‘book’ slots in your calendar for meetups.
We can also make a habit of hosting regular meetups (like a pub quiz or board game night) where anyone can show up. At university, I had a door wedge for my room so that people could come and chat any time without having to knock.
Obviously we can’t choose our family, but we can think about tweaking our family relationships to make them more positive. That starts with recognising good and bad patterns, then addressing them.
One of the most important things I’ve learned about family relationships comes from Alfie Kohn’s book Unconditional Parenting. ‘Conditional parenting’ is where you focus on your child’s behaviour and give (or withhold) love and positivity based on what you perceive as their achievements or failures. This leads to kids feeling things like good grades = I’m worthy of love and bad grades = I’m unworthy of love. Leads to high achievement, but messes up your relationship in the long term.
Unconditional parenting is way better and pretty simple: your kids know that you love them no matter what they do (even if you sometimes get annoyed or worried). Then they’re free to have their own real interests, without everything they do being a desperate search for love and attention.