Relationship

By Lee Thayer

This book is about all of the kinds of relationships people can have. It is a very insightful book about how relationships emerge. But it is also about how indispensable they are to our ongoing sense of being who we are in the worlds we inhabit. We have relationships with various people. But we also have relationships with our possessions, with our pets, and with our pens and car keys. We have relationships with the foods we eat, the places we go, and the diversions we take. We have relationships with the news we attend to, the gossip we consume, and the places we are familiar with. We have relationships with our clothes, our lotions and potions, our grooming equipment, our computers and our snow shovels. Taken together, all of the relationships we have had, have today, and will have in the future attach us to our worlds in an admixture of pushes and pulls on our attention and our behavior. Metaphorically, it might visually look much like an intricate circular spider web, with us individually stuck at the core. We use the singular relationship here because we want to explore what it is that all relationships have in common: relationship.

Relationships are sticky. They are far easier to fall into than to escape from. They are often demanding, requiring our attention when we wanted to devote our attention elsewhere. The drama of misplaced keys or a balky computer can take over our lives. We have hopes for certain relationships. We can be disappointed in how they turn out. But most of the myriad relationships that affect our lives just sort of happen. If they dont serve our purposes as we think we deserve, we drop them. A piece of clothing that just doesnt look right in the light can be dropped. Thats something you cant do with your own baby. You have a relationship with your body. If youre rich, you can get a remodeling job. If youre not, you may be stuck with the body youve got.

Some relationships bring us down. Other relationships lift us up. In this book, you will learn how to create the kinds of relationships you need to get to where you want to go. The relationship you have with yourself is key. This book reveals to you how, if you get that right, most of the other relationships you live in, and by, will fall into place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524599652

Lee Thayer

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Lee Thayer.

Library of Congress Control Number:  2017904393

ISBN:  Hardcover   978-1-5245-9967-6

            Softcover     978-1-5245-9966-9

            eBook           t978-1-5245-9965-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 04/24/2017

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

754313

Contents

Introduction

Perspective #1 - Some Prerequisite Thinking

Perspective #2 - Emerging From Our Relationships

Perspective #3 - How Things (and People) Get Related to Each Other

Perspective #4 - Relationships Spring from What They Mean to Us

Perspective #5 - There Are No Inconsequential Relationships

Perspective #6 - There Are No Relationships without Risk

Perspective #7 - You – Your Most Trusted Adviser

Perspective #8 - On Relationships – Gained and Lost

Perspective #9 - On Relating Private Lives to Virtual Worlds

Perspective #10 - Our Explanations Channel Our Lives

Perspective #11 - How Explanations Become Recipes

Perspective #12 - On Becoming the Artifacts of Our Artifacts

Perspective #13 - On the Literalization of Life

Perspective #14 - Life According to Our Explanations

Relationship – A Brief Afterword

Introduction

It is in how we relate to the rest of the world and the rest of the world relates to us that we have any existence we are conscious of. We live in and by the relationships we have with others, with ourselves, and with our surrounds. Those relationships are, like breathing, taken for granted. Unless a problem arises…. We usually don’t concern ourselves with the air we breathe unless it becomes toxic or physiologically difficult. A drowning person is perhaps for the first time aware of how critical air is to his or her existence. Relationships are like that. We are not aware of how critical they are until it becomes too late. It is worth contemplating that the loss of a loved one no longer concerns the departed. But it deeply affects the survivor. The survivor is not so much grieving the departed, but his or her personal loss. The termination of a relationship, for whatever reason, affects the bereft person far more than it does anyone else. It affects not at all those who had no vested interest in that relationship. It is the vested interest that we gain or lose in a relationship.

To be conscious of a relationship, we have to have an existence that depends to some degree upon that relationship. If it seems real and substantial, we mistake it for reality. We get created and are maintained in relationships, the first kind being biological, the second kind being social. We depend largely on the natural world for our biological needs. We depend entirely on the social world and its artifacts for the needs of our self-conscious existence – for who we imagine we are.

A person who has lost her memory has lost just her ability to recollect things from her past. She has lost her identity. Our memories archive the relationships out of which we emerge as the persons we become. Take those away and we no longer know who we are. We no longer know why we are where we are and what to do about it. We are adrift in an alien world, barren of those relationships by which we normally substantiate ourselves in a world of other selves. And barren of those relationships with the things and events of an inner and outer world by which we identified ourselves. There is only one cure: to be reborn.

The unique congeries of relationships that create us as the unique persons we imagine ourselves to be are cumulative. Having one is what makes the next one more likely. We grow as persons in concert with the growth of our relationships. Children evolve noticeably out of the relationships they fall into with other people, and with the things and events of their worlds. What people and things and their pasts mean to them are made possible by those they make meaningful contact with.

What makes them necessary is that they constitute one’s identity. We always think and believe and feel and act in accordance with what things mean to us. They are the core of our existence. That core is preserved as we grow and as we cope. Once created, it is who we are that must be preserved. People will sacrifice who they are for what things mean to them. But people will rarely sacrifice who they are for who they believe they ought to be.

+++++

Every ending has to have a beginning. In order to die, you must have been alive. In order to be in pain, you have to come from being pain-free. It is not the experience of the one vs. the other. Without the one, the other would make no sense. In order to get a divorce, you first have to get married. If you have never been married, you will not be solicited to join a divorced persons’ support group. In order to become what you imagine you should be, you have to begin by being that person. As long as you cling to being who you are, you cannot be who you imagine you ought to be. Relationships are surreptitiously deceitful. They make us what we are. But they inhibit us from being who we imagine we ought to be. They bring us into a self-conscious existence. But then we become their prisoners. Who you intend to be can only be achieved by beginning to perform that person today. The ending is inherent in the beginning.

People may talk about being someone other than who they are. But that is only talk. It is used to create or maintain a relationship with the people they are talking to. Those other people might then see them as someone who sometimes wishes she were someone other than who she is. It’s a status ploy. It is in lieu of changing. You can’t maintain a relationship with people who see you as person X if you seriously want to become person Y. We create or fall victim to our relationships. Then they create us. They typically prohibit us from changing much more than superficially. That’s because we depend upon them for who we are today.

And because others depend upon them for who they are. We lose our independence in our interdependence.

In our modern culture, people have a tendency to think of relationships as neutral. Actually, they are never without consequences for your life. Those consequences may be relatively harmless. Or they may be potently harmful. How they affect your life may go unnoticed. Or they may cause you unavoidable pain and anguish. People may anticipate that the relationships they create or fall into are intended to solve their problems. They might, in some trivial sense. For example, there are many people who will put up with mental or physical abuse just to avoid being alone, as in any port in a storm. Some people are in such bad company when they are alone that they will put up with any relationship just to avoid being alone with themselves. Some relationships may or may not solve someone’s problems. But it is for the most part our relationships that cause our problems rather than resolve them.

People fall in love for different reasons. The most likely reason is simply that it is what people do. Popular songs are popular either because they are about achieving that emotional state, or losing it. You are supposed to fall in love and live happily ever after. At least that is what our fairy tales tell us. But in life the story doesn’t end there. There is life after marriages. And that life, for whatever reason, usually turns into conflict and drama and indifference. We can do without the love. But we seem unable to do without the drama. It is difficult to make a good story out of the absence of conflict. If no aims are thwarted, there is no drama in our lives. So we undertake or exploit our relationships to get some adrenalin moving in our veins. It’s as if we cannot feel alive if there is not a sufficient level of drama in our lives. This may or may not be universal. But it is fairly obvious in our modern world. Some people’s lives can become so stultifying that they are driven to create the turmoil they imagine they are missing. Those who cannot experience enough vicarious turmoil through reading and television viewing may try to create it in the social world of their relationships – sometimes making themselves victims of their own malaise.

When people get together to be together, they are not the same people they are when by themselves. They undulate and laugh for no good reason. People might go to great lengths to avoid boredom. A life of ennui is not tolerable. A life of violence or just disagreeableness may help to eliminate the frustration, if only temporarily. There may be high drama in creating or falling into a relationship. But once achieved and routinized, it may feel deadly. Which is more sustainable – love or indifference?

We are turned-on by the pursuit of some yearned-for end. We are turned-off by achieving it. What our stories tell us is that we are most alive when we passionately want something. Our stories also tell us that we begin to feel less alive when we have achieved it. It is only a purpose that outlives us that can keep us feeling alive. To live a trouble-free life seems to require bartering the lives we have for one that is trouble-free. But that soon becomes intolerable. It seems that it is our relationships that become dispensable, not our need for conflict in our lives. Paradoxically, we feel most alive when we are most at risk. It is that feeling we seek. We have to seek it with those who are available, known or not. It is only those you trust who can betray you.

+++++

There is always a sense of possessiveness in a relationship. It is my car, not the car. It is my house, not the house. It is my husband or my wife, not the husband, the wife. It is interesting that in late medieval times, married couples referred to their spouses by using the non-possessive the. Or they referred to their wife as Mrs. Douglas, their husband as Mr. Douglas. Fashion and decorum rule, even about relationships.

There was a time when co-habitation was taboo, if not a sin. Premarital sex was frowned upon. If it led to a pregnancy, one or both were dismissed from their families. Masturbation was sinful. The folklore had it that you might go blind. Homosexuality was a sin, although it became just illegal. Now it is a right. Relationships (as in courting) used to be meaningful, serious even. Now they are simply fluffy plots for television shows or commercial advertising. Now homosexuality is a right, a word that has changed the social landscape perhaps more than any other word. Those who police political correctness may have a right. Apparently the violators of the latest taboos do not. Relationships have become temporary arrangements. You are my friend as long as it serves my purposes. Relationships were essentially social institutions. They were what held things together. Seemingly, they have become a part of our entertainment ecology. Like the rest of our entertainment ecology, they are impermanent. They are more like our circuses used to be – here today, gone tomorrow, with a titillation that lingered for a few days.

It is not that prior cultural fashions were better, or that our current fashions are bad. It is just that they have changed rapidly in just a few years, keeping pace with the changes in our technologies. If you know how to do it, you can now have sex on the internet. And, since everything is assumed to be relative, who’s to say which way of doing things is better than another? It’s all only one’s opinion anyway. But it seems like, for most people, there is no longer a sense of the permanence of things. Every life becomes a contingency. Contingencies change as contingencies occur.

So in our modern worlds, to speak of relationships is not to speak of friendship as it was understood by Emerson. It is not to speak of love as it was understood by Shakespeare. It is not to speak of arriving at a commitment by a handshake. It is certainly not to speak of what some people still imagine is one’s relationship with the gods, or a God. In our modern worlds, to speak of relationships is to speak of modern relationships, underwritten more by commercial advertising and the rest of pop culture (including much of the so-called social media) than by any kind of tradition having its roots in the past. That relationships are crucial to who we become as persons in our social contexts is not scrutinized. Maybe never were. They were as natural as breathing out and breathing in. They have simply become problematic, whereas before they were what people were socialized into. Now there is no into to be socialized into. We have our freedom and our rights, never quite realizing how victimized we are by the cultural fashions of the day.

We have adapted and will continue to adapt to whatever social conditions come our way. It may be that the primary flaw in the human condition is our infinite adaptability. We can even adapt to living ad hoc.

+++++

Not only is there a sense of possessiveness in our relationships – whether with other people or our personal possessions. There is also a sense in which relationships have the flavor of belonging. Those people or things with which we have a relationship belong to us. But for them to belong to us requires that we belong to them. The more an owner loves his car, the more he will belong to it. The clothes hanging in our closets help us to remember who we are or intend to be at the beginning of every new day. People who pray do so because it is a ritual that perpetuates a sense of who they are.

People who face death together become a band of brothers. Singing together in church or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in school has the same function – just not as dire, and thus not as deeply affecting. Requited love is a way of signaling publicly that you now belong to one another. You cannot become a member of a culture or a subculture unless you ante some part of yourself to the group. If you do not represent them, that group cannot represent you. There is no free lunch until someone else pays for it. Now you are obligated to them for something similar. To belong to any culture or subculture, you have to ante in. Your ante comes in the form of adopting the protocols and the fashions that identify you as a member. Belonging is not free. You have to pay the price. To the extent you do not belong to your clique or social circle, it will not belong to you. We seem to forget that belonging is a two-way street. To belong, you have to pay your dues – whatever they might be. They are usually tacit. If you can’t figure out what they are, you can’t belong. The more obviously you have paid your dues, the more you belong. That is, the more status you will have as a member of that clique or occupational group, or military unit, or neighborhood barbeque. The more of an exemplar of the social group’s values you appear to be, the higher your status in that group. But all status comes at a price. Just as there is no free lunch, there is also no free status.

+++++

It can be very illuminating to consider the sometimes counterintuitive role of imagination in any relationship. Small children often have relationships with people or things that do not exist. They have imaginary friends (and foes, of course). What that should reveal to us but typically doesn’t is that all human or social relationships exist only in our imaginations. It is not the physical presence of another person with whom a youngster or an adult has a relationship. Social relationships exist only in the minds and thus the feelings of those who believe they have them. And what they have exists only in the form and function those relationships evolve into for the people who are involved in that relationship. That is, it only means what it means to the persons who imagine being in such a relationship.

Some kinds of relationships catch on and become hegemonic in a culture or a subculture. When they do, they constitute reality for the person who enters into them. For example, marriage has a long and varied history over the years and in different cultures. Marriage does not mean to a modern secularist what it means to a devout member of an Amish community. Nor does it mean today what it meant to our grandparents. Even Victorians took on a spouse for purposes of breeding. If there was romantic love (as we know it), that was carried on outside of the marriage. In the early history of humans, intercourse was spontaneous, or seasonal. It had little to do with love. Our cultural orientations are our cultural orientations. They are neither natural nor universal, as we might like to imagine.

The point is: relationships are created by a more or less collective imagination, created and maintained in discourse. Relationships are mental artifacts. They emerge and evolve in how people in a given culture or subculture talk about or sing about or otherwise explain them. They are tacit, which in turn means that you either understand how to have them or you don’t. People are forever experimenting with ways of thinking and being and doing in a given culture or subculture. But there are always normative ways of feeling and doing in every culture, no matter how different they may be. To be recognized as such, relationships have to be grounded in their normative parameters. Social behavior is always and everywhere proscribed and prescribed. You might seek to relate to something or someone outside of these prescriptions and proscriptions. But you may lose face or even your personhood by operating too far outside the norm. Activists have a code of conduct, just as pacifists do. It’s the price you have to pay to be recognized as such.

Relationships do not exist by any scientific measure. They exist only in the minds of the people who claim to have them. They are as imaginative as the child’s imaginary friends. They feel real. But they feel real only so long as they last, then they get re-imagined in a less positive way. By how we imagine them we create them, we nourish or malnourish them, and we are capable of destroying them. What we are capable of creating by our imaginations, we are capable of destroying by the same source. What exists in your imagination is always subject to being recreated from a different perspective.

Relationships require collaboration – or at least complicity. You can imagine a relationship with yourself. You can imagine a relationship with someone else. But consummating that relationship, however it is mutually imagined, requires an imaginary collaboration. You have a mental picture and story of someone else. That person has a mental image and accompanying story about you. Whenever and wherever those cohere, there emerges a more or less public relationship. The imaginary one is private. When it is acted upon, it becomes public – as imagined by those who want to observe it or do something about it. Anyone who is interested can harbor an interpretation of your relationships. They can be mindful of them, in some minor or major way – casual or troubling. The wide-ranging dynamics that produce social relationships involves different and sometimes contradictory perspectives. If they are normative, they are not likely to be problematic. If relationships are not normative (not sanctioned by one’s social group), they will be problematic. A marriage or other intimate relationship that does not follow the pattern of passion –> public affirmation –> indifference will be suspect.

It is always something imagined by someone that constitutes a threat to the social status quo. When it is acted upon, it becomes a real threat to the status quo. Children are rambunctious in the way they imagine things. So their imaginations must be reigned in. To be a member-in-good-standing in any social grouping, you have to be no threat to the status quo. We may try to make relationships literal, by social definition or by law. But they will remain covert and tacit. How they feel determines what people will do in their name. If a person can imagine an alternative, he or she might act it out. Heeding the status quo functions as the ticket you have to get punched to belong to the status quo.

+++++

To gain some useful insight into how these mental artifacts (such as relationships) direct our lives one way or another, we have only to consider how habits work. Casually, we refer to habits as something we have. But if you have a habit, it has you. The more that some of your habits (notice the faulty possessive) energize and drive your everyday routines, the more you belong to them rather than they belong to you. By the time you become aware that your habits are living you rather than you living them, it’s too late. Prisoners are sometimes put in leg irons to avoid their escape. Habits of thought (and feeling, being, and doing) put our minds in something like mind-irons to avoid their escaping the grip of those habits.

Children are more spontaneous than adults. That’s because they have not yet developed the habits by which their lives become routinized. In general, adult lives seem certainly less impromptu and more routine, less spontaneous and more predictable. Children are predictably more curious and often wildly creative. Once they are adults, they become predictably less curious, more in the rut of what they know than forever wondering why things are the way they are. In our culture, adults believe that the purpose of learning is to get the answer for their lives from then on. Children don’t have to know all the answers (about which they may be skeptical anyway) because adults do not come to them for the answers. Adults imagine there is a definitive answer for almost every question. They avoid questions for which they do not have a handy answer. That is a social nicety children rarely indulge in.

There may be another explanation for this radical transition – perhaps an even better one. It is that children are not yet entrapped by the assumption that they must be faithful to their pasts. They have less past to be faithful to. They do not yet know who they are or who they are supposed to be in all social circumstances. Their identities are budding. But they are not yet in full bloom. So they do not have a personal history yet that they have to be faithful to. They can be openly experimental, not guarded in social situations. But once their identities begin to