Social Engineering - Part 2

Here is Part 1, in case you missed it.

Things change over time. People change. Adapt. Evolve. In high school my goal was to be friends with everyone in the school, but a decade and a half later it's far more important to build closer, more intimate connections with a much smaller group of people. Trouble is, the more time you spend with people and really get to know them, you either discover there's a solid foundation of common ground on which to continue to build the friendship, or you realize that the relationship just keeps turning in tight circles, with limited hope for developing into anything richer and more meaningful.

That's where I've figured out I stand a better chance of success with a little social "engineering" on my part. After all the good times and all the wasted time, I'm actively analyzing the foundations my relationships are built on, calculating what I put into them versus what I'm getting out of them, and then I do the same but from the other person's perspective. "If I put less ______ into this relationship, will the relationship dwindle? Is there equal active participation?" I question myself. Recently I've noticed that I may have let feelings get in the way of being honest with myself about the quality of certain relationships. It's in my nature to be loyal, often fiercely so, and I let myself be taken advantage of. Well no more! Slowly I'm becoming more comfortable in addressing those unhealthy relationships and helping them evaporate sooner rather than later, hopefully withou hurting anyone in the end. Aside from mentioning it here, I try to remove myself from the situation in a way that the other party won't really even notice. And how sad that they usually don't notice.

Since everyone's life is following a different course, and we're all moving at different speeds, is it inevitable that relationships will fizzle out eventually? What's the component of the relationship that can prevent that from happening? Or has the notion of the relationship changed so much in our modern world that life-long friendships are becoming a thing of the past, forever lost to our ever shortening attention spans? My mom still regularly keeps in touch with her friends and roommates from college (the ones that are still alive, anyway), an impressive time span of almost 50 years! Seriously, is that even possible nowadays, even with so many forms of immediate communication readily available?

During one of my silent drives I came to the conclusion that the average length of my non-family relationships is about 4 years, after which time we all just drift apart. Most often it's a great distance that sets the comradeship drift in motion, but it's the local and lost connections that trouble me. The ones that have dissolved into the continuous torrent of work and private life that I find myself thinking about, and analyzing hoping to find out why it happened so that I can break the cycle before it happens to my current relationships that I've found value and possible balance in. And, like I mentioned before, all of my non-family relationships are found in current and (recent) former coworkers. Probably not the best formula for success, huh?

I know I should probably start striking out and looking to build relationships with people outside of work. It's just so much easier to bond with the people you work with because work is a huge common denominator and you're never without something to talk about. I'll admit I feel intimidated at the thought of trying to build a friendship from scratch, and I don't know if I'm at a point in my life where I have the confidence to do it.

So for now, I'm just going to make sure that I'm being the best person I can and offering the best friendship I can to the people who mean the most to me, even though I know that history is working against us. And I'll continue to keep reevaluating the balances of the relationships, looks for ways to make minor adjustments to keep things in balance when necessary. It take two people to make a relationship work, but it only takes one to make it not. I'll just have to cut my losses from the one-sided relationships, move on, and hope that seeing these people around the campus and town from time to time won't be an issue.

Kenny Rogers sang, "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away and know when to run." That's a pretty good metaphor for relationships, every one is a gamble. But unlike poker, you really only win when it's a draw.