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Chapter 6
The Meaning of Relationships

When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
Japanese proverb

Your personality influences the way you relate to people and the
types of connections you prefer. In turn, the types of people you
have interacted with in your past have influenced your personality.
This chapter, and the chapters that follow, are an exploration of relationships
and the way you operate within them.

Relationships Are Everywhere

Why are relationships important? Almost everything we do, think,
and feel involves other people. According to psychologists, we
spend an average of 77 percent of our waking hours with other individuals.
Even when we are not in the presence of other people,
we spend a large portion of our time thinking about them, wondering
about them, and dreaming about them. Relationships are everywhere.
For this reason, understanding our relationships - how they form,
how they change, how they limit and benefit us - is one of the most
important topics we can learn about.
What does it mean, to have a relationship? It is not only that we
have a relationship with our partner. We also have 'relationships'
with our friends, parents, relatives, bosses, and colleagues. We even
share a relationship with the postman, the local baker, and the
waiter and waitress at the restaurant around the corner. Such interactions
can also be called 'relationships', because there are unwritten
laws and assumptions about how we are expected to interact with
these individuals.

Every social interaction can be considered a relationship.

When a waiter comes to your table, hands you a menu and announces,
"Hello, my name is Jack. I'll be your waiter today. What
would you like to drink?", you typically don't jump up, extend your
hand for a handshake, and reply, "Hello Jack, it's a pleasure to meet
you. My name is Ken". Instead, you abide by the unspoken assumptions
of the relationship. Namely, that Jack has been told by his
boss to introduce himself whenever he comes to a new table, and
his main intention is to find out what you want to eat. These unwritten
laws about what is expected in an interaction tell us how we
should act within each relationship.
Relationships are an important topic to think about not only because
of their quantity, but also because of their quality. The context
and quality of our relationships can change the meaning of each
and every experience we have. For example, part of what makes a
clumsy act or a foolish statement embarrassing is not the act or
statement itself, but having someone else observe it. The extent to
which you feel embarrassed depends not only on your personality,
but also on how comfortable or uncomfortable you feel with the
observer's personality and that observer's reaction. Similarly, what
creates the joy of accomplishment? Knowing we did something
well makes us feel good, but the thing that feels the best is when
we get to tell the story to other people and see their reactions. Would
you bother taking photographs on your next vacation if you knew
that nobody except you would look at the photographs when you
returned? Other people change the meaning of our experiences.
The third (and probably most important) reason why relationships
- particularly partnerships - are important to think about is that one
of the major influences on our physical health is how happy we are
within our relationships. Research on relationship happiness and
long-term health consequences has found that there is a direct link
between relationship compatibility and good health. An unhappy
partnership increases people's chances of getting sick by 35 percent
and shortens their lifespan by an average of four years. People who
are involved in unhappy relationships are 2.1 times more likely to
catch colds, 3.4 times more likely to seek chiropractic treatment for
back aches, and 2.7 times more likely to have stomach disorders,
compared to their peers. When we consider such statistics, it becomes
clear that thinking about the quality and nature of our relationships
is important. It is important that you surround yourself
with people you like and benefit from.

Link to this test: http://www.personality100.com/page/partner.xml?partnerid=SeUS&gclid=CP7p5bjYwIgCFRhLYwodVRvMLQ