Why Everyone Should Be Learning About Relationship Intelligence

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of caring about the relationships in your life. There is a misconception that those connections that the most important to us must withstand all challenges while the others who are not as integral to our well being might not matter that much. Both of these statements discard the complexities of relationships and our basic needs as well.

When our basic needs like safety, food, and shelter are provided our relationship become the primary source of concern. Relationships and their quality are what determines the quality of our lives since they are the primary blocks that we build our lives off of. This is why more and more people are studying the dynamics between different relationships and trying to come up with tangible solutions for common challenges instead of focusing on the root of the problem with no way out.

Relationships on the community level

One of the most famous couple’s therapists across the world, Esther Perel, often mentions in her speeches that we ask partners to satisfy all of our needs, while before we would need an entire village to provide us with those things. The structure of our communities is so different from those that were present even 3-4 decades ago that it's no wonder so many of us are lost and feeling overwhelmed. The communities are an integral part of feeling included and accepted, which is a need that everyone needs to satisfy. Where earlier we would have less freedom to be individual, we had the sense of community and belonging that even though often suffocating provided the safety necessary to move forward and feel secure in your place. You don’t often see large communities in the modern western world.

It has become a cliche that in big cities people could be living with the same neighbors for decades without ever having said hi to them. The isolation that most people feel nowadays is not entirely their fault.

Some people have been lucky enough to be born into families that cultivate their friend groups and relatives and teach their kids how to form human friendship but others are deprived of it simply because of the circumstances of modern times.

While the freedom and the right to explore individuality that comes with the modern attitude towards communities and living, the gap still needs to be filled with connection and belonging. It’s easy to idealize the life when you’re completely unbound by anyone or anything but in reality, it becomes a huge source of existential dread.

Isolations and it’s negative effects

As the author of one of the best-selling books about depression, Lost Connections, Johann Hari says the isolation can become a trigger for depression. At this point it's harder to find a person who hasn’t experience anxiety and depression at least to a degree, than it is to find a person that doesn’t struggle with these issues. Isolation is not the natural state of being that humans are used to and the modern set up contributed to this way of living.

Relationships and their importance goes way beyond these relationships. They provide us with the support and encouragement that we need to live and actually enjoy it. According to American Psychological Association isolation can even kill a person.

Often times people give their full selves to work or their studies and isolate themselves because the gains that come from these very activities are much more easy to grasp. There is no way that one can substitute for the other, it’s the much thought after balance and harmony of work with free time and relationships that are so sought after that people are looking for every day.

Relationship intelligence might sound like a made up for but it’s just a term to describe basically a set of tools we use in our everyday lives to deal with hardships in those relationships and to learn to cultivate them with intentions. That could be relationships with your family members, your partner, your friends or your co-workers.

Ever since a young age we constantly hear that relationships are hard. Which while true, doesn’t mean that they have to stay that way. In some cases, it’s pointless to try fixing some relationships because the other person is not on board with it at that point your hands are tied. But the point is that all relationships can be fixed if there is motivation on both ends.

Dynamics between people can be intense, toxic or fluctuating. Relationship intelligence does not just mean rationalizing your feelings or the feelings of others. It promoted the effort and willingness to accept responsibility for things that you could have done differently. It requires open conversations which often are not a part of family dynamics. The concept of understanding each other without having to speak, or assuming that family means forgiving each other even if the other person is not sorry or assuming things without checking in with other people because that’s how truly great relationship work has no actual basis.

If we want to break out of the cycle of unfulfilling relationships the first assumption that needs to go away is the one that other people should have it all figured out and should understand all aspects of you at any time.

I think it would be nice to rephrase the notion that relationship is work to relationships are effort.

We talked about isolations already but there is another aspect of it that needs to be discussed as well. Often when we get into relationships, we expect the person to satisfy all of social needs, which is too much pressure and also an impossible thing to ask of another person. Its something along the lines of don’t put all your eggs in one basket. But it's less feared-based in his case. You should rely exclusively on your partner to fulfill your cycle needs first because it is impossible but secondly because it creates often toxic dynamics between couples. Getting a partner doesn’t mean that you suddenly don’t need your friend or that you should ignore your family from now on. All these relationships are what makes for you as a person. Isolating yourself from the rest of the world and fully melting into your relationship often leads to losing perspective and losing yourself in the process. Every relationship where you are not an independent entity first and the part of the relationship second is doomed to become suffocating. And while this seems like an easy thing to process it’s sometimes very hard to do in real life.

Relationships as a method of self-reflection

Some of us have trouble keeping the necessary distance or nurturing ourselves beyond our relationships. Looking for solutions to your problems through other people is never a good idea. And the only way to break this cycle is to acknowledge the problem. Whether that is being too clingy, being too distant and emotionally unavailable it’s unfair to expect other people to fix us and deal with us while we refuse to work on ourselves so we can be better partners, a better friend and most importantly our better selves.

Some people take great pride in their toxic habits and base their individuality on those habits. While it's understandable when that happens during the teenage years far too many people take the same attitude into their adult life and go about looking for people who won’t put up boundaries to their toxic behaviors so they can feel empowered, even if that happens subconsciously. But what we can rely on our loved ones to do is to help us see what psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb calls the “blind spots”. Since we grow up almost never looking at ourselves from a neutral perspective, which can be incredibly hard to do, most of us need other people to guide us in the direction of improvement.

We might not understand why some patterns in our relationship and lives, in general, keep repeating but more often than not it’s our own habits. It takes a special person to point it out to you, gently and not offensive what those blind spots are for us. Being able to do that without making the other person feel attacked is also a part of the relationship intelligence toolset. Relationships are the number one thing that motivates us to change for the better. Sometimes those motivations are fueled by wrong reasons and sometimes they come from a place of hatred or anger and while they often serve as additional fuel to the ongoing turmoil inside our heads it can be a starting point.

That’s why as we do with all other parts of our lives we need more awareness of these dynamics and coping tools to make a relationship successful. It takes practice and a level of empathy to sympathize with others who are also not experts on these topics.

People are not always consistent with their feelings and behavior that is natural. The thing that relationship intelligence can help us discover is that most of these challenges can be dealt with and they are just a temporary thing and don’t always have to define the relationship entirely.

AS more people are getting familiar with the perks of having and using relationship intelligence, the more accessible these tools become. The digital sphere has a lot to do with it, as in any other sphere or industry and for what it’s worth it is a great way to learn and grow even if you don’t have the finances to attend overpriced seminars or afford personal therapy. While for some that might be necessity I would double check before assuming that’s the case.

A lot of our problems can be solved with little effort if we find the courage to admit to them in the first place. This can be an eyeopener not only for those looking to improve the quality of their relationships but also for those who wish to know themselves better. Relationships are what shaped us from the very first day of being alive and we carry those influences with us, sometimes unknowingly. They can be positive, neutral or negative and with deep introspections comes the embracement of the good, acceptance of the neutral and willingness to work on the negative.