Relationships
Social Relationships are a very integral part of a person’s life. In most cases they help to improve one’s life as they help to guide a person through various phases of one’s life. We are trained to make new relations throughout our life. The way and the type of relations that we make changes throughout our lives.
There are few relations that exist when we are born like our parents, siblings and maybe few members of families. We also form few relations with other people throughout our life. It could be in the form of friends, partners coworkers etc. My emphasis will be on informal relations rather than formal relations. As children we form relationships by sharing our toys, playing and sometimes our parents/guardians force some friends to help in our development. As grown children we make friends based on the people that sit in our desks, the one with closest proximity and the ones that have the same interests as us. For children in most cases, romantic relations don’t really play a role as they are too young to comprehend the idea of love in that way. As teens we make friends with the one that we identify with or the ones that we aspire to be. Romantic relations do slowly come into play here and according to Robert Stenberg’s Theory of Love, three major factors contribute to it including passion, commitment and intimacy. When I speak of relations that children and teens form I majorly focus on informal relations rather than formal relations because they are not that predominant in their life and they spend a little space in their lives. But formal relations do exist in their life.
I am not a fully grown adult yet, maybe I will never feel like one. Because of that I am not sure how adults form relations exactly. But with the knowledge I do have, at this stage many new types of relations come into play. I think of the important ones as adults are our relations with our colleagues more popularly known as “Work Friends”. These are more formal in nature and they are more pivotal in nature. Another type of relations that do start to develop are the ones with the families of friends and partners. I think there are a mixture of both informal and formal ones. It is a mixture of both as it was introduced in a informal way but it has a formal nature at least in the start as it is based on impressing both the parties. Maybe once this threshold is crossed maybe then the relation completely becomes informal in nature.
As much I do understand about adult relations, I do believe that they are quite difficult to develop, especially in this generation. Every generation has its own set of benefits and disadvantages that it has to face. The major one for this generation is forming relations, especially as adults. As often than not some component of a relation is missing due to various factors. This could be commitment, passion or even intimacy. But what is different for this generation that makes it difficult for one to develop relations than the previous relations. I think the major challenge is how people are changing and evolving. The concept of intimacy and commitment are not that important to people as it was once upon a time. This is quite upsetting. But I do believe that is a major issue leading to many more unhappy relations.
I do believe that if concepts like intimacy and commitment are given the same importance as they were given once, I think it could be easier to hold onto relationships. But when I say this I don’t mean that intimacy and commitment should be upheld at the cost of being happy or being your own person. I believe that intimacy, commitment, individuality and happiness are four concepts that should work together rather than against one another to uphold any healthy relationship.
