Some cliche analogy isn't where this post is going. Instead, I want to share a comparison I often use to talk about the choices we make and actions we take in our relationships. Analogy is useful for teaching, and the big-picture comparison I use to talk about relationships is gardening.
To make my point that relationships are basically like tomato plants, I'm going to post a 5-part series on why building good relationships is like growing a garden. Each post will deal with one of the five following characteristics of both relationship building and gardening:
They require knowledge.
They require ongoing tending.
They present their fair share of pests, annoyances, and hassles.
They should result in something that feeds you.
I'm going to kick off the series by addressing the first point:
Building Relationships and Growing Gardens both Require Knowledge
I tried to grow cilantro once. It was a miserable failure. I was mystified by my inability to grow cilantro because I was under the impression that growing it was about as easy as growing a wild onion (i.e., it's easy to be successful by accident). Apparently, that is not the case.
So, the question is: why did I fail? The answer is: because I didn't know what the blazes I was doing.
It's my feeling that most people attempt to manage relationships in the same way that I attempted to grow cilantro - with the misguided assumption that they are natural and they will essentially grow themselves. We come to this impression because most of us have had relationships forged for/with us for a very long time with little thought, work, or input of any sort on our parts. We form relationships with our parents, siblings, classmates, neighborhood kids, etc. We meet people, tell them things about ourselves, we like the same things, we become friends, and tah-dah - instarelationship.
That our relationships are forged for us for most of our formative years sets us up, I think, to assume that we inherently know how to form, grow, and maintain relationships. That assumption is as problematic as my assumption that I can grow cilantro because it's a plant and plants grow by themselves all the time. When I say it like that, it sounds slightly crazy that we all think we just get how to be in relationships.
Here's the truth: we have to learn how to do relationships the same way we need to learn how to grow cilantro or tomatoes. Part of learning means understanding that why an action (giving a plant too much sun, or yelling in a conflict) results in one outcome or another (plant death, or hurt and anger). I am positive that had I known the first thing about how to plant cilantro, I would have been more successful than I was. Similarly, if we want to grow relationships, we need an education about how to do so.
There are any number of ways to educate yourself. Take classes in communication or social psychology to understand what scholars have learned about relationships. Seek out relationship coaching or couples therapy to learn about how to interact with one another more fruitfully. Read a relationship blog.
Better yet, you should learn about your partner. Talk to your partner about how something they do in a conflict, for example, affects you (and vice versa). Deliberately try communicating differently to see if you get a different outcome (because whatever the outcome is, you've learned something). Talk to each other about how your experiments are going and adapt your communication to what you've learned about one another.
Whatever you learn, how ever you learn it, you should be learning it mindfully. We improve our odds of having successful relationships when we are deliberate and purposeful about learning what we need to in order to address our most important relationship concerns.
In retrospect, it occurs to me that I never googled how to grow cilantro. How easy that would have been. Instead, I embarked on an adventure armed with nothing but a desire for fresh cilantro all the time. I ended up with nothing to show for it but frustration. Be better about approaching your relationships than I was about approaching gardening. If you do, you will amass knowledge and information that will help you plan better, acquire more skills, and have more tools in your repertoire to be able to succeed at building solid relationships.
Stay tuned for Part II.
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