I sent several messages to someone online, nothing serious. Just making observations about some things they had posted online and after 4 or 5 messages I said something along the lines of "Most of my relationships go in the opposite direction of this one" as a joke.
The response was "This is not a relationship" and my response was "I was using the term loosely. You have a relationship with a person you're waiting at the same stop light as, on some level."
I guess I had never really dived into that concept before. I had thought about it a little bit maybe, but then I really started to think about it. We do develop mini-relationships all of the time. Most relationships will last under five minutes, but truthfully we aren't always aware of how to identify those.
I get what the person I was messaging meant, and her intent of the message was right; this was not a "relationship" in the classical sense. This wasn't someone I was dating or even trying to date or had even met. This was just a person I had interacted with. We exchanged words. It was no more of a relationship than what you might expect from your waiter at Applebee's.
We start these kinds of relationships all of the time. In the movie (or book if you prefer) Fight Club, the Narrator describes "Single-serving friends." That during his travels, especially airplane rides, it was just a pre-determined amount of time you would be forced into a relationship with the person sitting next to you and then it was over. Of course, this is not always the case.
In Fight Club, it became much more than a single-serving friend. But the gist of the idea is correct, and sometimes a single-serving friend can last even shorter than an airplane ride. How often do you even really speak to the person sitting next to you? Do you ever speak to a stranger on the bus? To the person behind you in line at the grocery store?
Probably not. But once there is a mutual awareness of each others existence you've developed a tiny relationship. You don't have a relationship with Barack Obama. You know of his existence, but he doesn't know of yours, therefore you aren't interacting, exchanging, helping, or deterring one another. However, what if the person next to you on the bus has a heart attack? What would you do?
Whether you help them or ignore them, you're making a decision about this person whether it affects either one of you or not. You are thrown into these mini-relationships constantly and they rarely will affect you, but sometimes they will change you.
Let's say that on average you interact with 5 new people a day. To me, this is a conservative estimate. Very conservative. You might say "I haven't interacted with 5 people this entire week" but is that really your average week? Are you just an eccentric recluse? If you go to the store, go to a restaurant, go to a Starbucks, go to work, go to school, call your credit card company and speak to a customer service representative, leave the house, how many people are you really interacting with? Maybe you spend an entire weekend at home but there will still be days where you might interact with 30 people.
But for arguments sake lets say you average 5 a day. That's 1,825 new interactions a year. I like round numbers and I think I was being conservative, so let's call it 2,000. Two thousand tiny to major relationships and interactions every year.
Let's say that 99% of those mean very little. A nod to a stranger walking down the street. A door you open for an elderly couple. An angry driver that you cut off in traffic. They happened, they past, they'll never come back to you. 99%. That extra 1% leaves you with a full 20 people that won't be single-serving friends. 20 people.
You can never be sure who those 20 people will be. The stranger walking down the street that becomes a friend. The elderly couple that gives you a job. The angry driver that smashes into your rear bumper. The handshake that becomes a spouse. 2000 opportunities to make 20 important relationships every year.
So every time you do interact with another person, how will you treat them?
Every time I make a call into a company for customer service, I try to treat the rep with as much respect as possible. Even if I am angry and call in to complain about a mistake they made, or a misunderstanding, or an interruption in service, I know not only that it is not the CSR's fault, but that they will interact with 100's of people a day. Most of those people probably do treat them like shit. I don't need to add to that. I try to be the best customer that they'll talk to every day, and we mutually benefit. I get fees waived all the time, and I hopefully bring a smile to their face.
If everybody tries to do something for everybody else, then everybody wins. When you take the chance and believe you don't need anyone else to get where you need to be, you're gambling that you're perfect. How many perfect people have you met? If you're 30 years old, and interacted with 60,000 people in your life, I guarantee 0% of those people were perfect. You don't need to be a math major to know the answer to that.
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