The heartfelt art of meaningful relationships

Nurturing connections with purpose, value, and understanding

I once was in an abusive relationship, and I was the abuser. I was terrorizing the poor lady with my oppressive demands and mandates, burdening her with my crippling fears and insecurities, making my problems hers. To my eternal regret, I was verbally and psychologically abusive to her, taking her love for granted, forcing her to be a punching bag for my inner demons. I was a horrible boyfriend to her, and I wasn’t worthy of her patience, understanding, and love. I didn’t even deserve the fear she felt for me: I was abusive because I was hopelessly immature and insecure, unworthy of consideration, let alone the acknowledgement of being feared. Thankfully, that relationship ended; she was finally free and wiser from her mistake, and I had earned costly education - the kind of learning you never stop paying for.

What really went wrong? I had many years to ponder…

How are successful, meaningful, lasting, and mutually beneficial relationships made?

Reflections

I now choose to nurture only a few personal, social, and professional relationships. Quality comes at the cost of quantity, and vice versa. But this wasn’t always the case.

I used to maintain relationships based on entitlement and one-way communication. I sought to take what I wanted and only give what was easiest for me to give, regardless of what others might have wanted. I didn’t pause to wonder for a moment whether what others wanted was something different to what I wanted to give to them. I hadn’t considered that I would have grown as an individual simply by regarding the wants of others; shocking, I know…

I used to always be suspicious of people; I still am, but now I give them the benefit of the doubt first before condemning them from the get-go. It’s an explanation - not an excuse - but I had been exploited in my younger years, so I used to broad-stroke everyone. “They’re all out to get me,” I thought, so I wasn’t willing to give others what they wanted from me. And then I presumed to wonder why I wasn’t getting much value from my relationships either. And the more frustrated I got, the more of a deliberately self-centered asshole I became. I became just like those who had exploited me in the past; I became what I hated. I should’ve been more frustrated with my self, the one thing I could control.

Accountability

Regardless of how life had shaped me, I was still responsible for my own failings. Indeed, my failings had randomly befallen me, so I was not to blame for what I happened to be; but I was still accountable for what I choose to do with those failings. There is indeed such a thing as ‘victim of circumstance,’ but how we manage our victimhood is our responsibility, and no one else’s; expecting others to mitigate our affliction for us makes them the victim, and us the villain.

We are not to blame for who we came to be, but we are responsible for how we act regardless of who are are.

Personal self-accountability is the bedrock of successful and meaningful relationships. It serves as the foundation from which the artful principles of meaningful relationships emerge.

Holding yourself accountable means you possess dignity, integrity, and a clear moral framework from which you derive your identity. It means you believe in yourself enough to hold my actions to a higher standard.

Humility

To attain personal self-accountability, you must first be humble. To be humble, you must first possess unwavering self-esteem; your self-esteem is not compromised by you not taking yourself too seriously. Humility is the exact opposite of insecure arrogance and needy narcissism. Arrogance and narcissism come from a place of crippling insecurity as a needy overcompensation for it. Arrogant and narcissistic people desperately take themselves too seriously because they are terrified of what it would mean for their frail self-image if they’d bring themselves down to the ground. Humility, on the other hand, requires self-confidence and self-esteem, because only with then can you acknowledge the truth (that you are just another human) without compromising your self-esteem, nor your dignity and integrity.

Principles for successful & meaningful relationships

Regardless of personal psychodynamics that explain (not excuse) why we do the bad things we do, there seem to exist certain optimization principles that apply to every relationship. Just as every machine functions properly under specific prerequisites and conditions, so do our bodies, our minds, and our relationships.

Here, I explore foundational principles that in and of themselves make each relationship not only successful, but also meaningful and gratifying. For example, there is no meaning in a relationship in which people have no option other than to be there. There is no meaning in a shotgun wedding; no meaning in threat-based chastity when the alternative is public execution; no meaning in circumstantial friendships out of desperation and settling; no meaning in collaborations where one party has no other options.

These principles apply to every type of relationship, whether romantic, professional, social, and even relationships with your relatives, with whom we assume we are entitled to their affection.

1. Mutual exchange

All relationships are transactional, and that’s a good thing. We are all driven by self-interest, and that’s a good thing. It is in our best interest to be valued by others; the psychopaths and sociopaths who don’t get this simple fact don’t matter.

You don’t want to be in a relationship in which the other person gives more to you than you give to them; you’re at a disadvantage, because it means you can’t give much, and they’ll figure it out sooner or later.

Yet, even if someone holds the self-righteous conviction that “he is a giver” and “likes to please others at his own expense,” he is in reality gratifying himself. Self-aggrandizing moralism and virtue-exhibitionism from a pretentiously “ethical” high horse is indeed self-serving for those who find such haughtiness satisfactory.

Meaningful relationships are based on a mutual exchange of value; usually, the same perceived value, more or less, or at least more perceived value than the perceived effort of giving. Just like in every economical transaction, each perceive the value they get more than the value they give. For example, you buy a coffee for X amount of money. If you are willing to make the exchange, it means that, at that place and time, you value the coffee more than the amount you are willing to trade for it. Similarly, the coffee vendor values your X amount more than that single coffee he gives you, otherwise the transaction would not voluntarily take place.

And this is key: in free voluntary transactions, we get maximum overall utility because we all seek to maximise the perceived value we get by maximising the perceived value we give. In a free market, the only way to get the maximum sustainable and long-term value for ourselves is by providing value back.

Relationships based on violence and coercion lead to circumstantial value from a crippled economy that functions well below its economic potential. Not only that, but such relationships are meaningless: if you get value through violence, it means no one was willing to give it to you voluntarily, so you weren’t worthy enough to them to make them want to trade their value for yours. It means you are so useless to society that no one found anything you offered valuable enough to want to trade you for it.

Your coercion is a confession of your worthlessness.

Thus, meaningful relationships can only be based on a transactional, voluntary, and mutual exchange of value.

And be careful of those who claim that relationships should not be transactional, and that they should instead be built on compromise and sacrifice. I guarantee you they will try to manipulate you into compromising and sacrificing for them. They will want you to give them everything they need without having to give you anything back in return (except perhaps the permission to pat yourself on the back as a self-righteous moralist boasting about “sacrificing himself for others”).

2. Non-entitlement and non-expectation

If you have the humility to accept that no owes you anything, you’ll then value what you receive as an over-and-above benefit, rather than the unsatisfying meeting of a bare minimum. If you are arrogant and entitled, you won’t appreciate nor enjoy whatever you feel is owed to you.

Humility means confidence, because to achieve it, you’d have to be able to accept your limiting human nature without compromising your self-esteem. Humility is the opposite of insecurity. Show me a narcissistic arrogant prick and I’ll show you a hopelessly insecure dweeb in desperate need to take himself too seriously, otherwise he’ll retreat into self-loathing. Narcissists live in fear of their own subconscious self-hatred constantly creeping in on them.

Consider this mindset: you don’t expect anything from people, but you are instead hopeful that they give you value. There is a vast difference between entitlement and hoping for something better without feeling it’s being owed to you. Expectation comes with indignation when you don’t get what you expect. And if you do get what you expect, you don’t feel particularly thankful for receiving what you presume should have always been yours by default. It’s like you were robbed of something, and it was returned to you; no satisfaction there.

Conversely, if you instead hope to get value without feeling entitled to it, you appreciate it more, because it is an added bonus. You then feel the intent to happily reciprocate. And if you don’t get what you want, you don’t hold a grudge, because you are self-reliant, and therefore humble enough to not be entitled to the actions of others.

Relationships without entitlement are more appreciative, grounded, and meaningful. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have standards or boundaries; quite the opposite. When you are self-reliant enough to not be entitled to other people, then it would take a lot of value from others to make you trade your self-sufficiency for a relationship with them. It’s the entitled people who are desperate to enter any relationship with just about anyone who would give them what they desperately need.

Sure, if you don’t receive anything from people in a relationship, you are free to leave that relationship. But that’s not because they owed you anything in the first place. It’s because you want more that others can’t give. And that’s fine. Perhaps you wanted too much from the wrong people. Perhaps it was an incompatibility issue. Even if you gave them more than they gave you, you can’t dislike them for it: it was still your choice to risk opening a relationship with them. This self-accountability keeps you grounded and at peace with yourself and with others.

To sum up, anything you get in a relationship is an over and above benefit, not an entitlement. If you can’t get what you want from a relationship, then it is your responsibility for choosing to start and be in that relationship. If you choose to be in a relationship in which you don’t get what you want, then you should accept the other person as they are, or reevaluate how much you give and how much you are happy with receiving.

3. Want vs. need

We generally aren’t thankful for the things we absolutely need; understandably so. If your life and wellbeing depend on something, then getting it is not a benefit; it’s a prerequisite to survive. When was the last time you were appreciative for having so much abundant air to breather? Yet you are ecstatic when you receive the latest iPhone, a totally useless luxury.

Need is for surviving; want is for living.

Simply surviving is not living. What gives life meaning and true gratification are the things we don’t need, but want. Want is superior to need. We can’t be grateful for meeting a need. If anything, we resent having the need. Only once our needs are met can we begin to pursue higher meaning (see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).

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If you are emotionally dependent, and you thus cannot accept yourself unless first accepted by others, then you are needy; are either a child or an adult with unresolved trauma. This means that your relationships are based on need, not want. If you have to tell someone “I need you,” you’ve already disqualified yourself from having a relationship with them. It means you aren’t self-sufficient enough to want a relationship instead of needing it.

If you are not prepared to be without that person, or without anyone with that specific role in your life, then you are reliant upon them; you desperately need them. Nobody respects neediness.

If you need something, you cannot appreciate it, because you deep-down resent having to depend on it. How grateful are you for the abundant air and water you have around you? Does it make you happy that the one thing you need the most in life, air, is so abundant, and that the earth never denies you it with each breath you take? Yes, we lose sleep over our favorite sportsball team or useless politician losing.

If you need a relationship, that makes you desperate for it; a place of weakness and vulnerability. As a needy person, you will either attract people who tend to exploit vulnerabilities, or you will attract people who will not at first see how weak you are - but will be disappointed to find out later.

People value being in relationships with people who have choices, and aren’t desperate to be in a relationship with just anyone. It is more meaningful for your spouse to forgo all other choices just to be with you specifically; this means something about you. And you wouldn’t want to be with someone for whom you were second or last or only fiddle.

Human dignity dictates that you surround yourself with people who can do without you, but still choose to be with you. This makes your relationships all the more meaningful and valuable.

Nobody wants to be needed; we need to be wanted.

And make sure you want what you want for the right reasons (a topic for another post).

4. Always be ready to leave

A good relationship can only flourish when the people involved value it. We tend to value things that are scarce. Therefore, a relationship that is a given, that is hard to break (for whatever reason), is a relationship we don’t value; sometimes even, a relationship we spite.

Consider: if it’s too hard to break a friendship because you are in desperate need of it, or because legal and social pressures make it extremely difficult for you to break it (on top of the difficulty of breaking it itself), then you stand to question whether you’d even want to be in that relationship otherwise. How valuable meaningful is a shotgun wedding? How truly chaste is a woman who remains so out of fear of brutal execution if she’s caught surrendering her chastity?

If you’re handcuffed together, the relationships loses its scarcity, and therefore, its value.

The most meaningful relationships are the ones that both have no need for each other, but still freely choose to be together regardless. If you are OK with yourself without that relationship, then choosing to be in it makes it all the more meaningful.

For example, when people enter adulthood, they can choose to sever all ties to their parents, if the parents were abusive. That means their earlier parent-child relationship was enforced out of desperation for the child, and out of government mandates for the parents. But if the adult children choose to maintain a good healthy relationship with their parents, then it means something for both parties.

Healthy relationships are bult by people who are able to live without each other. Knowing that your spouse can live without you, yet chooses to be with you, reminds you how precious each day is, and how privileged you are to have her; it means you appreciate her more. Similarly, if she knows you can live without her, yet choose to be with her, she loves you more for it. This is because you’re not with her out of mere desperation and settling; you choose to be with her because she means something to you.

We want to be with people who could do without us, yet choose to be with us regardless.

Knowing that other people can be fine without us acts as a reminder that our relationships are not too available, and that they are thus scarce. Our relationships can end at any moment, so we treasure them, and we treasure each other.

If you know that the other person engaged in a relationship with you can be fine without you, then you are grateful for them for choosing to be with you, and you treat them better than you would have, had you suspected they needed someone - anyone - to be with them. It honors you that they choose to be with you, and you specifically, even though they were fine alone. It honors you that they could easily find someone else to be in that role for them, yet they choose you.

You know what they say: “Never trust someone who’s always monkey-branching from relationship to relationship, and never being alone.” The reason is that they are needy; they need to be with someone - to settle for anyone - which makes their relationships meaningless.

Be ready to leave any relationship. With this mindset of self-reliance, you are motivated to treat each other better. It is also easier to set boundaries, because you come from a place of unwavering self-respect: “If I don’t get my boundaries respected, then I can’t be in this relationship.”

Always being ready to break a relationship is the only way for it to thrive.

To be able to always be ready to leave, you must have options, or at least the knowledge that you can easily find others to fill that role. If it’s hard for you to find quality people for a certain role, then you must understand that even having no one for that role is still a viable option. This doesn’t mean you should be a hermit; but your circle of people can have many roles, from spouse and family to friend, associates, and acquaintances.

Nobody guaranteed to you from birth that you’d have it all; this kind of humility is empowering because it frees you from the obsessions of needing it all. Choosing to not have someone in your life in a specific role can be your prevailing option when your only alternative is settling for a bad relationship out of desperation.

For example, in today’s sugar-coated tyranny of “modern democracy,” intervening government elbows its way into people’s bedrooms. Government-imposed institutions like modern bureaucratic marriage make it extremely difficult to end a bad relationship. Ending it is difficult enough without having to worry about legal battles and costs and disputes that will be resolved on the threat of violence of the government. Many reluctantly and indignantly stay in bad relationships because of the difficulty imposed by arbitrary family laws; then children have to suffer parents who hate each other, and hate even more the fact that they feel trapped with each other. And the children feel guilty on top of everything, assuming their parents stay together because of them. Oftentimes, a divorce is healthier than a bad marriage full of fighting and abuse, which the children take in as their own (a child witnessing one parent abusing the other is traumatized as if the child is being abused the same way).

Many have married for the wrong reasons; no one has divorced for a wrong reason.

Children

The only exception here is your relationship with your children for as long as they are young and dependent on you. Children are more physically and emotionally dependent and attached to their parents than their parents are to them. Children can’t maintain the option to leave the relationship with their parents if their parents are abusive.

In the case of parent-child relationship, the parent chooses to initiate the relationship, and the child has absolutely zero say in it. The child was never asked if it wanted to be born, and born to those specific parents no less. Since this is unfair to the child, the parent must make sure to be the best parent he can be, if he wants to have a meaningful relationship with the child. Otherwise, the relationship is one of unfortunate circumstance. The parent must make it so that the child would still choose him, if the child choose choose the the parents to be born to. And considering the child has a bias towards its parents, this is not a hard thing to achieve.

This does not mean spoiling the child and granting him access to junk food or whatever destructive thing its whims dictate. You are not obliged to give to the child whatever it demands. But you owe the child to give it everything it needs: attention, engagement, communication, reasoning, encouragement, and an abuse-free childhood. Parents can never be abusive for any reason whatsoever; all parents need to teach children is reason and being a good example themselves. If these aren’t enough for you, it’s because you’re a shitty parent. Bad children are not the result of “not enough discipline.” Bad children are the result of the example of bad parents.

There is no meaning in your relationship with your child if your child has no option but to be there under your roof. You’re not a good parent just because you performed a gooey biological function to replicate, just like rabbits and insects. Your relationship with your children becomes meaningful only when your children see you as the best parent possible for them. Yes, your children are biased towards seeing you as something better than you actually are, so you have to really fuck things up if they look at other parents and think: “Gee, I wish that guy was my dad instead.”

Your kids by-default worship you. You’d have to be a monumental loser to mess that up.

To sum up, your children have no option other than to be associated with you. So, if you want to make your relationship with them meaningful, you must treat them as if they had the option to leave you, and be someone else’s child. Only then will you truly value and appreciate them, and only then will your relationship become more meaningful than the circumstantial blood-relative connection you have.

The bottom line

The key to successful relationships is respecting yourself enough to be humble. Only then can you have the golden balance of considering others while also considering yourself; without one infringing on the other. Without humility, you are either an oppressive self-obsessed narcissist, or a self-righteous victim who pats his own ego with the pretentious self-image of the gleefully “oppressed;” whichever is easier for you to pull off.

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There is no meaning in a relationships if it exists out of desperation, lack of options, or coercion. If you are desperate enough to enter a relationships out of lack of alternatives, it means you would be elsewhere, had you had options. If you enter a relationship with someone who had no options, it means you have little value to offer, so only someone desperate would settle with you.

Remember: not having a relationship is a perfectly respectable option because it shows self-reliance. If you reject this option, it means you are needy of a relationship, so the relationship becomes meaningless. A meaningful relationship is one you can do without, yet you still choose to be in. This is a relationship that matters.

A final note

Lastly, be suspicious of people who claim that relationships are not transactional, and that relationships must instead be based on sacrifice and compromise. Non-transactional relationships are unfair and exploitative. Such people either expect you to make the sacrifice and compromise in a one-way relationship by which they exploit you, or the value they get from their relationships is the self-righteous boast that they do all the sacrificing in their relationships (in essence, they accuse the people with whom they maintain relationships). In the case of self-righteous victimhood, these pretentious moralists must passive-aggressively disparage their relationships, as they infer that they are being exploited. It’s hard being in relationships with such people; they indirectly accuse you of exploiting them while they maintain their plausible deniability in case you call them out on it. That’s the twisted value they take from their relationships.

Be humble, unentitled, self-accountable, self-reliant, and dignified; it’s the only way to be empathetic without being exploited.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your time. All my work here is free.

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