Building Bridges

Relationships can be complicated and making sense of them can be interesting at best and confusing to say the least.  We have relationships on various levels and they range from family, to business, to friends and even enemies.  We are in more relationships than we sometimes think and trying to understand each one, may in fact be a full time job.  Oftentimes, we tend to blur the lines between what the nature of the relationships are supposed to be.  Some people are very different in business relationships, than they are in social circles, simply because of the nature of the work that they do, or the type of industry they operate in.  They are required to be a certain way, because it is expected of them, in order to accomplish the position they hold.  I used to think that it would be wonderful to strive towards the same personality at home and at work because then you could be considered a person with a consistent temperament, but i have interacted with many people over the years and notice they too have a similar predicament, in that in order to be effective at what they do, they need to bring our certain parts of their personalities to get the job done and the fact is that these traits are not always necessary in the home context, or in social circles. That is why the relationships we keep are important and to have the right friends or colleagues, that can remind us of the situation we are in and help us to operate in life between the various spheres of society. Relationships also obviously change with time, with stress, with years and they are work in progress, because some are more time consuming than others.  In our modern era, it does not surprise me that work relationships can sometimes be easier than social relationships, because we spend a lot more time daily in hours working on them, whereas because of our busy lives, we have less time to socialize and spend less time with other people.  messaging and social media also take away time from relationships so when we do see people we have not seen in a while, we are not always sure how they will react and it tends to leave room for "skinner" and back talk.  They could say you are too serious, if you start asking in depth questions and many times they can think you are too nosy, if you press certain opinions home, when they want to waffle about the weather.  In business we are trained to deal with complicated situations and peoples demands and we get used to them.   Finding the perfect balance in relationships is a myriad of complex interactions and only a psychologist trained to understand them may have the answers.  Until then we can only try!