My idea of Relationships.

“Can a boy and a girl be just friends?” It was precisely the question I wanted to answer but the inquiry led me to a fascinating realisation. People say that it is difficult to quantify the various dynamics of relationships we have with people and hence, it is sufficient to distinguish each relationship with tags or I would argue – identities. For example you can be the girl/boyfriend of somebody while you both agree on what the terms ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ mean. Here, the aforementioned identities are accepted by both the parties. This is how various roles relating to each identity are formed for eg. Gender roles, teacher-pupil role, role of a parent and so on. Having established that relationships are not but various identities at work all the time, I further articulate that a person has to shift from various roles depending upon different situations. You are a student in school, son/daughter for your parents, a friend for your peers and a lover for your soulmate. That is how we navigate our way in the life by adjusting in the changing scenarios through identifying with commonly accepted terms. The identities insinuate the roles one has to perform each time. I realised this explanation can’t hold true for all the time.
The relationships are more than a role-play game. Let’s revert back to the question, can they be friends? Well, yeah as long as both the characters subscribe to a common idea of being a ‘friend’ and carry out the expected roles. This is however not as facile as it seems. There are numerous factors such as level of trust, desire to commit, expectations, frequency of interactions, intimacy etc. Then the question arises that whether we can trace the numerous relationships which are not just a function of identity but related to one’s emotional idiosyncrasy too. The question led me to exhaustion at a time but sooner I found that there is one factor which distinguishes a person’s various relationships with each other. And that factor is – “Intimacy”.

Intimacy can be defined as how close a person is to other person in terms of exposure to one’s deepest self. This was an intriguing realisation because it tends to connect many dots. We often feel that during adolescence, children have a less proclivity to be more intimate with their parents, lovers gradually go more intimate with each other, it is intimacy which distinguishes a BFF from a casual friend, teachers and students are intimate with each other in terms of academic life and so on. The graphical representation of the theory could be as follows: 

The degree and different relationships can vary from individual to individual but I think one can confirm to the model above at some level. This was the closest I got to map the various relationships on paper(screen) and hence, I can not only answer that a boy and a girl can be just friends when both are at the same level of intimacy that is ‘friends’.

I am against the use of the word ‘relationship’ purely for amorous relationships because as humans we are connected to every other human around us some or the other manner. Hence, I think there can exist many different kinds of relationships according to the level of intimacy each one shares. It becomes uncomfortable to expose one to others especially with whom we don’t want to share our personal information thereby, getting more intimate. There are also different areas of life such as academics, sexual, business, colleagues, friends etc. and hence, we can also say that:

·         We are academically more intimate to our teachers

·         We are professionally more intimate to our colleagues

·         We are casually more intimate to our friends

·         We are sexually more intimate to our partner

·         We are more intimate to our parents as a family

·         Etc.

 

These different aspects of intimacies can also overlap and the more specific intimacies get clubbed together, the more the overall relationship becomes. For example:

·         Your parents would know about your academic life, friends and girlfriend/boyfriend etc.

·         Your friends would know about your lover, parents, etc.

·         Your business partners may know something about your family, friends etc.

·         And so on.

And here is the conclusion: The more intimacies a person shares with you (other person sharing his/her intimacy with you is equally important because the promise of exposing someone to one’s deeper self requires a degree of trust that one must not divulge the personal information being provided) the more he/she is above in the map of relationship and hence, we can trace the overall level of intimacy with all of the people in our lives. Not only a boy and a girl can be friends but we can also map other relationships too.