Human beings are fundamentally selfish.
This isn’t a bad thing. We’re hardwired for survival. If something threatens that survival or even makes it more difficult, we treat it as a threat.
As airline flight attendants so often tell us, put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
A relationship is only as good as its ability to serve the needs of the people involved.
All of us go into every relationship and every interaction with other people thinking about how this relationship affects us.
If the relationship doesn’t benefit us or, in the worst case, if it actually works against us, we withdraw from the relationship. In some cases, we have no choice but to push the person out of our lives completely.
There is not a relationship anywhere in human interaction that doesn’t operate by this rule.
There is no relationship that is totally unconditional, not even the parent-child relationship.
There have been plenty of children who have had to push their parents out of their lives because the relationship posed such a grave threat to the child’s wellbeing and even their life.
The reason could be emotional cruelty, manipulation, or outright abuse. The children have to cut their parents off just to survive and rebuild a life from scratch.
The opposite is also true. Many parents have had no choice but to push their own children out of their lives for the same reasons. The parents had to save themselves from manipulation, toxic behavior, and even physical violence inflicted by their own children.
It doesn’t matter how much you think you love someone. Every relationship has boundary lines that, when crossed, destroy the relationship and drive the two people apart.
None of us should have a problem with this. It’s a good thing.
Many so-called influencers on the internet would tell us that we can improve the quality of our relationships by making them more relational and less transactional.
These influencers are telling us that we shouldn’t focus the relationship on what the other person can do for us—or what we can do for them. We should just enjoy relating to the person for their own sake.
This poses two distinct problems—mainly because it completely violates the law of human interaction that I’ve just spelled out here. Human beings don’t interact with each other this way.
If you’re telling yourself you aren’t going to treat a relationship as transactional, you’re probably already either getting taken advantage of or you’re the one taking advantage of the other person.
This advice is just a sloppy way of ignoring the needs of both parties.
If the relationship doesn’t work for one person, it doesn’t work for both people.
Someone I care about could come to me at any time and say, “This particular aspect of the relationship isn’t working for me. We need to change it for us to continue.”
Then it’s on me to actually find out what the problem is and work to fix it.
This doesn’t mean I’m admitting any fault on my part. It’s my obligation as one party to the relationship. It’s my job as half of the relationship to make sure it works for the other person as well as it works for me.
If I don’t work to fix it, then I’m failing in my role as an actor in this relationship.
If I say, “Screw you. The relationship works fine for me, so just suck it up and accept it,” then the person would have every right to say, “Either fix it or we’re done.”
If I persisted in not addressing the issue, then they would be right to end the relationship. It would be a clear sign that I don’t care enough about the relationship to make it meet the other person’s needs.
This actually happened to me with my mother. I spent years trying to get her to change the way we related to each other because our relationship didn’t work for me.
She continued to use the manipulation tactics she developed when I was a child. She did this for decades into my adulthood.
When I raised the issues, she didn’t say she wasn’t doing it. She knew she was doing it. She just said, “Well, this is the way I do it, so just eat it.”
Eventually, I had no choice but to cut her out of my life just to keep my own sanity.
There is another aspect of this that our influencer friends don’t seem to realize when they tell us not to make our relationships transactional.
Many times, the transaction involved and the payoff we receive is not from getting something for ourselves. Many times, the payoff is in what we can give to the other person.
This is the case with parenting—good parenting. Good parents don’t work and sacrifice for years to give their children a good life because of what the children can give to the parents.
The parents make these sacrifices and do this work because of what they can give to their children. These parents make the investment for the express purpose of benefiting their children. That’s the payoff—the children’s benefit and improved wellbeing both in the present and in the future.
This is also the case in friendships, romantic relationships, and other family relationships.
None of this negates the law I stated earlier. There is a limit to which anyone will work and sacrifice to benefit another person. There is always a line in the sand that, once crossed, will shatter the relationship and cause the parties to stop giving to each other.
We shouldn’t be trying to change this law. First of all, it isn’t possible to change it. Doing so would be counter to our own survival.
It isn’t even necessary or desirable to change it. This is the way human relations operate, but it goes beyond that. Transactional relationships are a good thing.
We should make our relationships more transactional, not less so.
We should all have clearly stated boundaries about what we will tolerate and what kind of behavior we’re willing to accept from those closest to us.
All actions have consequences. If you mistreat me, the chances are high that you won’t be in my life for very long. That’s a good thing. Getting people who mistreat me as far out of my life as possible is a great thing. It’s the best thing for me.
When my children were small, I used a very simple X-Y formula to communicate with them.
If you do X, I’m going to do Y.
This isn’t a threat. It isn’t a punishment. It’s a statement of fact about the consequences of the other person’s actions.
If you don’t put your shoes on right now, I’m going to put them on for you.
If you throw that ball in the house, it could break the window.
If you keep hitting your sister, I’m going to have to put you in your room until you calm down.
This is an effective formula we can all use in our daily interactions with people. They often don’t know how their actions are affecting us, so they don’t see the potential consequences.
Explaining it to them in a clear, concise manner gives them all the information they need to do the right thing.
If they really care about us, they’ll modify their behavior so the relationship works better for everyone involved.
If they say, “Too bad. I’m going to keep doing it,” then you’ve already outlined for them what will happen as a result. That’s on them.
We don’t need to feel guilty about delivering the consequence we already warned them we would deliver. Delivering the consequence will only benefit us.
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