Relationships

Recently, I finished reading The Dark Forest, the second book in the Three Body Problem trilogy, and felt inspired to think about ways in which astonishingly simple, yet powerful axioms can be applied to create useful frameworks that can be applied to reason about complex things.

The goal of this post is to spitball on an axiom about energy and how it could apply to interpersonal relationships.

Energy

Axioms:

1. Energy is finite, and a scarce resource

2. Things in your life either give you energy or take energy away from you

3. You should live your life in a way that maximizes your energy.

One of the biggest, if not the biggest, factors in the energy equation are interpersonal relationships, like the ones you may have with your friends, your colleague, and your partner. It follows then, that you should make sure that your relationships are a source, rather than a drain, of energy for parties involved.

I've been sorta intentionally vague about what "energy" means, because I don't really have a definition that encapsulates all of the cases I thought of — I'll just list them instead:

Non-exhaustive list of ways in which people can supply energy:

• By challenging you to think differently or grow
• By motivating you or giving you a purpose
• By sharing your interests or experiences
• By caring for you, emotionally, physically, spiritually
• By being a role model
• By making you feel excited

The way in which people demand energy feel a lot less concrete to me and less finite. You could imagine arbitrary ways in which someone demands energy from you, e.g. by placing expectations on you, restricting your freedom, neglecting you, etc. — for me, this means anything that makes me feel like I can't be myself or do things I want to do.

So how can we use this framework to think about relationships?

Well the first way that comes to mind is to understand the limitations of a relationship with someone. In this context, the limitations can be defined by your understanding of the behavior of the person's supply and demand of energy.

Every single relationship has a bare minimum requirement of spending some amount of time together or enduring some level of shared experience, and in my personal experience, most relationships require a lot more than that. Understanding the behavior of the supply and demand of energy in a relationship between two people requires understanding what the quantity and quality of energy each person is capable of providing, and the quantity and quality of energy that each person demands.

This is easier said than done, and takes quite a bit of time. But it is also something that, once you're made aware of, can be practiced via developing emotional awareness. Because understanding this curve is so important, when developing relationships, I bias towards people for whom the behavior of the function of energy is clearer.

What kinds of conclusions can you draw once you start to get a clear picture of the energy function behavior in a relationship?

This understanding allows you to make decisions about relationships, perhaps the most basic of which is, "should I continue to put effort into maintaining this relationship?"

The bar for that may be different for everybody. I would also like to point out that the function of energy in a relationship can look very different for each person, and should be viewed from both perspectives of the relationship. Imagine we plotted the curves of net energy derived from a relationship over time, where a red line indicates the net energy from one side, and a blue line indicates the net energy from the other. Here are some realistic examples of graphs I can think of:

• The red and blue lines are constant and positive. Both parties are happy.
• The red line is positive, but the blue line is negative. One party is happy, the other is not.
• Both lines are negative, and potentially decreasing. These parties should part ways, and fast.
• Both the red and the blue lines are positive and growing (maybe even exponentially). These parties should get married.

A point that becomes clear when you think about relationships in this way, is that time can play an important factor, and decisions should be made with how you think the behavior of the function will or could change with time. For example:

• Even if both lines are positive now, they may not be positive forever. Do not make rash decisions, e.g. couple yourself tightly with another person, by becoming their roommate, marrying them, etc., based on limited data, until you have sufficient confidence that the behavior of the function won't aggressively change for the worse.
• An extreme case: both lines are negative, but increasing, exponentially. People notoriously suck at visualizing things over long horizons, especially things that are exponential, but rate of change is really important to take into account here. As the tech bros say, slope over intercept.

The last point is especially important. Empirically, in my own experience, I've noticed that the ability to work through a problem is especially important in relationships — perhaps more so than anything else. Why is that?

A problem — fight, argument, whatever you want to call it — can have catastrophic effects on energy functions, both in the short term and the long term. These negative effects also seem to be compounding — one explanation could be that if the energy function suddenly takes a big dive for either red or blue, the ability to provide energy of the other party may also decrease, potentially resulting in a negative feedback loop.

The ability to resolve these problems will not only stabilize the energy function by breaking it from a nose-dive, it can also lead to greater long term compounding growth from the development of skills like communication, compromise, etc.

Having introduced a graphical representation, a question that naturally forms, is "what is the upper bound of the graph?" — in other words, how 'good' can the relationship be?

I think most people probably don't get a good sense for what an upper bound might look like. A fact: ~50% of marriages in the US end in divorce, and another 25% report being unhappy, whereas the most happy couples on average have been extremely happy with each other for decades.

As Ben Kuhn writes, this must mean, that relationships (and not just romantic ones) follow a heavy-tailed distribution where mega outliers are a lot more common than in the case of a normal distribution.

I think what the upper bound actually is for individual people might look different, but the point I'm making here is broadly that people shouldn't settle. Why?

Because if people in general don't have a good intuitive sense for what the upper bound may look like, then people should not settle without at least attempting to understand the space of possible energy functions that relationships can have.

This is not to say that people should aim to hunt down a theoretical upper bound — it is to say that people could end up in much happier, outlier relationships in the heavy tail of the distribution if they were willing to explore more (by not settling with someone who may be at the other end of the distribution).

Conclusion

Overall, I'm not exactly sure if this is the right lens for which to view relationships, but it certainly explains a lot of the phenomenons and behaviors I've observed in my own life thus far. Just to be clear, I think this principle applies not only to romantic relationships, but also to relationships in general.

If the ideas here resonated with you, I hope you spend some time thinking about how the energy functions have behaved in some of the important relationships in your life and if they can explain the behaviors you've observed. If they do, maybe you can try reasoning within the bounds of the framework, as I have, to make decisions about how to bring more energy into your life.