Relationships

            All of my relationships can probably be described according to two factors, trust and respect. The amount of these feelings I have for a person determines the type of relationship I have towards them. High amounts of trust and respect are what I define as love, and low amounts are what I define as hate, and all other relationships fall somewhere in between. I made a chart to demonstrate.

            Describing feelings as fundamental as trust and respect is quite difficult but I am going to try anyway (is this what you learn with a philosophy degree?).

Trust is what determines the tone of my relationships. Trusting relationships are friendly and cooperative, while distrusting ones are antagonistic and hostile. It basically establishes whether I am likely to work with someone or against them. If I distrust a person, I am also more inclined to act in an untrustworthy manner towards them so it can build on itself. The difficult thing about trust is that it is really hard to build up, and also hard to measure. Reasons for distrust are really the only thing to measure, and when compared to an amount of shared experience the value can be determined. Trust is something that I usually take for granted, but lack of it is always noticeable. For new acquaintances I prefer to trust people, because I've found that if you start trusting people they usually live up to your expectations. To use an analogy, trust is to relationships as healthiness is to food.

For respect, respect is to relationships as taste is to food. The amount of respect determines how enjoyable a relationship is for me. Being around people who I have contempt for is one of the situations that I dislike most in life. This is why respect determines whether I will engage someone or avoid them. Even the Rival relationship without trust is one that I would value. It’s like if you had to pick someone to beat you, that is the person you would pick. Honor is tied into respect somewhere too, because regardless of how much I trust someone, if I respect them, I will treat them honorably, and the opposite is true if I don’t respect them.

Physical attraction can also be mentioned in here (note that this is applied to both genders, and is different from sexual attraction). I don’t list attraction as a main factor in relationships because it is just too subjective, and generally ends up being overruled by trust and respect. Attraction really only impacts my first impressions, but after I have gotten to know someone well, their physical appearance doesn’t really matter anymore. People’s physical appearance just isn’t important to me, and I often don’t even notice it (I can only name four people’s eye colors in the whole world, and one of them is me). Even details like a person’s height are replaced by how much I respect them in my mental image, which I consider a much more important detail anyway.

On the other hand, sexual attraction is what makes the difference between a standard and a romantic relationship. For me though, sexual attraction has more of a mental aspect than a physical. I mean, I find a women in a tennis outfit sexy, but not as sexy as I find a women who knows about science and gets my obscure internet comic references. I guess I just put more value into mental traits than physical (I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine). Sexual attraction isn’t included in my key factors for relationships because I view it as mostly a bonus, and it doesn’t really determine the relationship like trust and respect. Sexual attraction might even just be something that comes from respect when a sense of sameness or a deep connection is added (I’m not attracted to opposites).

I can't explain why, but a girl in a tennis dress, tennis shoes, and a pony tail is my number one look

Anywho, that was just a bit of an exploration on how I define relationships. Cob out