Category Archives: Relationships

Christopher Allen writes a stimulating blog called Life With Alacrity — like Niel Robertson, his occasional posts are long and worth a slow, quiet read. His two most recent posts are must-reads for anyone interested in community, sociology, group / team dynamics, and personal relationships.

Community by the Numbers: Group Thresholds — He explains the optimal sizes of different groups. For example, 7 is the optimal number of people in a tight-knit "working group" — say, a small business. It's also a number of people that "feels right" at a dinner party. 13 he calls the "Judas Number" — at this threshold group behavior changes in a way that hurts the overall efforts until the size grows to a new threshold point more conducive to teamwork.

Community by the Numbers: Personal Circles — He explains the different types of relationships in our life and the maximum of each type the average person can maintain. Obviously there's variance in these numbers depending on the person.

• Support Circle – People you turn to in moments of severe emotional or financial distress: 3-5
• Sympathy Circle – People you turn to for sympathy and people whose death would be devastating to you: 10-15
• Trust Circle – People you have emotional closeness to, people you would send a Christmas card to: ~150
• Emotional Circle – People you "like" and can have a non-mutual emotional connection to (weak ties): ~300
• Familiar Strangers – People whose faces you recognize but you know nothing about them: 1000+? (No clear studies on # of people we can recognize.)

(hat tip to Eliezer Yudkowsky for the pointer to Allen's blog.)

Someone asked me the other day: Would you trust less a business partner who was cheating on his/her spouse?

Related question: Do you draw a hard line between someone's personal / bedroom conduct and their professional trustworthiness?

My answer to the first question: Yes, I would trust the person less, but I would not dismiss working with him/her out-of-hand. Second question: No, I draw a "soft line" between personal/professional.

I recognize that some people simply lack self-control when it comes to sex but not when it comes to anything else, or so they claim. Still, to me character is character, and if someone can be dishonest in a romantic setting, what else might she be dishonest about in a professional setting?

Culture matters. I was raised in America and Americans seem to care more about fidelity than most people.

In the end trust exists on a spectrum and one must weigh various factors. In a business relationship fidelity is not a deal breaker either way, just a factor among many. In a personal relationship I care more.

[Definitional note on cheating: There's the technical cheat (sleeping with someone other than your monogamous partner) and then there's what Chris Yeh eloquently described to me as "something that's technically allowed but really is just fucked up" — like sleeping with your best friend's ex or sleeping around days after the end of a positive long-term relationship. In the end the semantics doesn't matter. It's about what a person's actions say about their underlying ethics, honesty, and self-discipline and whether bedroom actions speak to these attributes in non-bedroom environments.]

Bottom Line: I think less of a person who cheats on their partner, but in a professional context I do not distrust him/her altogether. I just trust them less.

Related Post: Trust and the Failed State

Here's a piece of a paragraph about being totally vulnerable with someone from a David Foster Wallace short story. The protagonist – Schmidt – is briefing a focus group:

… Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknowing and -knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he'd watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg's cap's public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness …

Schmidt / Wallace says this type of intimacy and openness and display of vulnerability can only transpire in a good marriage. Whether it's a marriage or a very special friendship, it's clear only the most intimate relationships can play host to a person's confessional, private fears. Forming these relationships is hard: Some people never are able to find a person to whom they can be vulnerable in the way Wallace mentions (even if they're married).

I've blogged in the past about two related concepts. First, I've wondered whether you can be truly honest with anyone in your life other than a paid professional therapist. Other than some outside professional who's paid to listen to you, every other person in your life, no matter how close you are to them, has an agenda and bias and you censor yourself to respond to that agenda. Second, I've noted that the concept of a singular "best friend" seems limiting — the idea that one person can fulfill most of your emotional needs. Rather, the "composite best friend" means you have a handful of people who are close to you who stimulate you and engage you in different ways.

Bottom Line: Most people crave intimacy and an opportunity to share all their deep dark private insecurities. Those who can fulfill this need through a single soul mate or through close friends I think overall have a richer life. Cocooning against the world is not, really, a sustainable long-term position.

A friend and I were guessing the percentage of people who met their spouse in school (high school, college, grad), work, or in some other social context. I figured a Google search would point the way to a broad study on the question: Where do people meet their spouse? Surprisingly, I came up empty. Anyone know of a study based upon a large data set instead of anecdotes?

My Googling did, however, reveal a few other data points about marriage. This page said the median age for marriage for American men is 27 and for women 25 — lower than I expected. I suspect higher socio-economic classes / higher educated folks marry later in life. Also learned that 40-50% of marriages end in divorce in the U.S. Again I suspect it’s lower among higher educated folks.

The issue that seems to be most hotly contested on marriage data sites is around cohabitation — whether premarital cohabitation affects the longevity and quality of a marriage. This study suggests that premarital cohabitation “has consistently been found to be associated with increased risk for divorce and marital distress in the United States.” Why? The inertia of living together causes a couple that would not otherwise marry to marry. Interesting and somewhat counterintuitive.