The Truth about the Risks of having Relationships

From my experience, the number one overlooked principle about relationships is that "all relationships are risks."

To be in a relationship means you are taking a risk that the other person will deliver on your expectations and they too (hopefully) are relying on you to deliver on their expectations. This applies to ALL relationships: parents to children, husband to wife, boyfriend to girlfriend, friend to friend, human to pet, co-worker to co-worker, etc. It is a simple concept in this form, but the implications are much more grand:

• Risks require an investment--something needs to be on the line--something needs to be at stake. Whenever you take a risk, you are hoping that the investment will outweigh the outcome.

• A common response to risk is fear, humans have a natural fear of the unknown and risks imply that the outcome is unknown. We feel uncomfortable and out of place when we don't know what will happen and sometimes we feel frustrated because we don't have full control over the shape of the outcome or our relationship after it has started forming.

• Generally, the word "Trust" gets associated with "Relationships," but sometimes we put too much emphasis on trusting and not enough on the risk itself. Let me clarify what I mean: if they do what we expect, then we trust them; if they do anything that is unexpected, they step on our toes, or they trigger negative feelings, then we don't trust them. When we don't trust them, we retract the amount of risk we are taking on them and eventually they retract as well in response.

If you want to have a great, fulfilling, trusting relationship, you have to start by looking beyond fear. Fear is an emotion that influences your decisions just as logic can influence your decisions. Instead of fearing the unknown, you should embrace the unknown--you should look forward to the good feelings it triggers inside of you and the experiences you might gain from the relationship rather than reflecting on the possible failure.

Relationships are risks, and you waste a lot of life trying to minimize those risks and worrying whether things will turn out the way you would like them to. Humans aren't perfect, everyone makes mistakes, everyone will step on your toes and probably trigger your negative feelings if you stick around them long enough, but that is one of the risks you take by having a relationship with someone.

I'm not advocating irrational behavior, but sometimes our fear of the unknown slows the growth of our relationships when there need not be any slowing. Relationships require you to take risks and because we fear an unknown outcome we take really tiny steps and increase our commitment to the other person at a turtle's pace. We claim that because we don't know them well enough or haven't been with them long enough that we need to be cautious and so we slow down our relationships progression.

You are in a relationship, taking risks, because you want that other person to stay around and you want to get to know that person better and experience life with them. You can never know everything about the other person, nor should you; and you can't expect to know how to respond to everything they throw your way--people change, people aren't perfect or uniform and sometimes they aren't consistent and they will surprise you. Until the circumstance is actually in play, you can't accurately gauge how they will respond to it, even if you see them in similar situations prior to it. No matter what you do to prevent it, a relationship will always be a risk but if you focus on the benefits of relationships, the risk is always worth it.