Do Everything For Me, And I Will Love You
Our relationships are more and more based on an exchange of favors.
Let’s face reality: all of us have expectations of the people around us. And, what makes this situation worse, the closer these people are to us, the more expectations we have of them.
My guess is that you would feel the same when I say that all of us are hoping for the people closest to us to have less expectations in terms of what we are doing for them.
But the opposite is the case.
The more we have invested in a relationship, the more we expect from the other person.
All of this is based on social exchange theory, which describes “the elements and process by which people engage in an exchange where rewards are sought and costs are incurred”, as researcher Mark V. Redmond argues.
In other words, our relationships are just like any other investment we make. The more we are committed to something and the more we have sacrificed for that relationship, the more expectations we have of the other person. The more we have “paid” in order to maintain that relationship, the more we expect in return.
These sacrifices or payments can be pretty much anything you can think of. Whether it is helping the other person with some problem they have, or lending them money, or taking them out to dinner, or even being there for them whenever they are sad.
As sad as it sounds, but even motherly love may be so strong because a mother has sacrificed more than anyone for that child.
I am sure that this is not the only reason why a mother loves her child — at the very minimum, genetics plays a large role in this as well — but it certainly is one important aspect of it.
Just think of a practice which is still common in a lot of third world countries, and which used to be common in Europe as well.
Yes, I am talking about the fact that parents are getting a large number of children as an investment for their future.
Children who support them financially when they are too old too work, who will spend time with them when it is hard for them to make other social contacts, and who will be the first people to support their parents when anything happens.
We all know of the social contract which exists among different generations whereby the old support the young during their childhood, and the young support the old during the time of old age.
But we tend to think of something that only exist on a societal level. That is not the case at all. It exists just as much on a micro-level: within the families and other types of social networks.
The expectations people have of one another maintain social order.
By turning relationships into an exchange of favors, an automatic feedback system is built into the structure of society.
Nobody is able to break out of this circle of social order. Because if they do, they will loose their access to the support structure that is provided by the people around them.
Therefore, society is capable of ensuring that nobody acts exclusively selfish, which is the equivalent of stopping to support the development of society as a whole. In other words, society uses the obligation to an exchange of favors for the sake of maintaining order.
Without this system of obligations society would fall apart. Deep down, human beings are too selfish and too much concerned with their own benefits to invest a lot of resources into supporting others.
Just like a human beings’ genetic programming pushes him or her towards their own survival, a society or culture also is concerned with it’s own survival.
This obligation to exchange favors limits you in terms of how to live your life
The result of all this is that we are constantly concerned with the expectations other people have from us.
As we become more and more dependent on the people around us, we become more and more ingrained into societal structure. And as we are becoming more ingrained into societal structure, the less free we are in regards to our own decision-making process.
Humans are a product of the culture they grew up in. Human decision-making power is limited to the leeway that society as a whole is providing them with.
The sad reality is that there is no real way of breaking free from this circle. Expectations of the people around us will always play an important role in all human relationships. Therefore, we will never be completely free in designing our own life the way we want.
But, we do have one power to influence how this affects our own life:
The power of making active choices.
We have a choice in terms of which favors we are willing to give. We have a choice in terms of whom we are willing to do favors for. We have a choice in terms of how much of our resources (time, money, energy etc.) we are willing to invest in any given relationship.
And, most importantly, we have a choice in terms of the environment that we are exposing ourselves to.
The more relationships we build, the more communities we join, the more subcultures we are a part of, the more resources we will need in order to maintain all of these commitments.
Furthermore, the longer we stay in any given environment, the more strongly ingrained we become into it. We are investing more into the relationships, and therefore we ourselves are also expecting more in return. In doing so, we also become more dependent on the relationships that we have built.
Perhaps this sounds as if I was saying that we shouldn’t build any relationships with people at all and live our lives like a hermit, but that isn’t the case at all.
Rather, I am saying that we need to make active choices in terms of how much we are willing to sacrifice for any given relationship, community or subculture, and to what extent we want to become a part of it.
For example, I personally may say that I am not willing to stay longer than four years in any given country. Because the longer I stay in any given country, the more I become dependent on its societal structure, and the more my thinking gets stuck in the mental cage that this dependency creates.
This is an extreme position, of course. But there are much milder versions of the general idea.
If you are joining any club, for example, you have to be aware of how much you want to become ingrained into its structure. How much of your time and energy you want to sacrifice for it. And to what extent you want this aspect of your life to influence your life as a whole.
The same principle holds for any new job that you take, any relationship that you enter into, and any other subculture that you expose yourself to.
Some last words:
There is nothing inherently bad in the fact that our relationships, too a large extent, depend on the exchange of favors.
Like anybody else, I would love my relationships to be exclusively based on the feelings we have for each other — regardless of whether that is friendship, love or respect. But unfortunately, that is not a realistic expectation to have. At least not if we are hoping to cut all expectations out of these relationships.
Therefore, all we can do is to make active choices:
- active choices around who we are entering a relationship with (friendship, romantic relationships, communities, clubs, subcultures)
- active choices around how much of our resources (time, energy, money etc.) we are willing to invest into those relationships
- active choices around how deeply ingrained we are willing to become into any particular environment (friend circle, community, work environment, even country)
Whenever you are entering into a relationship, remain aware of the fact that you are making an investment that requires sacrifices from yourself. Ultimately, this will limit you in certain choices that you are making. Therefore, always make sure that you are choosing your relationships wisely, according to your plans for your own personal development.
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