Relationship Design

There’s nothing as challenging and as complex as a successful, long-lasting relationship. Whether it’s a professional relationship, a friendship, a family relationship and especially an intimate relationship. But how might design theories help us build better relationships? Well, as with every other design, we first have to understand what is the value of it. 

In the intimate relationship, the most challenging part is a long-lasting balance between deep love on the one hand, where you feel deeply connected and safe with the other person, and great passion on the other, where desire, adventure, and excitement are part of your life!

Unfortunately, like life, relationships don’t come with a manual. And on top of that, we are being misled that it comes naturally, that you won’t have to work on it and everything will magically happen, and you will live happily ever after. 

See, for the past 100-200 years, relationships have seen a tremendous shift. In intimate relationships we’ve gone from getting married and having a family mainly for social and economic purposes—you need someone to help you tend the farm, for example -to nowadays, where a relationship is brought about by connection and the resulting eroticism that we desire.

Or In work relationships, where again it used to be a transactional relationship of "I'm providing my service, the boss provides food," to nowadays where we want to feel fulfilled in the workplace, and we want to have a sense of meaning in the work we produce. 

These are mind-blowing swifts and we just now starting to realise how deep these changes affect not only our productivity, when it comes to work but also our ability to connect and to express ourselves erotically when we refer to intimate relationships.

In a nutshell, we’ve gone from seeing marriage as a social and financial contract to seeing marriage as a place to get our needs and desires fulfilled. From Romeo and Juliet that died together for one true love, to having as many dates as you can handle with just a swipe of your finger. At the same time, in the back of your mind, you want to experience something more like what Romeo and Juliet had.
 
Regardless of the complexity of our modern world and the new challenges it creates for relationships, the underlying pattern that rules all relationships is the balance between what I call ‘Stasis’ and ‘Kinesis.’ On the one hand, there’s the deep "love" that makes us feel secure and safe, and on the other is the "desire" that makes us feel the need for adventure and mystery. 

And that goes for all kinds of relationships, not only for intimate ones. The balance between Stasis and Kinesis determines the ability to add value to each other’s lives. Teaching and getting taught. Feel the confidence to accept what we don’t know, and the enjoyment to share what we do know. To lead and be lead. Not to try to maintain our self-structure, at the cost of failing to include others.

Finding the balance between the forces of Stasis and Kinesis is the key to all great relationships that encourage personal development. 

And it all starts from our childhood, from the stories we are told because these stories shape the way we see the world around us and the way we conduct our personal development. One misconception in the western culture is the metaphor that our lives, and especially our relationships, are a journey and that we need to find THE one traveler with whom we will make that journey. We fail to realize that people who are in a relationship are people with entirely different paths, but with an agreement that they will hold each other’s hand and push one another to become more and grow more on their development path. 

You see, a journey has a fixed destination. Some part at which we ought to arrive for the journey to be successful. And if there is something that keeps relationships from not falling apart, it is the playfulness that we can create in small, everyday moments. What is needed then is the ability to be present with no necessity for arriving somewhere else. Do you see the difference? A successful journey is when we arrive at the destination we have set from the beginning. So there is a must, an expectation that needs to be met. In playfulness, the end is irrelevant. It’s the presence at the moment that matters. The pure joy of playing is what matters.

When we have two individuals, with different experiences, different personalities and who both evolve on a different rhythm, why do we then expect that the destination we set at day one will be the destination that both will want to arrive at on day 2,850? You see, the number one reason why relationships fail is that people change through time, and as they change they forget to tell each other. For various reasons. 

A relationship is not a journey with an end goal; if you see it as such, it is predetermined to fail. A relationship is a process. A design process. One which needs your attention at every step of the way. It requires constant feedback, going back to the drawing board for new iterations, followed by a prototype for a new version of it, further testing, more feedback, then you play with it, and eventually, you get lost in the moment of the experience itself. 

Let me ask you something: How far back can your memory go? Do you remember when you were a kid when you used to play–not to win a prize, but just for the joy of playing? When you felt secure to explore new ways of playing with other kids and got lost in those moments, so immersed that when your parents took you home, you would cry? That’s what a great relationship feels like. It feels like having the security of staying connected with yourself and, at the same time, being playful and adventurous in the presence of another who feels the same. The safety of the static, to explore the kinetic.

So take action and design your relationships with people around you the way they deserve to be designed. It’s an ongoing process, of which you are the author. I’m a designer, and I’m here to help you design it the way it deserves to be.