Managing Contexts in Relationships
A younger friend recently asked me this question:
You shouldn't mix friendship with business. Right? What if they sometimes overlap?
The is one of those things that I have yet to wrap my head around. But in my ten-odd years of adulthood, I have managed to make varying scales of mistake and still came out (mostly) fine, so I must have done more right than wrong. This post is an attempt at summarizing the right things I did.
If people make up the basic units of a society, then relationships are the fundamental forces that hold people together. Therefore, one's ability to manage relationships dictate how well the person can function in a society. This may sound intuitive for some, but it may be not obvious for others, including my young adult self.
A self-made man, my father oft repeated advice is "count on your family when you're close to home, but make friends when you're out on a journey." We've had our fair share of disagreements, but this is one of the few lessons that I took to heart after I moved away. (He managed to keep a family business afloat despite having to deal with harassment from gangs and corrupt officials, so I trust that when he said to make "friends" he really meant it.)
It did, however, take me a while to figure out that his advice has a missing half: when it comes to relationships, context matters.
Pesky Contexts
Relationships are tricky because they can be highly contextual. But what's even trickier is that contexts are also ever-changing, depending on the situation and social dynamics of the people involved, resulting in blurry boundaries.
Let's start off with a story.
I attended a tiny elementary school. At the time, the school was small enough that every staff member wore multiple hats. I had a classmate — let's call him Marvin — whose father was also our dean, history teacher, and scoutmaster at different times. As if it's not already confusing enough, despite being a veteran educator, his father seemed to not grasp the importance of separating contexts: every once in a while, the father-teacher would warn Marvin's misbehavior in class by saying things like "just you wait until we get home" or "you're gonna have your handful in our scout meeting later." I suspect that the adult's aimless parenting approach has only reinforced the child's rebellious behavior.
Marvin's father served as a great counter-example for our topic. By failing to delineate his attitude and set clear expectations according to the current context they were in, he sent mixed signals to Marvin and stiffened the social dynamics for both parties. From Marvin's perspective, he had no way of knowing whether he should act as a student or as a son in the classroom, because the teacher could switch role into a father at any given moment. Yet, when they were home, I was told that the father would enforce strict supervision as if they're in school.
Luckily, most of us don't have to deal with relationships that are this complicated and traumatizing, but the blurry boundary remains nonetheless. Take, for example:
You and a higher ranking colleague are attracted to one another and you both know that the two of you would make the perfect match. But you have a promising and great paying job, would it be a good idea to engage in office romance?
A beloved family member asked you for a favor to develop her business website for very little pay, because she thinks her IT contractor is asking too much and she doesn't have the budget for it, despite it's the standard market rate. How would you reply?
Your just found out at a gathering that your biggest client is also a campaign funder of a political party, one that's vehemently hostile towards your spouse's ethnic group. Would you continue doing business with this person?
There often isn't a clear answer to these social dilemmas; you will have to make a choice and you will have regrets regardless of what your decision is. We can only adapt to the circumstances we find ourselves in.
Managing Contexts
When we're younger, we tend to trip ourselves over shifting contexts — a common cause for mistaking that someone has a "fake" personality. Let's say if I'm divulging an opinion to a friend, and then an acquaintance joins the conversation, I would perhaps switch to a different position or even a separate topic. I'm doing so because I cannot predict how this other person will respond to my viewpoints. If there were an eavesdropper during this exchange, the person might perceive me as an hypocrite, but from my perspective, I'm just practicing situational tactfulness.
This concept is also applicable for professional networking, as we may need to adjust our attitude and behavior as we interact with people under different circumstances. To network effectively requires one to communicate and form connections with all kinds of personalities, many of which may not be compatible with your own, but it's a necessary evil in order to thrive in the business world. As one of the Chinese proverb goes: one should speak the language of humans when seeing a human, and speak the language of devils when seeing a devil. And no wonder networking can be a chore, because switching back and forth between very different "languages" incurs a great deal of cognitive load.
(Side note: There's an important nuance when it comes to building relationships. You can befriend others without becoming friends with them. You can help others and choose to initiate interactions, all without a goal in mind. Relationships need not be transactional.)
A lot of times, when people talk about separating work and life, they speak of it as if they can draw a clear line between the two. If you're in college or if you're already working full-time, you know that this boundary isn't that tangible and concrete. You might have already found yourself thinking about school or work when you're supposed to be having a good time at a holiday gathering. However we wish so, we can't just turn off parts of our brain as we wade in and out of different slices of life.
Being able to juggle the multiplicity of contexts without it impeding our life is one of those growing pains into adulthood. Much like everything else, such being financially responsible for ourselves, it's an uneasy but necessary struggle. To have a better handle of these things, you have to pay a closer attention to how your mind works. (I'm starting to sound like a self-help guru, am I?)
Here are some ideas and mental techniques that might help:
Remind yourself that people think and act differently according to the context they are in. People you interact with is showing you a particular side of themselves in a given situation; unless you're involved in every aspect of a person's life, you're never going to see the entirety of it.
If you try to view and treat people as who they are, before any social identities they have, that everyone share the same range of emotions and biases, and that they have their own desires and worries just like you do, then you only need to slightly adjust your attitude whenever you interact with a different person. Only in rare occasions will you run into a sociopath that violates the norm.
As contexts tend to switch, and even blend into one another, if you're unsure how to act or what to say at a certain occasion, you can always doing a quick internal gut check first. You may need to consciously interrupt your mental activities, find a reason to step aside for a bit (going to the restroom or grabbing a drink is a good excuse), and take a few seconds to readjust. It's better to give a delayed response than to rush out an erratic one. In rare instances, contexts can change back and forth at the blink of an eye, but those are few and far between.
And if the scenario doesn't played out how you imagined it'd be, try to focus on what happens next instead of dwelling on the awkward moments. As you meet new people and experience new interactions, this will happen more often than not — and there are not many things more crucial than to learn how to recover from your mistakes.
And here's the thing: your relationships make up your social identities, but they should not define who you are as a person. If you find that one of these identities has a huge influence on you, to the extent that it's capable of shaping how you behave in general, you should be careful whether or not to continue as it is. If being a more empathic father to your child makes you emotionally mature, that seems like an improvement all-around. But if your manager is working to guilt you to become a "better" teammate, so you're willing to do more overtimes, then I'm afraid it's not going to bode well for the other aspects of your life.
What if you want add something onto an existing relationship without changing it? Establish a new context, and have the people involved to get on board with the expectations surrounding it. Hopefully, the person who's more familiar with the situation will have the ability to lay down ground rules. Otherwise, it should be the person who's more socially experienced. Entering a new context without a clear consensus among the parties involved isn't that much different from playing a game with people who aren't familiar with the rules, chaos will ensue.
(Seniority, authority, or cultural factors, such as gender role, should not be the determinant here, but that's just my idealist self talking. It's a common reason why relationships turn sour as people engage in new activities.)
Take Marvin's case, for example: since Marvin's father was already working at the school before his child's enrollment, the adult bore the obligation to instruct and maintain their different roles in the classroom and at home, ensuring that there's minimal confusion stemming from unintended overlapping of contexts. But, despite being decades older, the father clearly failed to do both, much to Marvin's disappointment.
As with other topics that I have covered before, there's not a whole lot of secret here — recognizing them is all but the beginning. The hard part is to have the patience to put up with the years of trial and error as you wrestle with the rest of day-to-day bits.
Or, you can be like Marvin's father and forge your own desire path. If that's your decision, I bid you the best of luck.