BENGALURU: Have you noticed that people talk about relationships as investments?
The way we think about relationships between people, especially romantic or sexual relationships, may not be quite the same as one might think of education or finances, but yet, we talk about investing in all of these, and so many other aspects of life such as physical or mental health, politics and governance, civil society, public welfare and so on.
If relationships are investments like how one might make in mutual funds and other financial instruments, should we then expect reasonable dividends? Is there such a thing as booking profits then? Or a stop loss? And what exactly are we investing in relationships?
Sure, we might be giving and receiving money or gifts that are worth substantial amounts of money, but most often, we are talking of investments of time and energy. We invest our intent and interest, our attention, our social connections, our passion, our affection. We invest our spirit and our soul. Much of these investments may not be tangible, and despite all the machinations of the financial industry to somehow put financial value on everything, including the trees and plants around us, all the investments we make in loving relationships are not quite formulaic yet, except maybe when relationships get sour and a legal settlement is being sought — even then, it is nowhere near an exact science. Everything we invest in relationships may be intangible and unquantifiable, but they are investments nevertheless.
We do expect that the investment be respected, safeguarded and that there are returns - only, here we expect not just dividends in return but an equal or higher investment right back with us. We want as much time, energy, attention, interest, passion and everything else we invest to be reciprocally invested right back in us. That doesn’t happen in other places — we would hardly expect the gym we invested in to be as invested in our fitness, nor would we even expect the school or college we join to be as concerned in us as we would be in the course to which we sought admission.
In relationships, if there is not a mutual and reciprocal investment, our stop loss flags get triggered — we ask ourselves what are we doing here, why are we continuing to invest in it, if we don’t get a similar investment back? We wouldn’t want to settle for crumbs - in fact, if any friend is doing that, we would call it out. And, of course, there is hardly ever any booking profit. If a relationship seems sound investment, we only invest more. We rarely walk away from it, satisfied we got the best return and look for new avenues — anyone doing that in relationships would get called out and they might struggle to get good new relationships.
We might talk loosely of investing in people as if it were no more than buying a few shares in the equity market, but investment in relationships is far more than that, isn’t it.