The Three Requirements of a Good Relationship
Before friendship is formed, you must pass judgment.
A quick update before we begin- I’m in the final stages of editing The Stoic Manual: Meditations on the Art of Living, a collection of 150 Stoic meditations on living well. It’ll be released soon and included free for all Annual and Lifetime members.
Welcome! The Stoics were deeply concerned with how we live with other people. Relationships are one of the hardest places to practice love, good judgement, kindness, patience, duty, and self-discipline. That’s why last time we talked about Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person. Today’s essay asks whether we can still practice this philosophy with someone who knows your weaknesses, interrupts your plans, disappoints you, needs you, misunderstands you, and still shares a life with you.
The Three Requirements of a Good Relationship
“When friendship is settled, you must trust; before friendship is formed, you must pass judgment.” — Seneca, Moral Letters
During one of my early days in theatre, I watched a senior surgeon stop a trainee who was pulling too hard on a piece of tissue. It was not a debridement. There was no sudden bleeding or cause for alarm, only a hand using more force than the tissue could bear.
“Easy,” he said. “It’s a person.”
The sentence stayed with me because it brought to light something beginners can forget when they’re concentrating on the operation. Tissue begins to look like mere material- something to grasp, move, expose, divide, and repair. Experience teaches you to remember that it’s living. It bruises. It tears. It may never even recover from what your hands do carelessly.
There were two other lessons repeated until they became instinctual. You must expose enough to see what you’re doing. And before you divide anything, you must know exactly what it is. Many disasters in theatre begin with a surgeon acting decisively on a mistaken idea of what lies beneath the surface.
The longer I’ve lived with other people, the more these rules have become useful outside the operating theatre. A good relationship asks for much the same discipline- where we show…