Co-efficiently Co-related

 I'm a fairly reserved person. I don't open up easily to people. I tend to hold my hand close to my chest, hesitant to lay cards on the table. However there have been a few times in my life where I have had a heart-to-heart talk with someone and I find them to be very rewarding.

I've been seeing a therapist for over a year now. One thing that I have decided over all the chats I've had with him is that the people I want to spend the most time with are the ones that I feel the closest to. I have many friends (I use the term "friends" more loosely than some, since to me the term "acquaintance" feels very odd) who are fun to interact with, but our interactions are sparse or superficial. I think it's perfectly fine to have these kinds of friendships--in fact, I think they can be very beneficial. But I have decided that for my own well-being, I will not be putting any measurable amount of emotional effort into such a friendship. I want to reserve that energy for deeper friendships.

I believe that the more you confide in me, the more you trust me and respect me, and therefore the more meaningful the emotions you feel toward me. And the same for the amount that I trust and confide in you. Being a fairly reserved person, I will not open up and discuss any deep personal feelings or concerns with you unless I feel a great deal of trust and respect for you.

Not long after my wife died, while I was attending the single's Mormon church unit in Knoxville, one friend at one point remarked at how deeply I was able to care about other people--he made it sound like it was an unusual trait and that he admired me for that ability. I don't know how much I had thought about it prior to him pointing it out to me. But I know I have thought a lot about it since then.

I have been hurt by many people whom I used to trust, respect, admire, and love. I want to interject that I do not believe that on its own is universally a reason to cut someone out of your life. From this pain I have learned that I need to mete out the amount of emotional energy I invest in my relationships with other people. 

I want to have deep, meaningful, personal relationships with people. In my mind, these are the relationships that are the most valuable--the most worth pursuing. I don't have many close friends. I can't put my finger on exactly when that happened, but I know that it is the case at this time. In my therapy sessions one thing I have come to learn about myself is that one thing I am missing is connection--I feel that I am missing deep connections with other people, and I would like to have more in my life.

As a teacher, when students would ask me about bringing their grade up, I would invariably instruct them that I would match their effort--if they were willing to try harder, I would be willing to put in extra effort to help them understand the material of the course. I found that very few students took me up on that because what they wanted was to get an easy A, not to actually learn the material. I have decided to take the same approach in life. If someone wants to be close to me, I will match their efforts. If they spend time with me, talk with me, open up to me, trust me, I will do the same with them. 

This isn't a test, and it's not a demand that someone meet a list of my criteria before I let them into my inner circle. It is a graduated system. Hence the name of this post--correlation. The correlation coefficient of two variables is an indication of the strength of the linear relationship between them. I want to keep that coefficient as close to 1 as possible. In other words, if you trust me X% and I can feel that, I will do my best to trust you X% as well. These kinds of relationships develop organically. I don't just immediately open up to someone I just met, and I don't expect them to either. I expect that as we spend more time together we will grow closer together.

And that is the crux of the matter there. As I said before, I am perfectly happy investing a small portion of my time with people who wish to only have a superficial relationship with me--lets hang out, play a game that we both like, like each other's Facebook posts, etc. Fun stuff that doesn't involve any lovey-dovey touchy-feely stuff. What that means is that our interactions will be few and far between. I won't invest a great deal of emotion or time in that relationship because I can't afford to. I only have so much to go around and I want to save it for people who want something deeper.

If you want to be close to me, be honest with me. Be open with me. Trust me, respect me, love. Tell me why I'm wrong. Criticize me. Fight with me. Get angry at me. I will do the same with you. In fact, I will tell you this--if I have never been mad at you ever in my life, then that means you have never been a close friend because I just didn't care enough about you to get angry at you. (The converse is not true--the fact that I got mad at you doesn't mean that I do feel close to you, since I have a bad habit of arguing with trolls online and getting mad at them.)

So the decision I have made is to limit the amount of time and emotional energy I invest in someone by the level of depth of our friendship. This doesn't mean cutting anyone out of my life. It means I just might spend less time with you if it feels like you aren't emotionally invested in me. I want more close friends. I want people that I can talk to about my personal shit. Someone I can cry with, celebrate with, fight with, make up with. 

And, yes, to me fighting is important--not looking for things to fight about, but the act of not avoiding fights. People don't always agree perfectly on everything, and it's important for each person to say how they feel. Fighting means you care. It means you're passionate about what you believe, and you're emotionally invested in trying to get the other person to see your perspective. If we're close, I want to see your perspective. Show me what you see, let me feel what you feel. I want that. I need more of that in my life. I need people who care--people who care about me and people whom I can care about.

Physical closeness helps but certainly is not necessary. People who live thousands of miles apart can be really close. I lived a couple thousand miles from my family for a dozen years. I visited every Christmas for the first half of those, and other visits as well. With the exception of my parents, no one in my family came to visit me the whole time I lived far away. That is what I mean to address here. I can't do one-sided relationships any longer. I want close relationships, and to be close that means both parties need to be invested in the other. If I feel that I'm investing a great deal more emotional energy in a relationship than the other person, I will curtail that investment. I need to save my reserves for places where the return on the investment will be greater. Yes, this may sound selfish or self-serving, but I believe that everyone needs to exercise at least some degree of selfishness if they wish to remain mentally healthy long-term.