The Space Between Us

What is a relationship?

Relate comes from the Latin relatus: to carry back, to bring back. In English the word kept a second life alongside the first. One relates a story. One relates an incident to a friend. The word therefore holds two meanings at once: to stand in connection with something, and to give an account of it.

-ship is the old ending denoting a state or a condition. Friendship. Hardship. Ownership. It does not name a thing possessed. It names a condition one is standing in.

A relationship, taken literally, is the condition of carrying something back and forth between two people. And part of what is carried is an account. A story. Something told.

Here we are considering any relationship at all. A father and a son. A brother and a sister. A teacher and a student. An employer and the man who works for him. Two neighbours who share a wall and a water connection. A citizen of one country and a citizen of another. A citizen of one country and a citizen of the same country, which is often the harder case. Two people who have never met and know each other only as a category.

Wherever two human beings stand in some connection to each other, there is relationship, whether either of them chose it or not.

And the field is wider than it first appears. If all of us are born on this earth, drawing from the same air, the same water, the same short supply of years, then relationship is not something entered into occasionally. It is the condition in which one already stands. One does not begin a relationship with the man who grows the grain one eats, nor with those who will inhabit this place after one is gone. Yet the connection is there, and it is not imaginary.

Consider it further. Suppose there were another planet, and people living upon it. Would we not be related to them also? Not by treaty, not by trade, not by any arrangement either side had agreed to, but by the simple fact that they are conscious beings and so are we.

If that relationship holds before any contact whatsoever, then relationship is not created by contact at all. It is prior to it. What is ordinarily called a relationship is only the small portion of that field one happens to have noticed.

Utopia or best relationship?

Set aside for a moment what relationships are, and consider what one would be at its best.

The question is not idle. Every complaint about a relationship implies a standard, and the standard is almost never examined. Something is being measured against something. It is worth asking what.

Looked at closely, the same few elements appear, and they appear underneath whatever particular form the relationship has taken. They are not the relationship itself. They are its structure, in the way that bone is not the body but is what the body stands upon.

Trust is the first, and it is not prediction. It is not the expectation that a person will behave well tomorrow, for that is an estimate, and an estimate can be made about a machine. Trust begins where knowledge ends. It is what one does with the part of another that cannot be verified. A relationship in which everything is verifiable has no need of trust and does not contain any.

Understanding is not agreement. To understand a man is not to approve of what he has done. It is to see how his action followed from where he was standing — from his fear, his history, the narrowness of what he could see at that hour. Agreement asks the other to become like oneself. Understanding asks nothing of him at all.

Affection is warmth that does not have to be earned again each morning. It is easily mistaken for the pleasure one takes in another's company, but pleasure is conditional and affection is not. Affection does not withdraw when the other is dull, or difficult, or unwell. Whatever withdraws under those conditions was something else wearing its name.

Compassion, taking the word apart as the first one was taken apart, means to suffer with. It is not pity, which observes suffering from a safe distance and is therefore a form of separation. Compassion has no distance in it. It is the recognition that what has fallen upon another could as easily have fallen here.

No one of these is sufficient alone. Trust without understanding becomes dependence, and it breaks at the first surprise. Understanding without affection becomes analysis, and a man may be understood completely and still be left cold. Affection without compassion stops at the edge of one's own circle and calls that edge the world. A strong relationship is not the presence of one of these things. It is the presence of all of them at once, each correcting what the others would become if left by themselves.

But even this is not fixed. What these words require does not stay the same. The trust asked of a father is not the trust asked of a colleague. Affection under scarcity does not resemble affection under ease. In a settled society understanding may cost very little, and in a divided one it may cost everything a man has. Circumstance does not merely test the structure. It alters what the structure demands.

So the ideal is not a standard fixed somewhere above human life, waiting to be reached. It moves as conditions move. Whether something that changes with circumstance can still serve as a measure, or whether it can only serve as a direction, is a question that will not be settled here.

What is not in doubt is that the elements themselves are known. It is commonly held that human beings fail one another because they do not know better, and that what is wanting is education, or exposure, or good example. That does not survive examination. The knowledge is already common and it is already disobeyed. The father who has not spoken to his son in nine years can define compassion as accurately as any teacher. Whatever produces conflict between human beings, it is not ignorance of the good.

Image, judgement and preconception

If it is not ignorance, then something stands between the knowledge and the act. It is worth naming with some care, because three things are ordinarily confused here.

A judgement is a conclusion formed about a person after something has happened. It has a date. It was arrived at, and it could in principle be revised.

A bias is a leaning that was present before anything happened, inclining what gets noticed and what is allowed to pass unnoticed. It has no date, because it was absorbed rather than formed.

A preconception is a picture carried into a meeting that has not yet taken place, so that the person is met already described.

These three accumulate, and what they accumulate into is an image. The image is not a fantasy. It is built from real material — words that were said, acts that were done, silences that were noted. But once it exists it begins to work in the other direction. The person is no longer producing the image. The image is now deciding which parts of the person are permitted to be seen.

That is a small mechanism, and it appears far too slight to carry the weight of what human beings do to one another. Whether it can carry that weight is the question the rest of this enquiry has to test.

Then why is there conflict?

If every one of us knows what a good relationship is made of, and every one of us wants one, why is the world arranged as it is?

The question deserves to be approached slowly, and from what can be observed rather than from what is assumed.

Begin with the observation itself. Conflict is present at every scale. Between a husband and a wife in a small room. Between a father and a son who have not spoken in nine years. Between two brothers over a strip of land their father divided badly. Between castes in a village, religions in a city, and two countries that share a border, a language and a history. The scale changes. The thing does not.

Each of these conflicts arrives with a full explanation of itself, and the explanation is always local. He said this. They took that. It began at the wedding. It began in 1947. Each side holds a complete account, and in every account the other side began it. The common perception is that these accounts are the causes, and that if the particular grievance were removed the conflict would go with it.

Is that true? It carries the appearance of truth, because each account is factually correct. The words were said. The land was taken. But observe what follows if it is taken as the whole explanation. Were the causes genuinely local, one would expect to find conflict in some places and its absence in others. That is not what is found. It is found in every country, in every century, at every income, in every faith, in the house of the illiterate and in the house of the professor. A thing that appears everywhere is not accounted for by a cause that appears in one place only.

So the local reasons are true and are not the cause. They are the occasion. Something more common is doing the work beneath them.

Then what is common to all of them? Not the land. Not the money. Not the words spoken at the wedding. When everything particular has been set aside, what remains in every case is only this: there are two human beings, and each of them is meeting an image rather than a person. The small mechanism turns out to be the one thing present everywhere.

Does one meet the person, or the image?

Consider what one actually holds when one thinks of one's father.

There is a picture. It has been built over thirty years out of real material. Something he said when one was seven. The evening he did not come. The way he stood at the gate. A tone of voice not heard in a decade and yet reproducible this minute.

The picture is not a lie. It is made entirely of things that happened. But it is a record of a man who no longer exists, kept by a boy who no longer exists either.

So the question arises. When the two of them quarrel on the telephone, who is quarrelling? Two people, or two images completed years ago and carefully maintained ever since?

There is a second difficulty, and it goes deeper than the first. Every human being is changing. Not as a sentiment, but as a fact. The body is not the body of last year. The fears are not the same fears. The man who shouted ten years ago has had ten years since. He may have buried a parent in that time. He may have been frightened in a way one knows nothing about. He is not the man who shouted. That man is gone, and the only place he still exists is in the mind that has kept him.

And the one who holds the image is also moving. One is not the person who was hurt. Those ten years have passed for him as well. Even the memory of the event has been revised a little each time it was taken out and looked at.

So there are not two fixed things standing in a relationship. There are two moving things, each holding a still photograph of the other, and this arrangement is what is called knowing someone.

The account we carry

Return to the word with which this began.

A relationship is the condition of carrying something back and forth, and part of what is carried is an account of the other person. In most relationships it is not the person who is carried. It is the story that has been made of him, delivered back to him daily, and called by the name of love.

If that is so, the difficulty is not confined to the quarrelling family or the disputed border. It is the ordinary condition of human beings living together. Nations hold images of nations. Castes hold images of castes. The believer holds an image of the unbeliever and is held within one himself. Much of what is called history is the maintenance of these pictures across generations, and much of what is called peace is an agreement not to act upon them for a time.

The space between two people is not empty. It is full of what has already been decided they are. And that may be the only distance that has ever needed closing.

Whether it can be crossed is not a thing an essay is able to settle. What an enquiry can do is leave the questions in better condition than it found them.