Relationships and Inequality

NOTE: This blog is sort of the voice of my alter ego from Dan the Branding Expert. Branding is important, but there are other things in life. This blog is about those other things.

It occurred to me the other day while I was talking to a professor in a casual setting how thoroughly fucked so many relationships are between people in the world. Why are these relationships fucked? Because of a fundamentally unequal power dynamic in many (most?) relationships- not only professional, but romantic and friendship as well.

Very often one person has more power in a relationship- say the girl who likes the boy less than he likes her, or the boss who has the employee's future in his hands, or the queen bee or alpha male who has a friend that wants to be her/his friend far more than s/he cares about the wannabe's friendship. In any of these situations, the weaker party can never really criticize the more powerful person, or share personal vulnerabilities/concerns ("why would powerful person care?"), and just fundamentally feels nervous/anxious in interacting with the stronger party, always wanting to impress. The stronger party whether consciously or unconsciously does not really care much about what the weaker party has to say and seeks mostly validation from the weaker party, if he or she even cares that much at all about the weaker party's approval.

Having been at various points on the weaker to stronger party spectrum in interpersonal relationships in my life, I've found that the only meaningful, functional relationships - friendship, romantic, professional - occur when both parties have roughly equal power. Since both parties hold each other in similar esteem and care about each other's observations, concerns, and general sensibility, the two people can interact on a more real level. Neither party is nervous for approval or dismissive of the other party's contributions to the relationship. From this, truthful feelings can be shared, playful jokes can be made at each other's expense in both directions, etc. Equality of power is not a sufficient condition for a meaningful relationship, but it is a necessary one.

It is interesting that the power dynamics are not - except with bosses and employees- explainable by economics at all, but rather dependent on who cares more (weaker) and who cares less (stronger) about being in that relationship with the other person for whatever reason.

p.s. Parents and children, you might say, are the exception to this dynamic, but that is a whole other story that is very complicated and I won't get into here but it is up for debate.