Relationships are coevolutionary loops (2023)

This is so important and underrated in life.

> "This is what I infer when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. There probably exists someone who enabled that evolution of personality. A parent, a friend group, a spouse. It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. We need someone who gives us space to unfold."

These were the crucial bits for me:

> "Sundays are for listing everything that went wrong during the week on the blackboard we painted on the wall of my study, so we can figure out what needs to change."

and

> "I liked to think about our life as a piece of software. We had our routines and our principles, this was the code. We ran the code by living it. The list on the blackboard was the bug log, a record of the ways our routines broke down in contact with reality. We kept going through the code until our life did what we wanted it to do, more or less."

Love the idea of bug log/dev cycle as a metaphor to use for improving relationships.

Thanks to globalization people have more choice in the environments they live in and change environments with much more ease than in the past. While talking about relationships the focus naturally goes to individuals, it should be recognized that growth in relationships on top of ever changing environments gets much more tricky.

Transport, Communication, Finance, Info networks have all changed drastically from the past.

And the sociologists have been pointing that out for a long time now. Check out

Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity.

Beck's Normal Chaos of Love

Works of Judith Stacey

Its a complex ever changing world out there. Coevolution requires a bit of stablity in the environments. Focus should not just be on what individuals are doing for each other but on how they shape the environment around them in ways that makes such things more possible.

I like the co-evolution framing but the listing of faults on the whiteboard reminded me of https://xkcd.com/523/

This was such a fun read! A sweet blend of poetry, anecdote, and Relational Ontology. Or maybe even Dialogical Philosophy?!

The themes, such as "Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside" remind me greatly of other great reads:

- Martin Buber's "I-Thou" relationship emphasizes genuine, reciprocal interactions, where the self becomes fully realized through mutual presence and connection with the other. See: I and Thou (1923)

- Hegel's concept of recognition (Anerkennung) highlights that self-consciousness and identity are developed through a dialectical process of mutual acknowledgment between self and other. See: Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

Leaving this here for those interested in these concepts

I'm sorry, but wtf? Doesn't coevolution imply two different species? Is coevolution an allegory to help understand relationship dynamics? We are butterflies trying to tongue the pollen out of the long lily stem of our partners?

Beautiful.