Unconsciously, I have been fascinated with the concept of human connections, throughout my writings and projects I’ve created over the past few years. It’s something I’ve only realized recently, as I’ve had some time to think and connect familiar patterns while experiencing new social situations that remind me of situations from the past. A significant portion of this has been through the invention of the internet, where the lens of communication and connection are distorted to allow for more widespread or foreign personal communication, but as a result, lacks genuineness or altruistic quality. It acts as more of a guise our purely social selves create, but through the internet, I’ve made connections with many, many more friends than I would have otherwise. It’s helped me realize that while connections may seem entirely chaotic, they’re instead much more deterministic upon certain factors, while still remaining inherently chaotic. This note won’t focus on the aspects of the internet though, or connections bigger than groups of friends, it will solely cover the nature of personal human connections and how they affect each other, as deterministically as I can quantify it. I mostly intend to write this note for myself and not for public purposes, so if others are reading this, I am humbly honored by your viewership.
What is a connection? How is it measured? If we rely on our common sense, we’d say something along the lines that a connection is a unique relationship between two people. This meaning seems to work, but can we make a better one? If we look at connections in a more technical sense, relationships are similar to a node/edge graph, where each node has values assigned to it (personality values), and each edge has values too (relationship values). This definition allows us to plot connections to view them visually in a node tree, which will allow us to define friend groups, etc. While each person is different in how many connections they allow themselves to have, we humans are a definitive social species that has evolved so we can better communicate and hone in on our social skills for one another. They are incredibly important to learn in our developmental years of childhood and continue on into our adulthood. There are an innumerable amount of people on the earth, and as such, we will never stop making new connections, however small they may seem. As such, a definition of connections must not be limited by age, status, or region/language, as we can create connections through social cues alone. It also isn’t limited to singular people, as some people believe to have a negative relationship with a certain group of people. So a better definition to fit human connections would be a quantifiably unique relationship between different people. Although this definition might seem all-encompassing, we shall break it down to be more specific later.
For now, let’s start off by looking at connections between only two people, as this is how many connections start out. The basic definition is very broad, so we can explore this by asking questions about these two people, such as, “Do they even know each other?” This might seem trivial, but our definition does not clarify the different people know each other. The typical definition for this kind of relationship would be “strangers”. If they are each from a group which are at odds from each other, they’d most likely view each other negatively in that group’s context, but on a personal level, they are neutral. To define this in a more technical sense, let’s assign a number ranking to how comfortable these types of connections are. Zero on this ranking will stand for a completely neutral comfortability between these two strangers. If these two people do know each other, we would ask “How much do they know each other?” It doesn’t have to be complete friendship, they could just vaguely know each other from seeing each other through friends or through transit, but it should be mutual. Until they are to consider themselves “friends”, this type of connection can be defined as acquaintanceship. To plot this on our comfortability scale, we have to think about what defines comfortability. Naturally, humans fear what they don’t understand, which is why once we learn about something new, we generally have a more positive outlook on it. However, this isn’t always the case, as what we learn factors into what we believe, which results in how we feel about the subject as a whole. So we can plot comfortability as a function of how much we know about someone else combined with our personal beliefs. As a side note, “how much we know about someone” can seem like an unclear definition, but this is because your knowledge of someone not only grows, but is also chaotic in nature. People don’t have essays about their lives and beliefs they hand out to people they just met, which is why a building of friendship has an air of chaos regarding what will happen. But anyway, acquaintanceship falls between 0 and 1 on our comfort scale, with 0 being “strangers” and 1 being “friends”. If one of the people has constrictive or radical beliefs, that comfortability score will not be as high, or it might even be below zero. If we continue this upwards, both people considering themselves mutual friends would rank between 1 and 2, and close friends would rank between 1.5 and 2.
What ranks higher than close friends? If we think about how we act around new people and how we act by ourselves, we naturally would not mix those two kinds of actions, as we don’t trust someone we just met to fully understand or be comfortable with our true personality. This means comfortability involves a mutual level of trust between two people to be comfortable opening more of themselves up to each other. A type of relationship many would agree is essential to be very comfortable and yourself in is a parental relationship. Parents/guardians help you grow and develop into a functioning adult, meaning a high degree of comfortability is needed between parents and their children in order to effectively and comfortably grow socially. Many may recognize this as the concept of “Attachment”, which can be organized in secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment. Under the assumption of secure attachment, parental relationships can be ranked higher than close friends, ranging from 2 to 2.5. The consequences of the other kinds of attachment will be covered later. If we keep questioning what kinds of relationships can scale higher in terms of comfortability, we should instead ask, for what type of connection is it essential for you to act yourself and be truthful with another person, or else it will most surely fall through? For anyone who’s been in this type of connection, it would be a romantic relationship. For a true romantic relationship to succeed in the long term, you must be invested, truthful, and committed, which takes a very high degree of comfortability to achieve, especially for life. Relationships also scale from 2 to around 2.5, but long term relationships can go as high as a 3. For our intents and purposes, the scale does not go higher than 3, for a 3 can stand for an almost perfect connection between two people, what some might call “soulmate”.
What if we flip the scale in the opposite direction? What makes a connection between two people uncomfortable? As stated earlier, the scale can go below 0 if you find someone who makes you uncomfortable, or someone you have conscious negative feelings for. Someone like this would go between 0 and -1, as either you have had mostly negative experiences with this person, or they were a former friend who you drifted apart from due to uncomfortable changes in personality/friend group differences. What about uncomfortability from -1 to -2? How do you garner such hate for a person? A good example would be betrayal, where a person formerly had a high standing of someone else, but due to a betrayal of trust, that high comfortability flipped around to create a high uncomfortability instead. Other examples are people who constantly cheat you or unfairly treat you, such that their low scaling gets lower each encounter. What about uncomfortability from -2 to -3? To define such low ranking, we can look to the opposite of comfortability levels 2 to 3, “soulmate”, and could infer -2 to -3 would be in the range of “mortal enemy”. Such a low level of relationship status seems to be the result of a very violent and unfortunate series of encounters, and I don’t believe anyone should have “mortal enemies” in their lives. I’m a generally positive person, and don’t like to think of people as “extremely uncomfortable” or “enemies” unless they seriously betray my trust. As such, I won’t be covering much more of the negative end of the spectrum. If you’re wondering what this scale is based off of, it’s not based off of anything, I pulled this concept out of my ass. I did, however, reference the saying “the Japanese have 3 faces”, where 0-1 would be the face you show strangers, 1-2 would be the face you show your friends, and 2-3 would be the face you show those most dear to you.
How else can explore this concept of comfortability? If we think about the connections we make in our life, we can start to compare them. How does our standing of a coworker acquaintance compare with our standing of, let’s say, a crush? If the crush is someone you don’t know very well, they won’t have as high of a comfortability standing, around 0.9 on the high end. A coworker acquaintance on the contrary is someone you probably know fairly well and trust to do their job, but you wouldn’t consider them a friend, and also rank 0.9 on the high end. Despite feeling differently about both people, they rank at the same comfortability, so what’s the missing difference? We could think back to how comfortability is a factor of how much you know about a person combined with your personal beliefs. If we plot a graph where knowledge of the person is on the x axis and comfortability is on the y axis, we get a graph where the crush and the coworker are apart from each other, but only by 1 unit at most. While this makes sense, is there another axis we can define it by? What separates a crush from a work acquaintance? The answer would be the crush is seen as more interesting, or has more potential than the coworker, and if we’re to place that scale on the x axis, we would end up with the coworker being on the left and the crush being on the right of our graph. If we’re to name in the quadrants of this graph, assuming the y axis is comfortability, we’d get the top right quadrant being general friends who have high interest and very comfortable; bottom right being people like crushes, who you have high interest with but are not yet comfortable with; bottom left being people you don’t like, who have low interest and low comfortability; and top left being people you’re comfortable with but not as interested in, like old friends or possibly parents. This is a concept I explored in a different light in a previous project I made “The Personal Social Standing Compass”, where instead of potential, people were plotted based on comfortableness and social experience (roughly introvert/extrovert).
There’s still one more variable we haven’t accounted for, and that is, what are the personal beliefs that factor into our decision when establishing connections? This question posed a problem for me when I was trying to plan out my social simulation program over a year ago. At first, I tried to create my own values that would make sense as values you would see in people socially, but I was unsure how to avoid possible overlap between similar values or values opposite of each other, so I looked elsewhere. What stuck out to me were the “Big Five” personality traits, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism. While they are more defined as personality traits and not social traits, they fit very well when quantifying social behavior. The way I organized the traits was what I believe to be the chronological order for social interaction. In a room full of people who are complete strangers to each other, the first who initiate social interaction are the ones with high extraversion. The extraverted people initiate friendships with people who are kind (agreeable) and open to friendships. Through this social interaction over time, other traits come into effect, like conscientiousness and neuroticism, which can define when they are social and how long/stable the social connection lasts. My simulation relied on this concept for “people” to build connections with each other, “hanging out” enough times until eventually becoming “friends”. Something I came to a realization of while creating it was the fact that personality values are not static, given enough time and pressure, personality values change depending upon the friends, or friend group they’re apart of. Connections aren’t just to fulfill our social desires, connections with others make us grow together. As we establish friendships and friend groups, we might not be as alike in our big five values, but as we spend more and more time with those friends, those values begin to shift to be more homogenous with them. The shift, however, will only be as much as we let ourselves shift. Someone with higher openness and lower conscientiousness is more likely to go with the flow of the group than someone with low openness and higher conscientiousness. This is what happens when someone leaves or fades out of a friend group because they personally feel uncomfortable changing to the dynamic that the group is continuing with. And also vice versa, when a friend group singles out someone because they don’t adopt the values of the group, or their values more apparently contrast the group’s values over time. This will be covered more in depth later.
Although we’ve discussed personality values and social situations, we should ask, what is the start? What inherently defines our personality values and connections? As we mentioned earlier, the psychological concept of Attachment is a very strong kind of connection humans innately develop as babies/toddlers, and use as a basis when establishing relationships in the future. What makes something like attachment so important is that it doesn’t just influence personality values as stated in the previous paragraph, it defines those values, which can be hard to change and cause issues through the adolescent and young adult years. If we’re to roughly define how each style of attachment influences personality values, let’s start with secure attachment. Secure attachment is defined by the child’s needs being met in their early development and their values being correctly assured, while being able to explore and express themselves mentally, physically, and emotionally to understand the world around them. This type of attachment allows for a more open and kind person who is likely to have low neuroticism. Anxious (anxious ambivalent) attachment arises in children due to an inconsistent parenting style, sometimes the child’s needs are met, and sometimes they are not, which can develop into having low self-esteem and anxiety when it comes to friendships/relationships. This type of attachment can result in medium neuroticism, and possibly low extrovertedness and low openness. The second kind of insecure attachment style is the Avoidant (anxious-avoidant) style. This manifests in children when the caregiver is unreceptive to their feelings by being strict or intolerant while growing up. People with avoidant attachment can have medium neuroticism, and possibly low extrovertedness and low agreeableness. The last form of attachment is a combination of the previous two, known as Disorganized (fearful-avoidant) attachment. This form of attachment is instilled when a child’s parents form a negative bond with their child by being physically and emotionally unavailable to them. Disorganized attachment people can have medium to high neuroticism, and possibly low extraversion, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness. However, something to note about these insecure attachment styles is they are not permanent. While some are harder to help be more secure than others, most people with insecure attachment styles eventually move out of their childhood establishment and surround themselves with others who can help to alter the insecurities in their personality. As a parent, you have a tremendous effect on the social-relationship outcome of your child, which is what makes parenthood such a massive responsibility. A parent with very insecure attachment will most likely inflict those attachment insecurities onto their child.
Now that we’ve defined the properties of connections as efficiently as we can, the next sensible thing to ask is What kind of connections are there? Friendships with people often change, so it could be helpful to think of connection types like a flow chart. If we think back to our compass of comfortability/potential, a “stranger” connection is defined as someone with neutral comfortability and neutral potentiality, so that would be the start of the flowchart. Now, connections can evolve in several different ways, but for the sake of this explanation, I’ll just be covering the most common types of connection evolutions. From Stranger, we can evolve to Acquaintance if the connection gets more comfortable and has more potential. If we keep going, it’ll evolve to Friend, Close Friend, and eventually, Partner, with the most mutual comfort and potential. However, not all connections are mutual. From Stranger or Acquaintance, we connect two nodes opposite of each other, a Clingy Friend node, with neutral comfort and low potential, and a Crush node, also with neutral comfort but high potential. If we instead meet a stranger but get a bad impression from them, a medium-low comfort and potential score would put them into the “Person with Negative Standing” node. The node name is a little weird because I couldn’t find a word to fit that description, but can be derived when a former friend/acquaintance does something you find wrong. From Friend, Close Friend, or the Negative Standing node we can get the Enemy node, which is someone you are very uncomfortable with and have negative potential for. Other nodes that can be connected are the Distant Friend node from the Friend node, which is a friend you are quite comfortable with, but feel low potential for. A Professional Friend can be drawn from the stranger or acquaintance node, and is also a friend you feel moderate comfort with, but more neutral potential. A rather interesting connection that can be drawn from the Friend, Close Friend, or Partner node is the Codependent Relationship node. This connection is interesting because it’s the only node deep in the fourth quadrant (so far), a connection with low comfort, but high feeling of potential, which is what keeps the relationship together. A node I found couldn’t connect to any other node is the Parent/Guardian node, as this relationship forms before the recognition of the concept of friends or strangers, and grows on its own throughout a person’s lifetime. A Parent/Guardian node is usually a connection with high comfort and between low to high potential, which is based on how old the person is or the relationship with their parents.
I would also like to touch on what defines good connections and bad connections as I feel that’s one of the last parts that should be defined. Something to note is there is no defined “good” and “bad” when it comes to connections, a lot of it is just shades of gray, and it’s up to us about where to draw the line of “good” or “bad”. So we’ll assume what defines *most* good and bad connections. The bare requirements for a good connection to prosper are that it should be mutual and have trust. A “good” connection doesn’t necessarily need to have great levels of comfort, it just needs to have common ground both are happy with. “Common ground” is the trust aspect and “both are happy with” is the mutual aspect. Albeit, having a high level of comfort and high interest (potential) helps greatly in making a connection prosper. A bad connection would be defined as the opposite, one that is not mutual and lacks trust. As we clarified earlier, a connection like a “clingy friend” is not mutual because one person sees more potential in the relationship than the other. However, this isn’t always a bad thing, like in the instance of a “crush”, because usually, those feelings are confessed to the other person and that one sided feeling can now be sorted out with them to resolve if it can evolve into a mutual or common ground feeling. As you become closer and closer with a person, those personal preferences of what you see in a good connection become stricter and stricter, as you need more and more trust in a person in order to be more and more comfortable with them. As such, a break in trust or poorly resolved not-mutual feelings hurt that much more for each person. Because of the high amount of comfort and potential each person garnered for each other, such “betrayal” is amplified from what it would usually be if they were instead friends or acquaintances. So much so that it can result in each person being demoted to the level of Stranger, “Person with Negative Standing”, or even Enemy. Contrarily, a bad connection can be mended back together with enough time for each person to forgive or forget. As long enough potential is felt in both sides to make a connection, it’ll happen.
One last concept I would like to cover is the Inevitability regarding the termination of connections. This is something I’ve come to believe while witnessing the progression of myself, my friends, and others’ connections or (more often) romantic relationships with people. To form a strong connection with someone, the connection needs both a high level of comfort and a high level of interest, for without one or the other, the connection will not go through. However, if we’re to think about the longevity of connections, a third property is brought to light. For after the initial exchange of happiness and pleasantries that come with the conception of a connection, the two parties must figure out what type of connection they will plateau at, whether it be less casual friends, friends, close friends, or even partners. This slow (or fast!) progression relies on each partys’ personality traits and how well they cooperate with the other party’s. For even if two strangers hook up in one night and get close enough to start a relationship, they have a very low chance of staying together if they do not have cooperating personalities. Hence, in a pure social environment without any negative external circumstances, if a connection ends due to a problem such as difference in opinion, aggression, complex misunderstanding, or etc., it doesn’t matter if it ended after a few months or a few years, the connection was inevitably going to end due to the difference in personality. While this may seem nihilistic, recall an effect mentioned earlier, where while in a connection or a group of connections, your personality slowly but surely changes to fit with the group of people, giving the effect of “growing together”. Meaning, there is a Mandelbrot-like event horizon line where your personality is close enough with another’s to slightly change and indefinitely stay in a relationship on one side, and far enough from another’s to slightly reject their personality eventually “grow apart” from them and leave the relationship, however long it takes. While this effect is more noticeable in romantic relationships and large friend groups because of their dramatic nature, it also applies to one on one connections or smaller friend groups. But do remember that even if one type of connection, like a romantic relationship, is inevitable to end with someone, that does not mean a lesser type of connection, like a friend or close friend, isn’t possible to endure.
So, what of it? All of this information and classification on what defines human connections, but what’s to gain?
This information is not a guide or something to be practically used in social situations, but instead a building block. I write this for the sake of those who are eager to learn from this and apply their own knowledge to it so we may further understand what really defines, human connections. I write it for those who do not yet know what really fascinates them, and reading such explorations and relations human psyche’s have on each other brings out their inner interest to carefully study how much they can correctly witness in the real world, and if it is incorrect, why? Concepts written so logistically in these paragraphs model such dramatic actions and consequences in the real world as if they’re data points. I write this note not because I’m unfeeling through my social experiences in ages of friend groups, but because I don’t want to be, and want to learn what further models people’s connections with each other for a more exact conclusion (give or take some chaotic nature). You are not a bystander of this phenomenon, you too have your own social personality values and morals which define how you interact with others, and how others interact with you. Connections are all about making mistakes, and mistakes are what make us human. People will grow together with you and others will grow apart from you. They are not always satisfying, you might start a promising connection but never be able to finish it with them, or contrarily, have an unsatisfying relationship drag out with another. Your connection will affect others which will in turn affect more people you might not ever meet. There is no guide to being social, it is a natural skill we take for granted, and can instinctively recognize when others lack it. You will encounter social situations you’ve gone through in the past and new ones you have yet to witness. With every new friend is a new step into a network you have yet to explore for yourself if you possess enough potential. The seemingly small chances and interactions with people can balloon into an every flowing timeline of causes and effects which will surprise you. Such is the chaotic nature of connecting with others you can later call close calls or friends. Because through it all, you will be a wiser and kinder friend, for the ever building of knowledge will only enhance how you navigate your challenges. The treasure of growing is being able to look back at your past and know you have become a better person than you once were, but being able to laugh about with close friends as you laugh about theirs. To be able to connect with others in such a meaningful way is a beauty and a privilege of being human. Such too is to understand others and explore your connection with them for however long either of you allow it. It is not unnatural to all develop your “line”, your expression, or even to yearn for a certain kind of connection. We are multifaceted beings, and require different types of connections to truly fulfill us, balance our social appetite. For in the end, what matters in a connection is how you make the person feel. Even if you have forgotten someone’s name, or face, what stays in the memory of a connection is the intangible feeling that long lost individual once gave to you. For that feeling is unique and is your own impression of them, which may be similar to others, but never the same. It is on this principle that connections work, so that you can reflect on yourself and on others to understand what needs a compromise. All this note calls for is to understand its contents, and ponder them in moderation. For I am but one man with my own perspective on the world, however overly reasoned it may be. And with this note, it is my mission to take this feeling of wondrous opportunity regarding human relationships and convey it to you in this final paragraph.
Thank you for reading.