Healthy Relationships Are Life's Most Important Support

First, I must define a healthy relationship. By it I mean a relationship beneficial both to ourselves and to the person we associate with, where "beneficial" means good for physical and mental health. For lovers, family, friends, teachers and students, classmates, and relatives to get along harmoniously long-term, a basic premise is not to burden each other too much while still helping and loving one another.

Relatives, lovers, and closest friends at the core of all our relationships (where "closest friend" may be a teacher, classmate, or soulmate) carry love to a deeper level—never abandoning one another through birth, aging, illness, and death, watching over each other in the hardest times. For each person, this most central relationship matters most, accounting for over 95% of all our relationships.

Large epidemiological surveys worldwide support this: people with family support and intimate relationships generally live longer than those without. Elderly people with a partner not only live longer but have higher quality of life and greater self-care ability.

So once we have such an intimate relationship, other relationships matter little. Though everyone actually needs it, for various reasons not everyone is lucky enough to have it. Casual acquaintances can ease loneliness a little, but when we need a lover or relative to care for us, casual friends cannot substitute. Because when a major sacrifice is required, only those who deeply love us are willing to give.

Among the core relationships, love is paramount. Mr. Zhang Zhongxing said the most important relationship in life is between man and woman—for homosexuals, of course, between same-sex lovers. Russell believed people are lonely most of their lives; the great significance of love is that a couple together drives out this spiritual loneliness. In Russell's view, sex matters, but it is not the primary factor in love; mutual companionship is. We Chinese have a vivid saying for Russell's view: "spouses in youth, companions in old age."

If our core relationships are complete and harmonious, our lifelong happiness index is quite high; if they are incomplete and discordant, we cannot avoid loneliness all our lives.

Love first comes from parents' natural love for children. A little life caressed intimately by its mother and fully protected by its father is like an intact seed that eventually grows into a great tree of love. But a child rejected or neglected by its parents lacks security all its life, can hardly build intimate relationships, and may even develop common psychological disorders or more serious mental illness.

Some people's fates are tragic from birth: parents who do not love each other, or a child who is not the gift from God the parents hoped for—in families favoring sons over daughters, girls often disappoint parents and grandparents, all of which leaves psychological scars.

In the era I was born, this was very common because of the one-child policy. Chinese traditionally value sons to carry on the family line, so in rural areas many families secretly bore several daughters while still wanting a son; daughters in these families were not treated well. With insufficient care from parents and grandparents, they generally grow up lacking security and confidence—a tragedy of an era.

Moreover, men and women play different roles in relationships; women bear more responsibility for caring for family, especially children. This makes mothers generally more anxious and depressed: among Chinese anxiety patients the male-to-female ratio is about 1:4, and among depression patients about 1:2 to 1:3. Women's tumors relate more to emotion, while men's cancers relate more to bad habits.

People show different relational traits at different ages. In early childhood, apart from their parents, children seek peers to play with. Children with plenty of playmates grow up more socially adept; those with few playmates are less socially skilled. Children raised in villages, especially large ones, tend to be more affable—this is why.

I have always believed the best kindergarten is the countryside; people raised there rarely have mental illness. Rural children get more protection and companionship, but sadly human society has abandoned this most effective early-rearing model in its development. Modern urban kindergartens are too fond of teaching rules and neglect the development of children's natural temperament. So many children grow up gloomy, not knowing how to develop new interests.

In adolescence people make many friends, which promotes mental development and lays the foundation for a future career. In middle age people gradually make like-minded friends at work and make new ones; but generally after middle age, new contacts dwindle. Sociologists find that across a lifetime the optimal number of relatives and friends at different stages is around 150; beyond that becomes a burden. After deducting blood relatives, classmates, and teachers, the friends we truly need are very few.

Dealing with too many people exhausts a person, because relationships cost energy and money. The person with the most friends is often close to no one, because good relationships take energy to maintain; someone with many friends can hardly find time to maintain a deeper friendship.

After a certain age, people consciously cut unnecessary socializing to save precious time and limited resources for more meaningful things. People with too many friends are not necessarily happy; they may inwardly tire of social events, because boring socializing is exhausting and fitting in with new contacts is not as easy and pleasant as with old friends.

"Acquaintances fill the world, but not one close friend" is a life tragedy. As poetry it is fine, but from a modern medical standpoint the author was psychologically flawed. If a reader deeply identifies with such a poem, that reader is also psychologically flawed. The vast majority of people can find resonating friends or lovers; to have no close friend means one is poor at relating—too picky, or communication-impaired—and so must keep seeking new relationships to fill inner lack. This means such a person's mind is not whole; if it is severe enough to affect life, he needs a psychologist.

Spiritual dialogue always happens between two people of similar temperament. As Mr. Fei Xiaotong put it, people raised in different family and educational backgrounds can hardly communicate well. Communicating with people whose worldview and outlook differ from ours often brings pain rather than pleasure, and such relationships hold more conflict than consensus. Too much conflict causes mental stress; those forced into socializing often end up with physical and mental illness. Some people have known over a thousand contacts in a lifetime and end up exhausted and lonely.

People who cannot handle relationships well mostly have unhappy families of origin and educational backgrounds, or major psychological trauma. Doctors may or may not heal them. Hitler and Churchill were such people. Churchill struggled all his life with depression; Hitler long used psychiatric drugs. Some politicians today are also in this state, but their health problems are protected as privacy. Yet professional doctors can still detect their problems from small details. For example, a political figure always appearing before the global public as a tough guy, with a six-meter-long desk so that anyone meeting him must stand six meters away—such details, to a psychologist, show deep insecurity and fear of being killed.

Healing a person's physical and mental illness is the hardest thing in the world; just discovering their problems costs a doctor dearly, let alone healing. An ideal treatment plan should include adjusting the patient's relationships. This adjustment works two ways: correcting the patient's mistaken habits in relating to others, and communicating with the patient's family to adjust their relationship with the patient—good relationships are always built by both sides moving toward each other. Good relationships are crucial to recovery: relatives provide not only financial support but spiritual support and emotional companionship, helping patients do what they cannot do alone.

Near-perfect relationships are rare; a person must reach a certain mental maturity to handle his relationships well. Once mature, people are always gentle and friendly to others, because gentleness and friendliness avoid conflict. Gentleness and friendliness are learnable temperaments: if parents are gentle and friendly, children likely are too; if a teacher is, students influenced by him become so; if one spouse is, the other becomes so over time.

Highly aggressive people and those indifferent to others' life and pain were often neglected in childhood, uncared for, or subjected to aggression and hate education, so they lack the capacity to love. Love first comes from being loved: a newborn cannot give to its parents; only when parents give to and caress them, letting them feel loved and protected, do they learn to love and protect others. From the details of how one person loves another we can see traces of how they were cared for in early childhood.

Early-life influences are indeed deep-rooted, because essentially, at a time when a person lacks discernment, they learn a series of habits from the environment. But these influences can be cleared; through behavior-cognition training, a person can change his character. It sounds improbable, yet it happens every day.

Some people suffer greatly and want to escape their mental pain, so they automatically study and seek its source. Gradually they find the sources, recognize their own problems, resolve to correct them, and form new habits. Character sounds mysterious, but essentially it is just a series of thinking and behavioral habits.

Professional counselors help clients analyze how their temperaments formed, recognize the problems, and then help them form a new habit—for most people, with professional, focused training, a new habit forms in a month. A few take longer, but if one resolves to cultivate a new habit, two years at most suffices. So if a person truly wants a new life, it is entirely possible; human fate can be changed and held in one's own hands.

Religion can play a role here: many people's temperaments change greatly after adopting a faith, mainly because they learn new thinking and behavioral habits in a religious environment. But some become more rigid after faith, which relates to the absence of targeted strategies for a particular person in the religious setting. Those who frequently engage in self-conflict and self-attack during relationships truly need a psychiatrist's help.