The Invisible Rules We Bring Into Relationships
You send a friend a message after school.
Nothing.
An hour passes.
Still nothing.
By dinner, your brain has assembled a surprisingly detailed investigation from approximately zero evidence. Are they annoyed? Did I say something? They were quieter at lunch. Actually, they did look at me strangely in science.
Meanwhile, your friend’s phone is sitting at the bottom of a backpack underneath a water bottle and something that may once have been a granola bar.
Same relationship.
Same unanswered message.
Two completely different interpretations.
That happens because we don't enter relationships as blank slates. We bring ideas about friendship, loyalty, respect, privacy, family, communication and what we think other people should do.
We have also spent years watching how other people behave such as our parents/guardians, siblings and friends. Without necessarily realizing it, we have been learning the unwritten rules of relationships.
Where did your rules come from?
Some of those rules are personal. You might believe good friends should talk about problems immediately. Someone else might prefer having time to think first.
You might think teasing shows that people are comfortable with each other. Someone else might think that certain kinds of teasing are disrespectful.
Neither person walks around carrying a handbook titled My Personal Beliefs About Relationships. The beliefs usually become visible through behaviour.
Behaviour gives you clues about the beliefs underneath it.
That is useful information.
If someone regularly checks on friends who are struggling, that behaviour tells you something about what they value. If someone avoids disagreements, that tells you something too.
So does apologizing, sharing private information, including people, interrupting them, listening carefully, keeping promises or disappearing whenever a friendship becomes difficult.
The Social World Enters the Relationship
Not literally. That would make hanging out considerably more crowded.
But your social world comes with you.
Every group develops social norms, the often unwritten expectations about what people normally do.
Maybe your group talks openly when someone is upset. Maybe nobody does. Perhaps friends tease one another constantly. Perhaps certain topics are understood to be off limits.
Maybe cancelling plans at the last minute is no big deal, or maybe everyone considers it disrespectful. Perhaps it influences potential future invites as it goes against those social norms.
Those norms can influence what you do.
What happens when the group reacts?
Suppose someone posts an embarrassing picture of another person in a group chat. You aren't sure it is okay.
Then several people react with laughing emojis.
The picture hasn't changed.
But something around it has.
You have received social information suggesting that other people approve. That can make joining in easier, even if you would have made a different choice alone.
Social influence can work in the other direction too. If somebody says, “Take it down. They asked you not to post that,” the group has received a very different message about what behaviour is expected.
Social norms aren't necessarily good or bad.
The important question is what behaviour they are encouraging.
Learning Relationships from Culture
Long before you started choosing your own friendships, you were watching relationships.
Families, communities and cultures can influence ideas about respect, independence, privacy, family responsibility, showing affection, helping other people, handling disagreement and talking about emotions. Those experiences can become part of what feels “normal” to us.
That does not mean everyone from the same family or culture thinks the same way. People interpret what they have learned differently, and their beliefs continue changing as they have new experiences.
It does mean that two people can care about each other and still arrive with different expectations.
“If something is wrong, tell me directly.”
“If something is wrong, don't embarrass the person by bringing it up.”
Neither expectation is visible until something happens.
Then suddenly it is very visible.
A Relationship Creates Its Own Rules
This is where relationships become interesting.
You aren't only influenced by the expectations you brought with you. The people in a relationship also create expectations together.
If I interrupt you repeatedly and you never say anything, interruption can slowly become normal between us.
If you tell me it bothers you and I listen and change what I am doing, we have established something different.
If we can disagree, talk about what happened and repair things afterward, that becomes part of the relationship too.
This is why relationships involve shared responsibility.
Both people contribute to establishing a relationship through their behaviour. Both contribute to maintaining it through things such as communication, reliability, respect, support and attention to what the other person is communicating.
When something goes wrong, both may have a role in repairing the relationship.
Shared responsibility does not mean equal responsibility for every behaviour.
If one person deliberately harms, humiliates, threatens, controls or repeatedly disrespects another person, responsibility for that behaviour belongs to the person doing it. Nobody is required to do half the work of repairing someone else's harmful behaviour, and nobody has a responsibility to keep an unsafe relationship going.
Reading the Behaviour
The interesting question, then, isn't only:
“Why did that person do that?”
Try looking one layer deeper.
What might be motivating this behaviour?
Reflection Questions
• Is there a personal belief underneath it?
• Is the person responding to what everyone else seems to be doing?
• Could they have learned different expectations about communication or relationships?
• Is this a one-time misunderstanding, or is the same behaviour happening repeatedly?
Then ask an even more useful question:
What is our behaviour creating between us?
Reading What the Relationship Is Becoming
Relationships are influenced by all sorts of things we inherited from elsewhere, but the relationship itself is being built in the present.
Every conversation, apology, ignored concern, act of support, broken confidence, repaired disagreement and moment of respect adds another piece of information.
Learning to notice those patterns and how individuals deliver them is part of becoming relationship literate.
You begin to recognize not only what someone says a relationship is, but what the behaviour of the people in it is telling you.
Don't only ask what someone says the relationship is.
Notice what the behaviour of the people in it is telling you the relationship actually is.