Towards a Typology of Relationships

Let's suppose we are studying relationships and would like to structure the different varieties of relationships into some kind of system — a typology, essentially. As we examine our own relationships and the relationships of people around us and read what people we've never met write about relationships, we come to a number of conclusions:

In our case, we are interested in understanding and classifying the unchanging aspects of relationships. We could also go a different route and study situational aspects of relationships, but that would be less intellectually satisfying (though potentially more practical).

Now we must somehow explain what we mean by a 'relationship.' The observations above are fairly obvious, but we must clarify their boundaries. The devil is in the details, as they say. To help us in this task, we can try visually portraying different relationships that people experience. For example, this might be how one relationship develops over time (here we have chosen the descriptors of psychological "comfort" and "discomfort," but really any useful descriptors could be used):

And a third might look like this (here the relationship was broken off before it developed into a long-term stable relationship):

This exercise helps us to see that it takes a while for each relationship to settle into a pattern. Now we see that we can separate the initial period of a relationship from the long-term pattern, which seems relatively inflexible. It seems that relationships over the long term tend to be either comfortable, uncomfortable, or fairly neutral. So it appears that for purposes of our typology we can more or less ignore the initial "adaptation" stage of relationships and focus on the long-term pattern.

What now? This relationship could be characterized as a largely uncomfortable and unstable relationship, with wide swings from love and affection to repulsion and antagonism. There is still a pattern, though it is more difficult to see. Such relationships are ultimately disappointing and yet create a powerful attachment, with the next illusory 'high' always around the corner, but followed by an inevitable emotional low and bitter discouragement.

An even greater problem, however, is trying to determine the actual level of psychological comfort in relationships. As we study others' relationships, we often find that when we go by our own external observations, we see one picture, and when we go by partners' self-reporting, we get a different picture. For example, we might see sign after sign of psychological discomfort, but then we ask the partners about their relationship, and they assure us that they are comfortable with each other! What do we believe?

Not only that, but many people simply are not able to tell directly whether they experience comfort or discomfort in their relationships. This leads us to believe there is a conscious and an unconscious layer in relationships. Depending on the 'quality' of whatever perceptual filters are interpreting signals from the unconscious, conscious perception of relationships can differ from the comfort or discomfort one is actually experiencing on a physiological (emotional, mental, psychic...) level.

A new complication in our attempt to classify relationships arises as we discover that relationships can be regulated. We know this because we repeatedly come across cases where people change aspects of interaction within relationships and achieve long-lasting changes. For example, let's look at the following case:

Here the relationship was poor to begin with and was consciously recognized as such. One or both participants underwent a change of some sort and began limiting interaction with the other partner to an amount he or she could manage emotionally. The interaction still causes a bit of psychological discomfort, but since it takes place in small amounts and in carefully controlled situations, it is viewed consciously as a rewarding challenge. However, the risk of "relapse" to the previous pattern remains if for any reason the partners stop limiting their interaction.

For purposes of our typology, we can assume that the above relationship has not changed fundamentally, even if it has been "sanitized." If the underlying pattern had indeed changed, then there would no longer be any potential for relapse, even if partners were to spend unlimited amounts of time together in an uncontrolled environment. Thus, for classification purposes we can ignore the change and say that the relationship causes significant discomfort in large doses. We could also add that in small doses and under certain conditions, the relationship might be viewed as a "positive challenge" for the partners.

Now we return to the task of defining what we mean by 'relationship.' By now it is clear that what we are really talking about is interaction. All the diagrams above show the degree of psychological comfort and discomfort experienced in each other's presence. To be more exact — in one-on-one interaction, since otherwise it would be too difficult to tell what was actually causing the comfort or discomfort.

Now that we have clarified what exactly we are talking about, we can move forward with our typology of relationships. What we want to do now is identify different relationship patterns and assign them names. Using just the "comfort - discomfort" scale, we can probably identify several different patterns. These could be called, for example, comfortable, uncomfortable, neutral, and unstable. For our purposes here it doesn't really matter how many we find or what we call them — just that they are exhaustive (any relationship can be described as one of these). For now we have:

To take the next step in our work, we have to postulate that all people will have these relationships with some other people. We have no reason to believe that some people are exceptions to this rule. We observe that the "better" a person's relationships seem to be with others, the more carefully he or she selects people to interact with. In other words, if we were to take away from them the chance to choose whom they interact with, these people would be deprived of their relationship "advantage."

Now we can take any person and categorize other people according to their relationship with this person. For example:

Also, we know that each of the other people in this table has these same four relationships (or interaction patterns) with one another. We could create a similar table for each of the 11 people in this group showing his or her relationships with the other 10. Our hope is that if — referring to the chart above — Persons 2, 6, and 10 all have a "comfortable" relationship with Person 1, then all three of them will have identical relationships with each of the other 10 people. In other words, the relationship charts of Persons 2, 6, and 10 will all look identical. If this is the case, then we are done. If not, then we need to either 1) modify our relationship categories or 2) increase the number of relationship categories (making them more specific), or both, until we have satisfied this condition.

A logical number of interaction types would be 3, 4 (2x2), 5, 8 (2x2x2), 9 (3x3), 16 (4x4), 25 (5x5), or 36 (6x6). A good number would be large enough to reflect the complexity of relationship types and small enough to keep things useful. A typology of, say, 1024 interaction types would not be practical, since it would be impossible to learn to distinguish each relationship from the others. Socionics uses 16 interaction types, and this number is probably perfect.

Now that we have a typology of relationships (or long-term one-on-one interaction patterns, to be precise), we can use this for prediction purposes. If we recognize that Person 12 has a "neutral" relationship with Person 1, we can expect that he will have the same relationships with the rest of the people as Persons 4, 8, and 11 (see chart above).

Now we are getting very close to our end goal. Assuming we have an effective typology of relationships that satisfies the condition above (in dark red), we can now create a typology of people. We can take the chart above, which is a chart of people's relationships with Person 1, and turn it into a chart of people's "types."

*Now we have added Person 1 to the chart as well. In this case we have arbitrarily assumed that people have "neutral" relationships with other people of the same type. Whether this is true or not does not matter for this demonstration.

Now we can create a chart of the relationships between the four types. It would look something like this:

To finish up our typology of individuals, we now need to look at the qualities that all people of one type have in common, and call this their "type definition." Qualities that many, but not all representatives of the type possess we can call "common" type traits, but they are not definitive of the type. Once we have type definitions, we can identify the types of other people without having to identify their relationships with people whose types are known. This type — as long as it has been identified correctly — is predictive of the relationships this individual will have with other people whose types have also been identified.

Now we have what we had hoped to obtain — a typology of relationships, or interaction, concealed behind a typology of people. The starting point of this exercise was the study of relationships, but this process led us to a typology of people. Now, by identifying people's types, we can predict the relationships they will have with others — within the bounds that we have established.