Relationship Labels

For my day job (outside of mom and blogger), I work in Information Management where I deal with relational databases that connect different pieces of data to each other. One of the things my group manages is relationships between organizations and people. We track how people are related to organizations, what are their roles. For example, a contact could be an Administrative Contact, a Technical Contact, a Finance Contact, or in a small organization, all three. We put the name of the relationship on the relationship label.

"The relationship label should be meaningful," said my manager today as he was explaining the concept to a new member of our team. "It needs to reflect the true nature of the relationship, of how they are connected."

My manager was talking about labels between data points, and this was something that I had heard before. Yet today when I heard it, I thought about the relationship labels everyone has in their own lives between the people they know. This past week, I've been thinking about relationship labels between people that we simply assign, but can mean so much more than the word: Mother. Father. Son. Daughter. Friend. Husband. Wife. Partner. Co-Worker. Boyfriend. Girlfriend. So simple and yet so complex.

We want to define who we are in relation to the people we know. What exactly is the connection between us? Good friend. Close Friend. Acquaintance. Peer. Colleague. Manager.

And do we feel the same way the other person thinks about us? With mothers and children, the relationship is not mutual or reciprocal. The Boy doesn't give me what I give him (food, shelter, lots of parenting advice, rides to places he needs to go), but he gives me something else -- I am the primary witness to his life, from the day he was born until now.

In some cases, there are more than one label: Piano teacher and friend. Aunt and confidant.

In other cases, things are fuzzy and undefined, or relationship is evolving from one label to another, or maybe some of the multiple labels are being peeled away, and other relationships new labels are added. For better or worse, this time of change is hard for everyone as uncertainty is not everyone's most favorite place to be.

And yet, when we look back at these times of relationship label changes, we can grow, for better worse. When we peel back and remove labels, it is a time to ponder why things changed, and determine if and how we can heal. When we add labels, that too is a time of growth. We are expanding our role in someone else's life.