The Need for Relationships
Sociality is the biological trait that describes how much the individuals in a species associate with each other and live in cooperative groups. The most fundamental characteristic of animal sociality is how much time, energy, and resources parents have to invest in raising their offspring. This intense investment creates conditions that have generated eusocial species. Eusociality is the highest degree of sociality and is defined by overlapping adult relationships, reproductive division of labor cooperative care of the young and, in the most developed cases, castes.
In his landmark 1975 book, E. O. Wilson applied the concept of eusociality to Homo sapiens. Wilson defined human eusociality as living in multi-generational communities with a division of labor and self-sacrificing behavior (altruism) for the group. As a eusocial species, it is not surprising that our relationships are incredibly important to us. Historically, the quality of our relationships have meant life or death. Social isolation hurts people both physically and mentally and can lead to increased mortality, chronic stress, anxiety and depression.
Because of this innate sociality, humans have a powerful biological need for stable interpersonal relationships. Our survival has depended on this for millennia, our infants are born completely helpless, like baby birds, naked and squirming, completely unable to survive on their own for years. The intense parental investment needed to raise successful offspring has basically created human civilization, because the raising of children who go on to raise their own children (the evolutionary imperative) has created the need for groups of humans to work together for years.
Studies have shown that good relationships are widely considered to be a vital factor for a happy and healthy life, but developing good relationships is not easy,, it requires self-reflection, self-awareness and compromise. Relationship skills are learned at a very young age in the same way that language is learned through immersion in a culture. Our social need is biological but our social skills are learned. Developing relationship skills as an adult can be challenging because as a child you learned social skills when you were so young that you don’t remember it. Many social rules and expectations are unspoken, and when you are conditioned from an early age to behave a certain way it is difficult sometimes to even identify the cause of the behavior as it is to change that behavior.
In the past 50 years, there’s been a dramatic transformation of our most important relationships, those between parents and children. Traditionally,, most family relationships are based on mutual obligations. Today, family relationships are interwoven with personal growth, the pursuit of happiness, and the need for psychological healing. Parent-child relationships are generally more egalitarian, with greater intimacy and reciprocity, Although individuality and independence are highly valued, parents often continue to support their children, financially and emotionally, well into adulthood. Even as technology has had greater impact on our lives and our culture has continued to evolve, our relationships with each have remained the most important part of our lives.