Harmonious Human Relationships

[sranganayaki]

Many human relationships start off in heaven and gradually come back to earth. That is common but not inevitable. You can recover the romance or joy of happy and harmonious human relationships.

Achieving and maintaining positive and joyous human relationships is more difficult than attaining high professional eminence, but it is still possible. Happy romantic relationships are possible in the measure you are willing to raise your capacity for living.

The capacity for living is the capacity to make human contacts pleasurable. All human contacts can be made pleasurable, if you have no objection to learning the principle and practicing it. We often tend to romanticize love as some magic formula which comes and goes like a Divine messenger without our conscious intention or control. But lasting human relationships are built of much more earthly stuff. Here is a graded series of methods you can adopt to achieve or restore lasting harmony and joy in any human relationship.

Good Manners
In earlier centuries manners were so highly revered that the quality and value of an individual was judged almost entirely by how they appeared and behaved. Ours is an egalitarian age where we reject as preposterous the notion that people should be judged by their appearance or how much money they have to spend on clothes. Ours is an age where we idolize freedom of expression, even when it is crude or offensive. But there is a truth and power in good manners that we ignore at our peril. That value of manners is best illustrated by the way men and women behave during the period of courtship before marriage. Once they are attracted to one another, young lovers take an extraordinary effort to be polite, thoughtful, considerate and understanding with regard to each other. Their every thought is about pleasing the other person, doing what they want to do, saying what they would like to hear, avoiding activities and topics that disturb or annoy. Young lovers reveal a marvelous capacity for selflessness and self-giving that can make the romantic relationship the most wonderful and unforgettable experience. Imagine maintaining the sense of romantic wonder through and after years of constant companionship. That is dream most people can only dream about and very few actually realize.

Good Behavior
Why does the bliss of romantic love often fade so quickly even before the wedding or the honeymoon is over? It fades because most often the perfect manners and consideration of young lovers is not really an expression of good behavior. Good behavior means that the manners we express truly and fully reflect our inner thoughts, feelings and attitudes. Too often in the urgent hope of winning the love of another, we display manners that are not endorsed by our feelings. We make sacrifices and act in a considerate manner to win the other person by an effort to suppress our own real feelings and preferences.
Once we win the affection of another and the security of relationship, the intense effort to shape our manners subsides. We begin to express more of what we really feel. Though we were willing to do anything and be anything to win the love of another person, once we have won it we would like the other person to accept us just as we are -- not as we have behaved -- and to indulge all the feelings and sentiments we concealed in order to win their affection.
Good manners creates the basis for good human relationships, but good behavior is essential for maintaining that harmonious relationships over time. Instead of dropping our good manners because it is not the way we really feel, those who want last happiness in relationship should strive to modify their thoughts and feelings to be in harmony with the good manners they express. Instead of changing our outer behavior, change our inner attitudes to make that good outer behavior more sincere and lasting.

Spiritual Methods
There is nothing very remarkable or romantic about good manners and behavior, but the fact is that they form the bedrock on which lasting harmonious relationship are achieved. If it seems like too much self-restraint and effort is required to always be polite, accommodating, understanding, thoughtful and considerate of another person, then it is not rational or reasonable for you to expect the most rare and special of human experiences to last. Remarkable relationships call for remarkable efforts.
Good manners and good behavior are enough to preserve any relationship and any marriage. But they are not sufficient to maintain the intensity of romantic love. For that a greater effort is needed and a higher spiritual method is required. Here too there is a gradation of methods that you can apply to intensify and deepen the relationship and make it not only a source of harmony and joy but an endless opportunity for personal growth and spiritual progress.

You can find more methods at
Harmonious human relationships - Human Science - a Wikia wiki

[Zukin]

Those are great points, sranganayaki. It reminds me of the research of the psychologist John Gottman. Basically, he says that all human relationships are made up of individual transactions called "bids" which are represented by verbal or nonverbal actions. In this model, someone will make a "bid" and then the other person can choose to respond to or reject that bid. The most successful relationships (whether they are romantic relationships, friendships, or work groups) involve people making and responding to bids positively and on a regular basis.

Here's a further summary:
Simple Steps for Making Marriage Work - Lovegevity.com

[sranganayaki]

Originally Posted by Zukin

Those are great points, sranganayaki. It reminds me of the research of the psychologist John Gottman. Basically, he says that all human relationships are made up of individual transactions called "bids" which are represented by verbal or nonverbal actions. In this model, someone will make a "bid" and then the other person can choose to respond to or reject that bid. The most successful relationships (whether they are romantic relationships, friendships, or work groups) involve people making and responding to bids positively and on a regular basis.

Here's a further summary:
Simple Steps for Making Marriage Work - Lovegevity.com

Thanks for your interesting link with John Gottman and agree with the idea of reciprocity implied in his exchange of bids. But in my experience the action is less important than the attitude. If each partner responds with the right attitude to the other, their actions are much less significant. Then only the interaction matures from a bargain to real human relationship.