It all started with a recent trip to visit my parents in Michigan. With them being in their late seventies and my mom having various health issues, I want to spend as much time with them as I can. I enjoyed hearing my mom share interesting stories from her past. With my dad, a retired teacher with a PhD in philosophy, I had the kind of intellectual discussions about “the big questions of life” that we both enjoy.
One of the things I talked with my dad about was the importance and difficulty of maintaining meaningful relationships through the changing seasons of life. He’s wrestling with that due to being in retirement and caring for my mother. It’s also a pressing issue for me now that I’ve moved away from longtime friends and changed from a group-based music career to the more solitary life of a writer.
When I returned home, I ran into some friends. I was happy to see them together – they’ve been dating seriously for about a year but had experienced some struggles in their relationship lately. I told them that relationships are hard, and even after twenty-seven years of marriage, my wife Lisa and I still have to work at it. They said they wanted to ask us for our “secret” to a healthy, long-term relationship. I said we certainly don’t have all the answers but would be happy to get together and share some thoughts.
Those conversations with my dad and my friends got me thinking about relationships. While that’s a huge topic, my baseline is this – I believe that relationships with self, others, and God are the heart of a meaningful and fulfilling life. Even if the God part isn’t for you, I think most of us would agree that relationships are important, even critical, to our personal development and enjoyment of life.
So how do we nurture and maintain meaningful relationships? Thousands of books have been written trying to answer that question. For the purpose of this post, I’ll just touch on one idea. For me, a key factor in successful relationships is intentionality.
What is intentionality? It’s effort expended for a specific purpose. Intentionality is action toward a predetermined goal. Simply put, if your desire is for meaningful relationships, you’re going to have to work at it. You won’t drift into them any more than your closet, desk, or garage will drift into neat organization. Life doesn’t work that way.
When my son Kilian moved to Sacramento after college, he didn’t have many friends in the area. He chose to be intentional about developing relationships by going to nearby meetup.com events – rock climbing trips, board game and trivia nights, Game of Thrones watching parties. Through those efforts, he’s made some great friends. It never would have happened without him being intentional.
As I look back on my own life, one of the most helpful intentional actions I’ve taken for relationship building is automation. It’s simply setting up a recurring pattern of interaction with people like I schedule auto payments for important bills. For ten years, I’ve had a standing Thursday noon lunch appointment with my great friend Ty. Having that understanding between us eliminates the well-intentioned but often useless “this was great, we should do it again soon” factor from the equation. Life is busy. The important gets sidelined by the urgent. Because of that, even now that I’ve moved out of state, Ty and I still “meet” every Thursday at noon via FaceTime. There are some weeks when it doesn’t work out, but by intentionally planning a connection for every seven days, we stay consistent.
So what would applying intentionality look like in your relationships? Are you in a season where you need to find new friendships? Have you drifted apart from someone and need to reconnect? Maybe some of your current relationships need some attention. Whether the relationships that come to mind are with yourself, others, or God, the concept is the same. If you want to have meaningful, life-giving relationships, focus your efforts. Come up with a plan. Do the work. Expend the energy. Make the call. Send the text. Automate the connection. Be intentional. If you do, you’ll take another great step toward Becoming Yourself.
This post was originally published February 10, 2019.
For him and any others with that same question, here are some practical ideas on how to engage in community:
Sitting in your living room waiting for community to happen isn’t going to work. Even though I’m an introvert, I stop and introduce myself to neighbors while out running. Take cookies to new people who move into my area. Volunteer regularly with a charitable organization. Play in a band at a church. Initiate monthly gatherings with some author friends. Schedule poker nights. Through all these efforts, I’ve been able to find really wonderful community. Life is busy. People are busy. If you don’t step up and initiate connections, it probably wont happen. Make time for the things that are important.
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b. I’ve had an accountability partner for over 15 years. A friend I meet with regularly to talk about life. Someone I open up to. Share my struggles with. Tell them the kind of person I want to be and ask for their help. Give them permission to ask me hard questions and speak into my life. It’s an incredible, tank-filling relationship. I was invited into this by my first accountability partner, and I learned about the power of this kind of relationship. When my job took me to a new state, I asked one of my new work friends to take on that role. When he moved away a few years later, I asked a different friend if he would step up. Over ten years, that partnership has become second only to my relationships with God and my wife and kids. Our lunches are one of the highlights of my week. I have that relationship because I asked for it. I admitted that I need help to become the kind of person I want to be and discovered that he desired the same thing.
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