Lessons from my biology class.

It takes two to tango is an idiom that I have heard since I was little child.

It takes two to tango is an idiom that I have heard since I was a child. It made more sense in my late teen years and early adult life, as I saw that it takes two intentional people to make a relationship work.

When I say relationship here, I don't mean only love relationships; I mean all kinds of relationships, from family to friendship to relationships at work or church. Wherever and however the interaction might come about, we need to be deliberate and intentional. 

I have put all my different relationships into two broad groups. I have done this based on lessons from my biology class in secondary school. I know there are more than two types of ecological relationships, but from my understanding of humans, I have concluded that our relationships are either parasitic or mutually symbiotic. I will explain further:

I. A relationship is parasitic when only one person or party does the work of building, watering, celebrating, sharing information, and what have you, while the other person or party just benefit from all of these and fails to reciprocate. This folk or these folks would zap and keep zapping and taking without ever giving back or returning the favour. In this instance, the first person can be called the host, while the other is a parasite.

II. However, in a mutually symbiotic relationship, both parties do the work and mutually benefit from it; no one feels left out, as the work of building the relationship is on the shoulders of both parties and not relegated to only one party. Everyone involved is usually intentional about growth, and I will say this is the kind of relationship I'd like. 

"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in."—Morrie Schwartz, from Tuesdays with Morrie

I want friends who will go all out for me like I will for them. I don't want to feel like the host or parasite as it may be in my friendship, relationship, family, workplace, church, and wherever it is, I will be. Sometimes, we enjoy being the parasite because we are getting all the goodies that we didn't work and that's a nice place to be, but not for so long, as over time, our host will get worn out like the host from the parasitic relationship in biology class. So, what do we do to find another host?

Let's not be the person who only comes around when they need to zap; be the person who is always there. I hope we grow in our relationships and have mutually beneficial relationships henceforth. 

Happy Valentine.

Originally published on 2/13/2020 at 10:07 PM.