Hours in Relationships
Putting my relationships in context
Reasons I don’t want to write this:
Afraid I’ll get interrupted by needing to board my flight
Afraid on the flight I’ll be sleepy or otherwise unmotivated to continue/finish writing
But I really want to write this actually. It’s been feeling alive again recently as I’m leaving LA, and I think it really helps explain a lot of my intuitions for orienting my life - why I’ve prioritized my parent relationships, my old friendships, new high touch relationships. I’m excited to share, and have wanted to write about it since August in Seattle.
On Parents
I spent August 2024 in Seattle to attend 2 weddings and spend time with family. The most emotionally powerful experience in that time was actually looking at baby photos.
It started when one day, out of the blue, my mom said “hey these are my baby photos.” I saw photos of my mom as a baby, a toddler, a little girl. I saw pictures of an older sister of hers that died at age 2, and was told of a younger sister that also died at age 2, family members I didn’t even know existed. I wept. I saw a picture of her mother, my grandmother, holding her on her hip in her arms as a baby.
At that moment I had the thought “this same picture must exist but for me and my mom” - her holding me the same way. And so I resolved to go find it.
So I went upstairs and started looking through my baby photos to find my mom and I’s version of this photo. And as I combed through the photos, my attention shifted to the photos themselves.
I had a moment of realizing that there’s only 1 thing in those photos - love. Pages upon pages, volumes upon volumes, painstakingly compiled by my mother, mere snapshots of entire days, weeks, months, years - where my parents delighted in me existing and doing baby things, pouring love into me every moment.
The magnitude of love that I was starting to touch was overwhelming. That night I began to scratch the surface of the vastness of love that I’ve received in my life, particularly in my childhood. I wept til my eyes ran dry multiple nights that month.
A particularly special experience was asking my mom to put on baby videos and watching with them. I was not only with the love and beauty and joy that radiated from the videos themselves, but I could look over at my parents, in their 60’s, absolutely beaming, with big grins on their faces, laughing with delight. I’m tearing up as I write this.
As someone who went through most of life skeptical and resentful of my mom and her "supposed" love for me, my experience was true and real and hard. And now that i'm able to actually inhabit her perspective, the claim that it wasnt there is basically insane.
At some point in this process, it dawned on me that I have not been a unique recipient of this much love. The way my parents poured love into me, my grandparents poured love into them, and their parents before them, and theirs before them, in a never ending chain of too-big-to-comprehend love since time immemorial. I stand at the base of a waterfall, an astronomical fondue fountain of love. Realizing the honor, the blessing, the cosmic grace it is for me to be part of this chain of ancestry, this waterfall of love led to writing this essay, where I talk about my place in the world.
I wanted some context for making sense of my realizations, and thought of “10,000 hours to be an expert at something”. I had previously considered what it would mean to be an “expert at a relationship” to have spent 10,000 hours with someone.
I asked chat gpt “how much time does the average couple spend together before getting married?” I wanted to use the point at which one makes a lifelong involved commitment to another as a strong benchmark of love and connection. It did some napkin math - say you’re together for 2 or 3 years, spend a few hours together a few times a week, sometimes longer, bada bing bada boom - on average probably a few thousand hours (say 3-4k) before getting married.
Of course every relationship is different and so many variables go into love, but I’d say time spent together is one of the biggest and a strong proxy for it.
So then I asked “how much time does a stay at home parent spend with their child in the first years of life?” Almost 6000 hours.
My mom and dad, in the 7 or 8 months of my life, (each) poured the amount of love into me that my future spouse will have by the time that I decide to make a lifelong commitment to them. They continued to do so, though perhaps in a declining way, for the next 20 years.
Incomprehensible scale.
It’s helped deepen my understanding around why my relationship with my parents was so formative and has played such a huge role in becoming the person I am today.
I also don’t think I had a particularly unique experience - I imagine most people’s parents are attentive to their baby’s needs, at least for the first few years of life (otherwise the baby, like, dies). Which leads me to tweet stuff like this - I believe in the deep seated desire of parents to be connected to their children.
Here ends my sense making around trying to grasp the love that I’ve received from my parents.
On Friends
I then turned this thinking towards my friendships, which I found quite insightful.
Again I used the marriage reference point - if in my life I’ve maximized the number of people that I have a lifelong commitment level of love, trust, connection with, to me that indicates having lived a good life.
So say a few thousand hours is the bar I’m trying to hit for relationships.
When I lived in San Francisco, I saw my closest friend there once a week for a few hours, say 2 hours. In the US and much of the modern world, this is pretty frequent, as far as I can tell, and I loved and treasured the time we’d spend together.
50 weeks a year, 100 hours a year. At that rate, it would take 30-40 years to reach the level of connection and commitment that I most want in my relationships. In 30-40 years I’m an old man on the cusp of dying. I can’t wait that long!
This gestures at why making strong new friendships as an adult is so hard. As wonderful as a newer friend like him is, it’s simply too hard to put in that magnitude of hours. The number of zeros isn’t right.
This meaningfully informs why I’ve had such an emphasis on spending extended time with people - weekend trips, coliving, travel, etc. When I lived in Lisbon with my crew, we spent a few hours together basically every day. It’s 10x the rate of connection. 3 or 4 years of that rate of connection via living together seems more within the realm of possibility - if the next 10 years we were spending a season together each year, we’d get there. I see hope there.
It also informs why old friends are so valuable. With my friends from elementary/middle/high school, I spent a few hours with them every day for years. With my college friends, we spent a few hours together, living together, every day for a few years. With these old friends, we already have the hours!
Nothing can buy a few thousand hours worth of closeness with someone. This is why it’s so ubiquitous for people’s best friends to come from school.
This also informs why I’ve made it a priority to reconnect with my oldest, most cherished friends. Even if it takes a hundred hours, or even a few hundred hours to reconnect, it might unblock thousands of hours worth of love.
I want people in my life that I have love and commitment with. Ideally people that I trust will be around with me and for me over the multi decade time frame, if not the rest of my life, and I want to offer that to them. And I hope for some (many) of those people to be my friends!
There may be a million things in between me and a given friend making lifelong commitments to each other, from lack of trust to cultural norms to societal incentives to priorities to personal shadows. I don’t know if I can get there with anyone, let alone multiple people. There’s big stuff to fight against, and it’s daunting. But I want to try. I’ve been trying to find ways for years now. But I know it doesn’t have to be impossible to make close adult friendships, even if it feels that way sometimes.
Addendum: On Extended Family
I just spent a month in Taiwan, mostly with my extended family, and it’s made an extremely strong impression on me that I’m still trying to make sense of. One thing that’s clear is that I may have fewer hours with members of my family than my oldest/closest friends, but in some meaningful ways I sense a much greater mutual commitment to each other. I’m still marinating on what’s going on there, though I certainly have initial guesses, and it reminds me that time is not the only factor in relationships.
How far you've come along, dear friend 🫶 I love this visual idea of having love poured into you from generations above, it's astronomically powerful to imagine ourselves as vessels capable of so much love.