In my core I know it’s all about a connection to each other. Maybe there is a way to make it much easier to do. We simply need to do our best to be of service to the people who come into our life. The closest of those relationships will be the ones we spend the majority of our time with by choice or nature and give our whole hearts to.

Thanks for the hand back up!

It’s all about “locality”, or as the first commenter said: “place”.

Surround ourselves with the people we care about in the place where we live, or at least that we can walk (or bike) to.

Cheers,
Randall.

Still the sense of community being linked to place is rather elusive the way things are in society at the moment. I’d like to be in a place where I had at least some interaction with locals because it just happens that locals are people you’d go to for your essentials rather than a big shop in the next town.

It just occurred to me that the visualisations above might be too centered on the individual, where in fact what we’re looking at is a networked set of interactions, and often people keep relationships going via intermediaries relaying information, so in fact it isn’t a case of “managing” a list of associations, rather it often happens without your personal effort because another person is acting as the “glue”.

human “glouns” in your quantum theory of relationships there. This is probably quite important in my world, as I can think of very obvious people in my life that have this kind of role.

But I do agree with graywyvern–not everyone is the same. There do seem to be people who really prefer having a large number of not-so-close relationships, and other people who absolutely cannot stand dealing with large numbers of acquaintance-level relationships. There are party people and run-screaming-from-parties people. So while some people probably have large groups of acquaintances because they haven’t built up the intimacy and trust with a smaller group to be able to move the rest to orbits further out, others I don’t think it’s so–juggling wider groups is really their natural or preferred state.

I suspect the same is true of polyamory, including non-exclusive overlapping polyamory. Some “we” may be naturally suited to it, perhaps not realizing it because of cultural overlay. I’ve certainly known some people who really seem suited to that sort of relationship. Other “we” probably really isn’t. Personally, all issues of exclusivity, whether jealousy is innate or culturally mandated etc. aside, I’m just not sociable enough to be able to handle multiple intimate partnerships at once. I mean, you talk about most people having 5-7 really close relationships that take up all of their social time. Then you consider an ideal involving 3-7 amorous ones, which either leaves between 0 and 2 for family and friends or implies overload. Plus, all the amorous ones are in flux and leading to other complex connections. I’d go nuts. If I could jettison all my cultural baggage (and get some other cultural baggage appropriate to the project), I could maybe handle two. Maybe. For a few months at a time. For me, I think the “lots of work” you point to would just be too much, the extra support you describe just not worth it–to me, some time to reflect on my own is extremely important, while I only need so much support network. Different people’s needs and tradeoffs are different.

Janene talks about the importance of place, and of some kind of unified community in which relationships in different spheres overlap. I’m not sure how important I think that is. I have a group of friends I get together with one evening a week to indulge a common interest. I’m pretty close to them. We trust each other, we know that we’d be there for each other if we really needed help although we’re all the sort who would be hesitant to ask. I don’t normally see them in any other context. I guess I’d be happy if I did run into them at other times, but it’s not important–we don’t need that to be close. I could theorize that there is something incomplete about this relationship, but that’s all I’d be doing–I can’t come up with any actual feelings or intuitions of dissatisfaction on which to hang such theories. Even in something like a tribe, might be your hunting buddy would be a different person from your talk-about-legends buddy. Holism can be taken too far–I think people have a built in tendency to divide things (including relationships) into categories, and while that tendency holds risks it also has a great deal of value.

the models would not be the same for introverts & extraverts; & i suspect that each of the 16 Jungian types has its own specific social needs.

because the types are not equally prevalent, the more common ones’ needs “drown out” the perceptibility of the needs of the less common types (some are 100 times more common than others).

you might rather look at it from the point of view of the ideal tribe, which would (say) have one of the very least common types, but no more than their fair number of the most common types; but what happens in today’s world, is a mediated sorting-out of like with like, so that grossly unbalanced tribes form, with a consensus that is biased toward things it is easy for those of that type to believe.

this is how we end up so deluded en masse.

I recently wrote an essay on the band, incl. optimal size.
http://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/strike-up-the-band/
Would love to have your comment on it on the blog.