More Love, Less Autopilot: Reflections on Roles Versus Relationships

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of roles versus relationships. Inevitably, our lives contain both. The concepts overlap, intersect, one might meld or develop into the other. But a truth life has recently taught me is that there’s a cost to pay if we don’t suss out where we are in a relationship versus where we are playing a role. It can be a painful process of taking stock — sorting out our roles from our relationships — but I believe it’s an undertaking that eventually leads to personal growth.

Is slotting ourselves and others into roles hardwired into us as humans? Thinkers like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell would probably say yes. Their work on myths and archetypes posits that in life and in stories, we create and seek out certain types (lover, caregiver, hero, etc). Their theories make a compelling case that being human means putting people into roles.

We all play a whole host of roles in our lifetimes. The cleanest and easiest roles to process are the explicit roles. At our jobs, we play a role and have a clear sense of the duties of that role. Other roles come with implicit but pretty clear expectations. Playing the role of neighbor, I help shovel the shared driveway when it snows and take in my neighbor’s mail when she’s away.

It seems like as we age, we amass roles and relationships sort of fall away. I look at my kids, especially my 9th grader, and I see a life full of relationship building. Yes, they play roles too (child, student, pet owner, ie.) but as my kids are figuring themselves out, part of the way they are doing that is socially — exploring whose values and visions compliment or contrast with their own.

Middle age is a whole different story. As I flip through my mental rolodex of connections, I see a life fulled with roles. I seem to have amassed them like barnacles. Some certainly are satisfying roles. But other roles feel stale, constricting, like a suit of clothes that no longer fits.

Here’s how it happens, I think: we get to a point in our life where we feel we know who we are. We have a pretty set cast of characters in our lives. We’re not cycling through new connections in the same way or at the same pace as we did in youth. The people with whom we’ve been in relationships the longest play established roles in our life. I think that’s natural and the way that’s supposed to be.

But over the past few years, as I’ve been examining my relationship with myself and others, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. In some connections, I am only playing a role. The relationship component seems to have fallen away. In these connections where I just play a role, things feel very staid and scripted. The choreography is set. The script is set. We do the things we’ve always done. We talk about or avoid the things we’ve always talked about or avoided.

Having rigidly fixed roles is, I believe, a barrier to maintaining meaningful relationships through the years. If we have to show up in someone’s life in the way we’ve always shown up, there isn’t space for growth of change. There isn’t a chance to say this doesn’t work for me anymore. There isn’t space for discovery, of self or other.

In college, I had a friend who was always rearranging her dorm room. She’d get stoned, skip class and move everything around — the art, the furniture. She once nabbed a marble pedestal that was supposed to be showcasing college trophies and used it to prop up a teeny dorm room TV. Her room was sort of the hangout space of our friend group so I got to experience a lot of the transformation. We’d pull back the tapestry covering the door and viola! A new space! And we’d be changed in that changed space, sit in new places, notice new things, have new conversations.

In “A Passage to India,” one of the main characters calls middle age a time of revision. Because he’s in his forties, he will revise. At eighty, he’ll revise again. And then he will be revised. I think I prefer “grow” to “revise” but whatever verb we chose, of course we revise or evolve or change as we go through life. Unless we shut down, stay hyper guarded, and refuse introspection, of course, we will change. Life’s journey is meant to change us.

I have not just an interest but a need to step out of roles and into relationships. The thing is though you just can’t undertake that solo. Both parties in a relationship have to be open to breaking out of limiting roles and into deepening the connection. That involves taking stock of the current connection— what’s there, what’s missing, what is no longer working. We look to our relationships to give our life meaning, to satiate our desires, allay our fears, redress our limitations, help create and carry on our memories. The deep work to move from role to relationship cannot be done without conversations that are sure to involve some discomfort on both sides.

This all gets me thinking of a line in a podcast I like, Barb Knows Best, that relationships are in your life for a reason, for a season, or for a lifetime. I’ve had relationships that lasted only a season that I was sad to see fall away but the desire to extend was not felt on both sides. One thing’s for sure: if we want a connection to endure and thrive through the various seasons of our life, we need to step off the set stage of scripted roles and into the exciting shifting landscape of a relationship.