Dr. Ed Tori argues that treating your closest relationships as fragile, not guaranteed, actually strengthens them. Imagining the sudden loss of someone essential shifts how you show up for them, moving you from taking them for granted to actively maintaining what matters most.
What if instead of taking our relationships for granted, those, those ones that are predictable, that are reliable and non-threatening, the ones that are actually like the most important in your life, what if we recognized that those are actually fragile? They're not, they're not givens. What if we took them as fragile? What then? Take a moment and imagine the most important person in your life. Pick someone. It might be a spouse. It might be a child. It might be a close friend. Imagine now that person is taken away, or that person has a severe stroke, or that person moves away, or the relationship ends in some other way, or their life is taken. It's not a given. Their presence in your life is not a given. It's fragile. If something is fragile, then the fact that it was predictable, reliable, and not threatening, all of a sudden we might maintain it a little better. We might pay a little more attention to it. We might give it its due.
