What Makes All Relationships Work: Affinity

The more I progress as a writer the more I fall in love with words that people seldom use…

Ralph Waldo Emerson gave me this idea. To write about affinity. As I always say, Reading the Classics is always a wise decision.

What makes any relationship work is your natural affinity for that person. How much you are alike. What your common interests are. And things of that nature.

Without some sort of natural affinity, no matter how small, a relationship simply won’t work, no matter how hard one tries.

Affinities can not be forced. They can be made however. Because an affinity simply is the resonance between two souls.

Who you are is your soul. The deepest part of you. Which is made up of all your experiences, all the people you have encountered, all the books you have read, all the nature you have witnessed. Everything that you are, and everything you have done, and are doing, and possibly even what you will do.

People grow…

And people deteriorate…

And their affinities are constantly changing…

While I may have once liked a thing, I shed it for another that has achieved a new importance in me. And if that was my only affinity with a person. My friendship or acquaintanceship will pass away.

If I have a strong affinity with someone, it means we have enjoyed a similar life, and love similar things. And all these build up into a strong resonance with each others soul.

The more we have in common. The more we can enjoy each other. Because we see ourselves in the other person.

This affinity transcends age, transcends culture, transcends work, it transcends all. And while it transcends all it can also include anything it transcends. That is the mystery in it.

The soul knows when it meets someone, if it has fallen upon a kindred spirit or not. Not much time needs to pass for two souls to join tightly together over common affinity.

And souls can increase or decrease their affinity with each other over time.

Yet souls almost certainly increase in affinity as they share and mix their lives together. Which is why the family is one of the strongest affinities one can have. And is also why there is a strong attraction, and yet a familiar strangeness, when an adopted child meets their biological parent after years of being away.

As time continues to push us along, we can most easily decrease or increase in affinity with another. Time spent helps us flow together, time away, apart.

We would be wise to consider what type of affinity we would like to build in ourselves, and then choose our relationships accordingly.

For no matter what we believe we are constantly building our affinity within ourselves and with one another. If we are not careful we may become what we love not, and be with those we care not about.

The soul does speak, and it remembers its past affinities.

Be aware of the work it does within you to drive you to be who you are…