Numbers of Relationships

I was watching my two youngest children interacting the other day. We were on a short walk, and my 4-year old son walked over and grabbed the hand of my one-year old daughter. It was a cute moment, and made me pay attention the rest of the day to how they interacted, what they said to each other, what they played. It was really interesting to me to really just focus on the two of them and how they related.

I mean, before I had kids, my family had a single relationship. Me and my wife. ONE. That's it. One thing to focus on (or obsess about, at times).

Once you have a kid, however, you increase the number of relationships in your family. Now there’s you and your kid, you and your wife and. of course, your wife and your kid. That’s three relationships right there. And the dynamic is always different if all three of you hang out, so if you count that, then when you have just one kid, there are four completely different ways your family could interact together instead of just one.

This is what makes “the family” so much more interesting than “the relationship” (which is what marriage is before kids). There’s just so much more going on in a family once there are kids around.

Adding more kids makes these numbers explode. If you have a second kid, you go from three two-party relationships to six two-party relationships (you&wife; wife&kid1; wife&kid2; you&kid1; you&kid2; kid1&kid2). Also, there are now eleven ways your family can interact if you add in three and four party relationships.

Three kids means ten two-party relationship and a mind-boggling 26 ways that you can hang out in groups of two or more. Four kids means 15 two-party relationship and 56 total ways in which you can hang out in groups of two or more. 56!!! (I’ll spare you by not listing them).

If you’re the type of person who liked people-watching or stuff like that back in college or high school, you can kill some serious time watching and analyzing the myriad ways in which your family members can and do interact with one another.

This may seem like a funny math point or something obscure, and it is, but it really does open up whole new worlds. You’ll realize that you and your oldest and youngest are perfect for going shopping together or something like that, and you wife and you son can hang out and work in the garden or something. The combinations matter.

It’s fascinating stuff.