Engineering Resiliency in Interpersonal Relationships

Disclaimer: I have not written such an opinionated blog post before, so just dumping my thoughts. I will probably come back multiple times to rewrite my thoughts or make them clearer.

Every system is ephemeral whether it’s a single server, microservice, friendship, or marriage. We don’t aim for 100% uptime because 100% is a lie. Even the craziest uptime we can budget for with enterprise monopoly money is 99.999%. This definitely falls in line with the law of entropy. If decay is inevitable, is there a natural method of defiance? Maintenance.

Since every relationship is a time-bound system (by choice or mortality), uptime is denoted by reliability during the duration and resiliency during the incidents. Without a test environment for interpersonal relationships, every unvetted change stakes the lifespan of your fundamentally ephemeral courtship. To mitigate these inherent risks, we follow a framework that not only prioritizes the health of the bond over the ego of the individuals, but also the capacity of recovery from a incident.

You cannot ‘test’ quality into a product; it must be built in. — Deming

While we tend to fixate on a specific trigger event, catastrophic outcomes are rarely the result of individual negligence– they are inherent to the architecture of the system itself.

In interpersonal relationships, we iterate based on feedback loops. We stop asking who failed and start asking how the system failed them.

Here’s my related post on “incidents” in a relationship, why they are “normal”.