Relationships

Where life is shared, distributed, and negotiated

Including others, roles, responsibility, boundaries, and how we experience ourselves with others.

Relationships are about how we are with other people.

They include family, partners, friends, colleagues, neighbours, and the wider community around us.

Relationships shape everyday life through connection, responsibility, expectation, support, distance, and strain.

They are present even when we’re not actively engaging with anyone.

The hand doesn’t judge relationships or suggest how they should change.

It simply places relational experience alongside the rest of life.

Relationships are part of ordinary life.

From early on, we live alongside others and are shaped by that contact in many small, ongoing ways.

Some relationships feel supportive.

Some feel demanding, distant, complicated, or unresolved.

Often it’s a mix.

Relationships don’t only exist in conversations or interactions.

They also exist through roles, responsibilities, memories, expectations, and absence.

Relationships can hold things like:

These experiences aren’t signs of doing relationships well or badly.

They show how life is currently being shaped through being with others.

Relational experience often shifts as roles change, people age, circumstances move, or demands increase.

When relationships are viewed through the hand, they’re seen alongside the other aspects of life.

This makes it easier to notice interaction rather than blame.

For example, tension in a relationship may reflect exhaustion, external pressure, or life circumstances rather than conflict itself.

Not all relationships can change in the ways we might want.

Some involve fixed roles, long histories, or limits that can’t be moved.

Noticing relational limits doesn’t require action, confrontation, or resolution.

It simply acknowledges how life is currently shaped through others.