I've been watching several feeds I set up on the web about relationships.  I started with ICERocket and Newsvine feeds and the topics that have come across the wire are hilarious.  Everything from "How to make a Sex Tape" to "Consolidate Loans" has come through.  I'm convinced I'm missing something here. I think the missing piece is that the word "Relationship" is too broad.  With Google returning 732 million results, the enormity of this topic is definitely confirmed.  In fact, it's very interesting that the top 15 results for relationship are about romantic relationships.  It's not until the 16th result that business relationships come into the picture with a link to Salesforce.com.  In starting to blog about relationships, I now realize that I was assuming that relationships were 99% non-romantic.  If the Google results are any indication, this shows a HUGE deficit in knowledge about non-romantic relationships. So, I am going to officially define what I think of as a romantic and non-romantic relationship.  I am guessing that there are further types of non-romantic relationships, but we'll start here first. Romantic relationships are obviously with someone you are romantically involved with.  I best understand this as a relationship that includes a sexual component.  I know that sounds rather clinical, but there you go.  Normally, I'd assume only one person can fill this role at a single time.  What makes a romantic relationship interesting is that it gets the lions share of attention in our lives.  I probably spend at least 40 to 50% of my relationship effort on my wife.  I consider that time very well spent, but the fact that the minority receives a large portion of my attention is definitely interesting. Non-Romantic relationships are relationships that lack a sexual component.  Friends, co-workers, family all fall into this category.  I would say that I spend the other 50 to 60% of my relationship effort with this group.  I'm not sure I know the exact size of this group either.  My outlook contact list is about 130 individuals.  However, this includes a variety of distant family members that I may talk to only once or twice a year.  A better estimate might be around 80 to 90 individuals I connect with on a normal basis. What surprises me here is the imbalence of relationship effort to the type of relationship.  Now, if I broke down my non-romantic relationships even further, different types emerge here as well.  I would classify some friends as "Close Friends".  Of course "Family" would be a group here as well.  However, a certain effort level is applied to each of these groups as well.  As I move down the line, I spend much less effort on keeping up with distant family members rather than close family members.  Thus, I think it's safe to say that not all non-romantic relationships are equal either.  In fact, there is even an order to the amount of relationship effort spent on non-romantic relationships. Wow, my brain is spinning with this.  I'm a visual thinker, so here's a chart of how I'm visualizing this: If you apply all the long tail hype of late to this graph, some interesting things stand out.  First off, this completely validates the MonkeySphere(link 1, link 2) principle.  Short diversion.  The MonkeySphere is a theoretical number coined by a researcher by the name of Dunbar that states that a person's social circle size is limited by the size of their brain.  Having smaller brains, monkeys are limited to around 50.  Humans round out around 150.  Somewhat a dry idea, David Wong wrote a hilarious explanation of it, titling it the MonkeySphere. Back to the point.  Secondly, is there a current trend in technology to help people expand the Monkeysphere?  It's all sort of trendy right now, but the idea that software can help extend the long tail of anything is actually a core idea at the foundation of Web 2.0.  Amazon and Google both follow this, so it must work. Once again, I'm creating more questions for myself than answers.  My brain is getting a little too full to write coherantly right now, so here's a quick wrap up of what I'm thinking and the questions that I want to answer.
  • Do relationships actually follow the long tail model?
  • Assuming Dunbar's number (aka Monkeysphere) is fixed, could software be created to artificially extend this number? 
 
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