Qualities of Relationships

Several years ago I made great use of a computer application called InfoCentral. I no longer use it as it hasn't been supported for years but it was a very powerful (though hard to learn) tool for managing information. At its simplest it had as its data a set of objects of different kinds which had relationships with the other objects. So an object might be a person and another object a place and the relationship would be that the person attended a meeting at that place at a given time. So the time, the place, the event, and the person were all objects in the application which were all held in relationship to each other.

What was especially powerful about this application was that the relationships themselves had qualities. For example, I could create an object which was my Thursday night therapy group and connect to it each of the members of the group. Each person had a relationship to the group which had the qualities of when they joined and when they left. It was possible to select a point in time and see who was in the group at that point.
 
You can see why it was complicated, but I hope you can also see how powerful it was. It allowed for entry of all sorts of data and then allow one to look at the data from far more points of view than one can easily do with a standard relational database.

We easily think of objects as having qualities. They may have color or weight or hardness or texture. We less often think of relationships as having qualities.

When we pay attention to the qualities of our relationships with others, and engage with them in a consideration of those qualities, we find that we can choose what we want the relationship to be like. We can consciously and collaboratively select the qualities we want and work together to create them. We can...but we seldom do so.