Sustainability of Relationships?

So all this social/cultural sustainability has me thinking, how does it apply on a personal level, such as human relations? What makes a relationship sustainable? Can I use the social/cultural models that I went over earlier to get any insight on that? Kallstrom & Ljung's (2005) model for farmers seems the most applicable, with a need for mutual care, rights and solidarity in a relationship for things to be sustainable, but there's another dimension to inter-personal relation ships too: change. Individuals change a lot faster than societies, and individuals can change in different directions too. When this happens, the traditional psychological advice would be that this would end the relationship, yet there are examples I can think of where people change in different directions yet continue their relationship.

The traditional model would put commitment at the core of relationship sustainability, with care, rights and solidarity as supporting factors. This attempts to box the individuals into social molds however, removing the possibility for real individual change, and that is (by and large) personally unsustainable and unhealthy. In building off of class discussion, what if commitment is re-framed to not be about commitment to having a specific kind of relationship with the other person, but instead commitment to a moral or ethic of interacting with that other person? Commitment to care, rights and solidarity. How does that change the interaction dynamic? Does that improve sustainability?

Consider, for a moment, the traditional model is boxing and confining, it forces participants to conform to social norms of human interaction: friend, best friend, co-workers, roommate, boyfriend/girlfriend, lover, partner, wife/husband, etc. There's social concepts that the traditional model requires us to bend to accommodate, with the idea that care, rights and solidarity exist within these models, and only within these models.

Breaking out of these models and looking at care, rights and solidarity on their own merits allows for an adaptability of interaction that can compensate for individual changes, and potentially improve sustainability of a relationship. Yet this raises an interesting question, what if a relationship isn't meant to continue? This is a larger sustainability question which I think I will address later, but it's especially relevant in this kind of discussion, so I'll at least raise the question: Why sustain something?

Food for thought,

- Jason

Reference:
Kallstrom, H. N. & Ljung, M. (2005). Social sustainability and collaborative learning. Ambio, 34(4/5), 376-382. Retrieved from http://www.springer.com/environment/journal/13280