4–Seek Wisdom, Practice Love, Get Results: Happiness and Success Part 4

In our last blog, we talked about how happiness and fulfillment come from good, high-quality relationships.

In this piece, we'll talk about the three basic ways to understand relationships, and find that covenant relationships give us the best chance for happiness and success.
Three Types of Relationships
Football, basketball and golf are all different paradigms for playing a sport. They all use the word “team”, but they mean different things by that word.

In football, there are offensive, defensive and special teams, each with 11 players. In basketball, there is one team of five on the court with players substituting in and out. Golf is generally an individual sport, but uses teams for international competitions.

The concept of team is different in each sport depending on the nature of the sport.

In the same way, in history there are three major paradigms for understanding life—a Wisdom Paradigm, Modern Paradigm and Postmodern Paradigm—and each has its own understanding of human relationships that differs based on the paradigm.

Each of these paradigms and their different understandings of relationship are present in our society today.

We’ll take a look at Modern contract relationships, Postmodern power relationships and Wisdom covenant relationships.

The more we know about each of these relationships types, the more we can engage the relationship that gives us the best chance for happiness and success—and avoid relationship types that are less effective.
Contract Relationships
In the 1500’s and 1600’s, Europe was devastated by religious wars that killed millions of people and bankrupted governments.

In response, Enlightenment thinkers of the time tried to come up with a new, modern way of understanding life that included a new understanding of human relationships.

They started with the idea that humans are radically free individuals in a state of nature—of constant war and anarchy—without basic, pre-existing relationships with others.

Individuals in this state of anarchy have lots of freedom to do whatever they want, but don’t have much security, because other people are free to do bad things to them.

The solution to this anarchy is that people come together in a social contract. They give up some of their freedom to the community or government and get security in return.

As the Modern Paradigm became a dominant way of understanding life, people began to think of all relationships as fundamentally contract relationships.

At their core, contract relationships are transactional and antagonistic.

Take the example of companies and employees.

In a contract relationship, employees want more money from the company for less work. Companies want more work from employees for less money. What is good for one is bad for the other.

Employees need jobs and companies need workers, so eventually they negotiate a contract. They establish a contractual relationship.

By definition, what’s good for the employee and good for the company are opposite. That means contract relationships are low-trust relationships.

Low-trust relationships driven by money get low levels of commitment from people. Low commitment results in low performance. That’s why contract relationships are low performance relationships.

Finally, low-trust, low-commitment relationships aren’t very stable. They are brittle. When you put them under pressure, they break.

In contractual relationships, you get the relationship you pay for.

Would you rather have friends who are with you because they love you or because you give them things?

Contract relationships are low-trust, low-performance, low-stability relationships.
Power-based Relationships
In the 1900’s, a new postmodern way of looking at life became increasingly influential in our society.

Postmodern thinking is grounded in the idea that many of the things we think are facts—like truth, morality and justice—are not facts,