Cash Flow versus Love

Sometimes it seems like the best thinking is done when the rest of your brain is in autopilot. This was another one of those times as I was driving to Atlanta to get my ankle x-rayed after twisting it post-break.

I started thinking about the concept of the emotional bank account and how similar the concepts of cash flow and love flow seem to be. Perhaps that is why so many confuse the two or substitute love for money.

Like with money, it seems to take love to produce love. The investments of your parents teach you how to manage love and affection. But if you have never been loved, or never had money then the concepts of managing and holding onto it are often foreign to that person. Or it could be that the rarity of such things produces a person that wants to horde it, producing jealousy or being stingy with the person they see as a source of love. This inevitably creates a situation where they smother or drive away the goose that lays the golden egg.

It gave me time to reconsider the concept of an emotional bank account, and I thought of how some people have good credit in your eyes because they have been reliable or charitable time and time again, as opposed to people who are just bad emotional investments. Then I started thinking about those people’s accounts of love. Perhaps their balance is so low, that every penny or small increment of love that they receive goes to supporting their basic needs (or in worst case their addictions), that they never have any to give back. They basically have the emotional equivalent of a money pit, where as soon as one need is met, another arises and they are always in the hole, working to fill their own needs that they can’t possibly look beyond those to others.

In a similar vein, it made me consider supply and demand on an emotional level. This seems to be how people express their love. They tend to give what they have an abundant supply of … time, money, advice … but that might not necessarily be what is in demand. Although they are giving, because it has no demand or market, it has no value. Only that which is in demand or truly needed is what has true value to the market i.e. the person that the supplier is trying to connect to through giving.

Like with money, there are some people that if you invest your time and energy into, they will take until you are just as bankrupt as them. There are others that if you invest in them, you will always see some sort of return on your investment. In a way, dealing with people can be akin to playing the stock market. You have to know when to get out and when to invest, and you never know if one day the market is going to crash and all that you have invested will be lost regardless. But like the market, all connections with people have an ebb and flow. Some are worth it. Some aren’t.

Perhaps this seems a callous way to examine relationships, but maybe to those who have a hard time grasping the concepts but are acquainted with financial concerns, can relate to it.