On Relationship Bank Accounts

and making those regular deposits

I was a real nerd as a child.

kindergarten, in singapore.

Frankly, I loved being a nerd. When a kid tried to bully me in grade five by calling me names, ‘nerd’ chief among them, I distinctly remember stepping out of the classroom (where I must have been doing nerdy activities, like reading), placing my hand on my cocked hip, and retorting with a smirk: ‘yeh, I know I’m a nerd! What’s wrong with being a nerd, huh? I love being a nerd!’

Poor kid didn’t know what to say to that. How do you bully someone who loves embodying the quality you’re mocking?

me, in the white hoodie, at muslim camp at probably 15 years old? we thought we were *very* cool.

One of the outcomes of being a nerd in the 90s and early 2000s was that I read almost every book in the children and young adults section at our local library, including the ‘young’ version of a best-selling self-help book, The 7 Habits for Highly Effective People.

Sean* Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens was an absolute revelation. It was full of comic-book like illustrations and cheeky banter, breaking down the dense subject matter in clear, understandable language. Check out the opening gambit:

Welcome! My name is Sean and I wrote this book. I don’t know how you got it. Maybe your mom gave it to you to shape you up. Or maybe you bought it with your own money because the title caught your eye. Regardless of how it landed in your hands, I’m really glad it did. Now you just need to read it.

Exciting, right? For a precocious 13 or 14 year old, it feels like you’re being spoken directly to, and you’re understood. In a world where young people often felt spoken over (certainly that’s how I felt, forever misunderstood!) it felt cool**!

*it wasn’t until I revisited the book for this Substack that I realised Sean Covey is the son of the original author Stephen R Covey, not the same person at all!

**cool, in a nerdy way, mmk?

On an aside: I wonder how much this book influenced my desire to write comprehensive non-fiction for younger readers, like Stand Up and Speak Out Against Racism. Distilling such complex ideas for a young audience is a real intellectual workout, but I genuinely believe it has the ability to change lives - as it did for me.

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For those who might be new to the 7 Habits, the premise is simple: divided into three sections, the first three habits are focused on internal work - the ‘private’ victory, then external work - the ‘public’ victory, then maintenance - ‘renewal’.

an example of the illustration style, from the first chapter of the book

I read and re-read Sean’s book multiple times, because the habits and the ideas made so much sense. It taught me to ‘be proactive’ and take responsibility for my life. It suggested that rather than placing ‘stuff’ and ‘school’ and ‘other people’s opinions’ at the center of my life, placing principles at the core would be a far better guide (an idea that seemed to chime rather well with my Islamic school teachings!). Sean used stories and metaphors that have remained with me, including the one which opened the chapter on ‘Sharpening the Saw’.

Imagine that you’re going for a walk in the forest when you come upon a guy furiously sawing down a tree.
“What’re you doing?” you ask.
“I’m sawing down a tree,” comes the curt reply.
“How long have you been at it?”
“Four hours so far, but I’m really making progress,” he says, sweat dripping from his chin.
“Your saw looks pretty dull,” you say. “Why don’t you take a break and sharpen it?”
“I can’t, you idiot. I’m too busy sawing.”
We all know who the real idiot here is, now, don’t we? If the guy were to take a fifteen-minute break to sharpen the saw, he’d probably finish three times faster.
Have you ever been too busy driving to take time to get gas?
Have you ever been too busy living to take time to renew yourself?
Habit 7 is all about keeping your personal self sharp so that you can better deal with life. It means regularly renewing and strengthening the four key dimensions of your life—your body, your brain, your heart, and your soul.

Pretty good lesson for a teenager to learn - one, arguably, I’m still working on today.

Why do I share all this with you? Well, I was reminded of this book recently while weighing up choices in relation to friendships in my life. The fourth habit in the Coveys’ framework is focused on relationships, and this idea called the ‘RBA’ - Relationship Bank Account, representing the trust and confidence you have in each of your relationships.

“The RBA is very much like a checking account at a bank. You can make deposits and improve the relationship, or take withdrawals and weaken it. A strong and healthy relationship is always the result of steady deposits made over a long period.”

You have an RBA with every person you meet, Covey wrote, whether you like it or not. ‘Suppose you come across a new kid in school. If you smile and say hello, you’ve just opened an account with him. If you ignore him, you’ve just opened an account as well, although a negative one. There’s kinda no getting around it.’

Also, unlike a savings or ‘checking’ bank account (where $10 is $10 regardless), not all withdrawals and deposits are of equal value. It might take many deposits to make up for one ‘withdrawal’ - a mean comment, or a hurtful betrayal…

Doesn’t that ring so true? In the words of Esther Perel, ‘it is the quality of our relationships that will determine the quality of our lives.’

One of the aspects that makes maintaining healthy relationships difficult for me is that my loved ones are scattered across the world. Home is a disparate thing. That, and I’m often traveling and miss big events, I can be terrible at replying to messages, and I am sometimes so focused on the urgent that I forget to service the important, mean that my relationships can suffer. The small, regular deposits - calling on special occasions, messaging regularly, pebbling - which are so vital, sometimes fall by the wayside, and then I find myself weighed down by guilt for not being a good enough friend, which then makes me want to avoid the ‘work’ even more… ‘tis a vicious cycle.

my incessant sharing of tiktoks is actually my love language, k?

But I know, I know, deep down in my gut, when time comes for a healthy deposit to be made. We know, don’t we. Sometimes, there’s just this moment. The call you make can be the difference between cementing a robust bond, or weakening into a tie that will break the moment a strong breeze blows.

This is how I found myself making a couple of decisions recently, primarily focused on investing in a relationship bank account. These decisions were personally challenging - either emotionally taxing, or requiring more time than I might have wanted to spend - but reader, in the end, it was worth it. They weren’t easy or comfortable, but that’s fine! That’s what it means to be in relationship, right? Not everything is convenient, not every moment brings ease. But if friendship matters, if our relationships matter, then we must prioritise them. We must do what is required to ensure their health, and take that charge seriously, just as we would our health, or our career. Close friendships do not happen by accident, especially in a world which actively encourages us to prioritise everything else above them. But if we are to avoid the friendship dip, something needs to change - right?

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Friendship is a big theme in my life. I do not currently have children and live far away from much of my immediate and extended family, so the traditional Sudanese model of relationship is not easily accessible. My primary relationships are those I choose, and cultivate, and while that is wonderful, it does mean a different type of intention and effort is required to achieve the kind of social infrastructure my parents and grandparents enjoyed throughout their lives.

How important are friendships in your life? What are ways you prioritise (or have seen yourself de-prioritise) friendships, and why?

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Listen: Therapy, with Friends

Have you ever considered doing therapy with a friend? Two best friends who called themselves brothers found themselves drifting apart, so they asked Ether Perel to help…

Watch: The Science of Friendship

The speaker here is quite nervous! But this is a short, sweet talk that reinforces many of the ideas I’ve been thinking about, and asks the questions worth reflecting on… (btw if you have recommendations for talks on friendship, LMK!)

Read: Acts of Language by Isabella Hammad

I enjoy Hammad’s novels, but her recent non-fiction writing has left me in much awe. She is definitely one of our generation’s sharpest Palestinian voices writing in the English language, mashallah.

This focus on the speech used tο support Palestinian rights does more than obscure the context in which protesters are speaking; it also obscures the reality about which they speak. I believe in the power and importance of language. But what is happening is not primarily about language. Words are not weapons of mass destruction: when we encourage others to use language with care, we should be sure to do the same ourselves. Some metaphors are inappropriate in some contexts. The context here is a quantity of ammunition dropped on Gaza that is equivalent to more than three times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high proportion of those bombs were US-made and supplied. Those bombs were not made of language, and they certainly were not metaphors.

I’ve also read quite a few non-fiction books on friendship recently, although some are better than others. Happy to take recommendations…or maybe I should do a recs list?

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That’s all for this week, folks. Now, I’d love your input here. Looking at my upcoming workload, I think I might need a break from Substack over the northern-hemisphere’s summer to focus on a few big up-coming deadlines.

Which of these options would you prefer?

Part of why I’m asking the above question is because I don’t quite know how much this newsletter factors into your weekly rituals. Is it a nice to have that doesn’t matter either way, or something you really look forward to and make time for? There are obviously datapoints at the back-end I have access to, but the qualitative stuff is what I’m missing. See, I’m coming up to almost a year now of weekly posts, which means time to revisit the promise I’d made to myself - post consistently for a year, then evaulate and take stock. We’ve nearly double the number of free subscribers, but I’m not sure how much that number should matter to me, really. How should I think of the value of this space? To be determined, I suppose.

Anyhoo, dear reader. Thanks as always for your attention, your thoughtfulness, your care. If you are so inclined, please leave a comment, or reply, or share, and tell those you care that you love them.

Until next week, inshallah.

Yassmin.