This entry is more personal in nature, but I wanted to put this here as an initial foray into relationships. I know that I want relationships to be important within the corporate culture, but at the same time, I’m wholly unsure what that should look like in a corporation, but I hope this personal reflection helps to get the thought process started.

On Sunday, I watched Her, the movie about how a human falls in “love” with an artificial intelligence OS. What scared me the most about it was how something like this could definitely be manipulated to provide relationships for people. What scared me, though, was the potential for it to be used in a similar manner as to an escort service. An argument could be made that “Samantha” was more complex than what an escort service would provide, but before a complex AI like Samantha could be made, I believe an escort-service type of AI could be developed (crude relational games are being made these days), commercialized and manipulated.

Not to say that escort services are all like this, but conceptually, I view escort services as “on-demand companionship”. Maybe “on-demand companionship” simplifies it too much: it would be ‘on-demand’ in the sense that you use it when you want and when you don’t want to deal with it, you don’t have to; companionship as almost a support group, not a true give and take relationship. The escort service isn’t there for a covenantal relationship, but a business transaction with an inherent aim to keep the relationship going for as long as possible.

This is what scared me from the movie, that some company could develop such an AI and provide people with such seemingly palpable relationships. It would create a system where a person practices taking without giving in the relationship. It would create that unrealistic expectation as the norm in an actual relationship, to take without giving. It would flip the tenet of a relationship upside down: an escort-service-type relationship equals taking without giving (minus the monetary exchange), whereas a real loving relationship is about giving without expecting anything in return.

It’s interesting to see the different characters Scarlett Johansson plays as ‘Samantha’ in Her and ‘Barbara’ in Don Jon. As Samantha, Sam gives of herself (literally as an OS that’s supposed to be the ultimate personal assistant), with an underlying curiosity of the world, the curiosity which pushes Theo in order to discover this world Sam’s so curious about (the curiosity which gives Theo life). As Barbara, she plays hard-to-get and gives of herself only to make Jon (JGL) something that she wants him to be (which eventually pushes Jon to see that the relationship is predicated on giving and succumbs under the pressure).

From my own recent movie memory, About Time probably shares the most realistic expectation of what a relationship should look like. In About Time, Tim has the opportunity to relive moments in his life and he decides to use this power to find love. He does use it to land the woman of his dreams, but it’s later when Tim matures in his use of his power that we see what makes a relationship work. Tim’s dad suggests that Tim should relive every day, seeing the missed opportunities to enjoy life and the second time around, to enjoy those moments. Instead, Tim stops time traveling and chooses to enjoy the moments the first time around.

This was shown through my favorite moment of the movie, a moment I hope to experience one day. Tim & Mary (Rachel McAdams) wake up, with the responsibility of getting their kids ready for the day. In that moment, Mary says she’ll do the kids, but Tim interjects and says he’ll do it instead. That moment showed how by giving of yourself, you gain so much more in return: Tim feels utter joy in the pleasure of extra time in bed his wife gains; Tim gets to spend more time with his kids, culminating in the moment he drops his daughter off at school and she keeps turning around to say bye again and again. To me, it was an expression of love and how love gives us the ability to enjoy the mundane, moment by moment, if only our perspective changed.

Though I feel I’m beginning to understand what a relationship should look like, to put it into practice, is a whole different challenge. The practicality of how to build a structure of good relationships into a corporate culture, perhaps an impossible one.