Long-Form Essay — Love, Let Live, Or Leave It / Lose It: The One Relationship Test

A signature personal essay on time, value, and the test that determines which relationships deserve our investment. Showcases first-person voice, narrative reporting, and persuasive structure.

Time cannot be saved, made up, or even spent — we only invest it. By that measure, time stands as the most valuable resource we hold, second only to our relationships.

My friend "Q," whom I have known for twenty years, lives by one rule for evaluating any job or income opportunity: any commute longer than thirty minutes is not worth it. The math sharpens his point. A forty-minute commute each way costs eighty minutes a day, four hundred minutes a week, twenty-thousand-eight-hundred minutes a year. Across a thirty-year career, that commuter loses well over a full calendar year — not workdays, not evenings, but contiguous days — to sitting in transit. After Q lost his father, he made the decision out loud: every remaining year would serve a purpose, or move toward one.

The ongoing Harvard Study of Adult Development tells us the same truth from a different angle: warm relationships protect mental and physical health, lengthen our lives, and raise our happiness. Humans thrive on social connection. Everything any of us holds — opportunities, possessions, even self-knowledge — arrived through someone else. Even in business, the corporation outperforms the sole proprietorship because it draws on shared resources. Relationships do not merely matter; they compound.

So which relationships deserve our reinvestment, and which ones cost us our future? Years ago my best friend Rachael told me she would always rather date a broke man than a cheap one. The broke man simply has nothing to give. The cheap man has it, sees the need, and refuses to share. That refusal carries cruelty, and it deserves to be named. I combined Q's commuting principle with Rachael's dating filter, and a single test emerged.

The test rests on one question: Is this person capable of meeting your need but unwilling? Or are they incapable yet always willing to try? The first deserves the lowest possible apportionment of your resources. The second deserves your time, your patience, and your loyalty.

Eleven years ago my older brother Richard was arrested in Pennsylvania. Long before that arrest, our bond ran thin, and I held the line that I would not visit him in prison. Months between his conviction and sentencing, my father asked me to write a family statement for the court. The night before, I stared at a blank screen. The next morning at five o'clock, my father let himself into my apartment, lifted me out of bed, and helped me dress one article at a time, up to a necktie. By the time we reached his Jeep, I was sobbing. I sobbed the entire ride to the Pennsylvania courthouse. That day taught me two things. First, impact statements rarely change a sentencing — judges arrive with a decision in hand. Second: I may not have been capable, I may not have been successful, but I showed up willing.

Nine years collapsed into months. This past March, three days after he came home, I saw Richard for the first time in nearly a decade as we both crossed the kitchen. Here is what I have learned. Life is short. Love holds varying degrees but not varying versions. Relationships are collaborative and spatial. The placement of a person in proximity to you defines the closeness of your relationship with them. Keep capable-but-unwilling people at the longest possible distance. Keep close the people who show up willingly — even past what they think they can offer — as long as they keep trying.

If within the last thirty days the other person made an offering, contribution, or decision toward you or toward the relationship from which they did not directly benefit, you have your answer. While I sit on the journey to assess what I can offer my brother going forward, I have settled on this: as long as I am invited to the conversation, and as many times as I am asked to join the effort, I will show up for every conversation and travel down any road.

— Shannon J. Love