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We recently watched the “Advanced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” episode of Community (season 5 episode 10). If you haven’t seen it, the group tries to use D&D to bring an estranged father and son back together. It emphasized both the value and complexity of human relationships.
People are complicated, and the more people you bring to a relationship, the more complicated it gets. When that happens, you have two choices: make the relationship shallower or invest more into the individuals.
Some relationships, like most social media connections, keep connections light. You may care deeply about the people in the group, but you don’t invest a lot of time and emotional energy into each person. You may not know much about them outside of group-related conversations. Others, like your immediate family, found family, or best friends, require a larger investment. So if your close groups have multiple people, you must prioritize your time and energy for them. And when everyone in a given group has expectations about the amount of investment the group expects, we can also know how much to receive back. The same applies to vulnerability, how much we can reveal of ourselves and still feel safe and accepted.
Yet an episode about using D&D to build relationships resonated with me. I’ve found that cooperative storytelling offers a way to get personal. We can reveal pieces of ourselves through our characters (often unintentionally!), wrapped in a fantasy package. By combining ourselves with other characteristics but not labeling which is which, we can safely introduce aspects of ourselves, test reactions, and acclimate people to aspects of ourselves with less risk.
We may never be conscious or intentional about any of this, but as it naturally flows from the experience, relationships grow stronger, and we benefit more with each encounter, both in our fantasy worlds and the real world. |
