As a wee lad, the education system asked of me the following:
Which organ in the human body is the most important?
The brain – without which no other organs operate?
The heart – without which no organs receive nutrients?
Lungs – without which there’s no oxygen?
The answer, of course, is they’re all essential. With a couple of obvious exceptions, you need all your organs intact and healthy to stay alive.
A busted liver leads to total system failure, no matter how righteous the brain and heart are.
That makes this a bad analogy for relationships.
With those, you can get the scalpel out, cutting away the dead or diseased ones.
But it’s not imperfect.
If someone asks you what the most important relationship in your life is… well, let’s say they mean tangible relationships, so you can’t say God or Jesus.
In that case, you might say your spouse or your children.
And you’d be right.
Except, again, it doesn’t pay to dismiss the other relationships so quickly. All healthy relationships in your life nourish you.
In different ways and to different degrees, of course.
Still.
More and better relationships will only help you.
And this will help you with those: