Week 4: Dependency Formation: The Real Balance Sheet

The five things a relationship actually puts on a party's balance sheet, and why counting only one of them causes most misreadings of "attachment"

15 March 2027

Once interaction is reliable enough to plan around, a party starts building positions against it — time not spent elsewhere, routines built around availability, social capital spent introducing the other person, plans made that assume they’ll still be there. That’s dependency, and it is a balance sheet with (at least) five line items: time, emotional disclosure, social integration, logistical entanglement, and identity — how much of “who I am” now routes through this relationship existing.

The mistake this week targets is collapsing all five into one number, usually “how much I like them,” and then being surprised when the balance sheet doesn’t move the way the feeling does. A person can be moderately attracted and severely dependent — most of the entanglement of a bad situationship is exactly that combination.

Outline#

• the five dependency line items, priced separately, not summed into one feeling
• why time and identity dependency are the two that outlast a breakup longest
• reading a balance sheet backwards: given the entanglement, what does that imply the party has been assuming?
• reading for next week: what happens when one line item can’t be replaced by anyone else