Over the past few years, there have been so many ‘collabs’ that we have lost count — they’ve generally been in the area of products: Reebok collaborating with Scarlett Johansson; or the UK’s NHS with Facebook to expand the organ donor register; or even Spain’s Hospital Sant Joan de Déu with Miquel Rius, a stationery manufacturer, to produce an ergonomic school backpack. An ‘X’ or ‘+’ are symbols of the one-time project that the two entities have come together for.
A partnership though, has long-term implications: a husband and wife who come together for life, people who pool their skills and resources to build a business, a parent and school to help a child reach their full potential. There are highs and lows, ebbs and flows, with each entity fitting into the other like jigsaw pieces, as time progresses, patterns worked out, and personality factored in.
What the lockdown has taught us is that relationships are built on partnerships not on just a bunch of collaborative projects (sweeping-swabbing, dusting) that work during a crisis. It has also taught us who we can work with long-term, who we genuinely share relationships with and who we are just living with for convenience or convention.
If I see my mother slaving over the stove and washing up through the day, while I watch TV, offering to share one odd chore (I do the dishes and she wipes them), that’s a collaboration. A relationship is based on much more: have I taken her age into consideration, or how she’s feeling that day, or how tired she is by the end of the day? Or have I neatly divided the work into ‘hers’ and ‘mine’ — hers to do all the housework, and mine to do a 9-to-5? Have I realised that she has no free time?
A student recently told me how her father encouraged the children to help their mother — he wouldn’t budge, even though his work hours were fixed and he had the weekends off. How many of us have been through these ego-driven collaborations that exhaust and erode? We produce pretty houses, sometimes children, even a lifetime together, but they aren’t partnerships if each person feels depleted by the end.
With the lockdown coming to an end, and life hopefully resuming, we can only hope that we re-examine our relationships to see if they’re just a series of collaborations that show ‘results’ or real partnerships that build us up and set us free.