The Atomic Theory of Relationships

May 02, 2019
By Abu Turab Naqvi
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- Abu Turab Naqvi, Reading Time: 2 Min 37 Sec

While reading a book on the life of great physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, I came across one of his sayings about the atoms. It goes like this......

“All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence ... there is an enormous amount of information about the world.”

Besides the scientific depth and philosophical meanings this one statement carries, there is something that got me wonder and re-read the statement and it goes again....... “attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another”. This sentence kept resounding in my mind until I was able to draw this analogy of human relationships with atoms attracting and repelling each other.

This tells about the art of balancing. Atoms attract when they are apart within a limit and they repel when the limit is crossed. In both the cases, there is this limit, the threshold distance that help balancing the conjugation of atoms to form molecules and so on.

This is exactly what happens when we are about fall in love or already in a relationship. The attraction comes within the circles of certain distance. We attract each other, we meet, have coffee or tea, go to movies and roam around hand in hand. This is perfect until we start feeling that “squeezed into one another” situation. This is where the problems begin. This is when the balance breaks.

I have learned from others and from my own experiences that relationships need some kind of balance in their pursuit. Both distance and getting closer should be balanced if we want our relationships to sustain. It is same as the old dictum of “respecting the personal space”.

But this “respecting the personal space” kind of confuse some of us and we end up being too careless while maintaining the “space”. There comes the atomic theory of relationships.

It tells you that you should keep up a certain distance that you don't get apart or get squeezed too much that you had to face repulsion. After all, whatever we see around us is the clustered manifestation of millions of atoms guided by the same principle of maintaining the distance. Re-read that saying of Feynman..

“All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence ... there is an enormous amount of information about the world.”

It says “In that one sentence ... there is an enormous amount of information about the world”. This is what compelled me to think this way about the relationships and draw an analogy with atomic way of attracting and repelling each other when crossing the threshold of a moderate distance. This is the atomic theory of relationships.

#atoms