RULE 105

Love equals time

What do you do when you get pulled in two different directions? One of your children wants you at their sports day but that’s the same date the other has their music concert. Your best friend desperately needs a shoulder to cry on because their marriage has just broken up, but you’re deeply involved in trying to get your ailing mother the help she needs from the hospital. Or perhaps your partner is going through a bout of heavy depression and can’t bear to be apart from you, but your sister can’t cope with the kids on her own and needs your support. Or maybe all of these at once. Life is full of phases like this. Everything runs smoothly enough for a while, but every so often it all piles up. So what’s the answer?

You have to recognize the equation that love, in the end, comes to the same thing as time. All these people need your time – some may want only a little and some may want lots. Some may want it at a precise moment and others whenever you can spare it. Some of them may need your input in their absence and others want you in the room with them. But all of them want time, and time is a finite resource. Once you’ve allocated 24 hours of it each day, that’s your lot.

This is why you can’t keep up with all the friends you’ve ever met, or still be as close to as many people after you have children as you were before. You can find enough time for 100 casual acquaintances, or 20 close friends and 3 siblings, or 4 immediate family plus 5 extended family along with 3 best mates and 11 good friends. I’m making up the numbers obviously. I don’t know the permutations but you get my drift. You can only fit so many people into your life. And the more you have that occupy loads of time, the less there is left over at the end to go round everyone else. If you don’t have children, please remember this Rule and don’t get huffy with parent friends who you think are neglecting you. They’re probably trying their best. Give them time.

When you get pulled in all directions, the only thing you can do is prioritize. You need to have some kind of pecking order. Maybe partner and kids come first, followed by parents, then siblings, best friends and so on. You don’t have to formalize it, you just need to be aware in your head of what it is. People move up and down the list because they gain ‘points’ if they’re particularly vulnerable, or if they have no one else to turn to. And the reason they need you will affect their position in the scale too. Time management experts advise people to allocate their time on the basis of whether things are (a) important and/or (b) urgent. Urgent and important things usually come first, but they don’t necessarily get much time. Maybe love isn’t so different.

You have to explain to the people you love that you want to be there for them all but you have only so much time and you’ll do the best you can. You’ll go to your child’s next music concert instead of this one, or you’re there for your friend but you only have a couple of hours this week. It’s tough, but if you understand this principle, you should feel a whole lot less stressed about not being able to do everything for everyone.