malka

I've come up with a new human-interaction metaphor set, because I needed a word out of it.

Think 3-space. In boring old Euclidean 3-space, lines can be parallel, intersecting, or skew.

Intersecting lines are fights. Some pairs of people are basically in spherical space: any interaction, no matter where it starts, will eventually end in a fight. If you can't keep a relationship from being in spherical space, you might be better off avoiding following any line in it very far. (Shades of "If you can't change your organization, change your organization.")

Parallel or parallelish-and-bouncing-off-each-other (here's where we drop geometrical definitions and go back to generic world-based spatial intuition) lines are good, healthy relationships. You run along the samish way, with your own individual bumps and wiggles, and you periodically interact and influence each other.

Skew lines are those things which you want to describe as fights, even though technically no fighting went on because you were in two different conversations, in two different universes. Treating skews as fights can easily lead to more skews, as one party quite legitimately points out that it wasn't a fight and the other party quite legitimately points out that it sure as hell hurt like a fight and neither point really gets addressed by the other.