Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

The Japanese have this word: amaeru. It describes a kind of behaviour in a relationship, it’s sometimes described as love-dependancy.

If your kids always call you up from the middle of nowhere asking for a ride when they know you’re busy, you could describe that as amaeru behaviour. If a friend is constantly involving you in their squabbles with other people, that could be amaeru. If someone in your family is always using the last of the milk knowing that they are supposed to get some more and just not doing it, if someone at the office always slips off early when the work is not done because you always let them get away with it, you could describe that as amaeru. Usually it’s someone pushing acceptable behaviour in a relationship, and more often someone who is in the less strong position. And someone who lets them get away with it.

But turn it around. Amaeru can tell us a lot about our relationships. Given that a relationship is the kind of stickiness, the glue between two or more people, which of your relationships is sticky, and which are a little more tenuous? Imagine that you are busy doing a number of things for different people, all about the same importance. Which of those things would you do first, which would you be more likely to forget about? Amaeru behaviour can tell us how close we sense the relationship to be, and how durable. Amaeru is most easily seen between parents and children, or lovers, or people working in a group.

We sometimes have quite different relationships to what we assume or to how they appear, and only realize it when we’ve pushed things too far. Amaeru is about that pushing; it’s a test – an unacknowledged attempt to see how far we can go.