A closed system left in its state will not maintain the status quo. This has been something hard for me to understand. It's hard to accept that even when a "harmonious" state is reached it cannot last without any regulatory mechanisms. Well, except for static systems, which are too simple for the context where I'm applying this thinking.
When it comes to relationships, of any sort, static systems are probably not practical nor desirable, as this would result in energy spent just to maintain the status quo that leads nowhere, if not to boredom and lack of purpose. On the other hand, not investing any energy would cause the system dynamics to degrade to a chaotic state; this is something described also by entropy. In physics, the total entropy of a system - simply put how much disorder there is - either increases or remains constant in any spontaneous process; it never decreases. A different way of expressing the second law of thermodynamics is that in a closed system, the total entropy always increases.
If we accept the above, there has to be some degree of energy spent by all parts of a system, even if only to maintain the status quo. Ideally, however, it would be great if we could all agree that a Kaizen mindset (i.e. continuous improvement) is beneficial as this would set the system on a path for increased quality. I want to keep this general for the moment, leaving aside discussions on what quality means and how it is measured.
For the sake of this discussion, if we reduce the system in the context of relationships to a system comprised of two persons, we could argue that the amount of energy should be equally spent by each person. This is an interesting idea but if we accept that in such a context a static system is not desirable, it's easy to see that this 50/50 rule is, in theory, a valid option but it is, in my opinion, an enormous oversimplification.
Based on my experience this threshold is dynamic and rightfully so. There are several reasons why this is the case. I have my idea, and this is something I'm also working on myself, as to what should be a good regulatory mechanism that maintains the system in an improving-harmonious state. This topic requires however a new post and, even then, I'm sure it is probably not going to be enough.
Picture created by the author using GenAI