“How well do you know Bob?” is a hard question to answer. If someone asked you to introduce them to someone you’re connected to on LinkedIn, there are some people you can just text and say “yo! You should talk to this person”; for other people you would weigh seriously the potential repetitional risk of the intro and craft a thoughtful and informational email. And of course there are the random people you met once, added on LinkedIn, and have absolutely no memory of.

I have a nerdy potential solution. Technology readiness levess are a 1 through 9 scale used as a shorthand for how close a technology is to being fully armed and operational. I propose Personal Relationship Levels to do a similar thing for conveying how close you are to someone.

The PRLs:

  1. Complete stranger.
  2. A second degree connection. You know of this person and know who you know who knows them.
  3. Brief interaction. People you have met once, briefly, and maybe don’t even remember meeting.
  4. Distant acquaintance. People you have one or two substantive interactions with who you suspect would also remember a few things about you and be more predisposition to you than a stranger. You put some effort into emails to these people: making sure you give them context, perhaps adopting a slightly more formal tone.
  5. Acquaintance. Someone you’ve interacted with several times, probably not 1-1. These are the people you see semi-regularly at professional events or friend’s gatherings but don’t seek out or see 1-1.
  6. Friendly Acquaintance. Someone you see regularly and have met with 1-1 but wouldn’t say, have 1-1 dinner with in a non-professional context. (You don’t necessarily like this person but can at least tolerate them.) You’re happy to do this person a small favor but think harder about bigger ones. You’ll shoot these people a quick email question without thinking too much about it.
  7. Friend. Someone whose company you actively seek out. You would happily do this person a favor and usually feel comfortable asking for one. You have a low barrier to communication with them — shooting a quick text, etc.
  8. Good friend. A friend you prioritize above your other friends. These are the people you might invite to your wedding, talk about feelings with, and ask vulnerable questions.
  9. Intimate. These are the people you would go to war for, trust with your life, etc. (Intimate here is meant in a non-sexual sense.)
  10. Family. Sometimes these people are chosen, not blood family. What makes someone family beyond blood is ineffable. Maybe it’s that these are the relationships that are too close to walk away from, no matter how much the other person pisses you off.

Some observations:

  • Relationships evolve at wildly different rates — sometimes people will become good friends after only a few interactions. Part of this is personal — some people just develop intimacy much faster — but some of it is pairwise combinations of people.
  • While your relationship with someone can go dormant, it feels like PRLs rarely go down without significant conflict. If both people opt in, you can often pick up a close relationship even after years.
  • Because PRLs are a unilateral thing, PRLs on two sides of a relationship can definitely be mismatched.

There are obvious flaw with this idea!

  • Some people will tell things to a complete stranger that others wouldn’t even tell to their spouse.
  • People’s relationships with their families are often complicated but I’m going to still insist that it’s PRL 9.
  • Relationships have many dimensions so collapsing down to a single number is extremely lossy.
  • There are many ways that quantifying a relationship can be awkward or actively bad.