Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was a film I admired greatly and enjoyed a lot. I saw it a few times in the cinemas, and thought the cinematography, technicality and direction were excellent.

That said, I rarely have thought about it since. What I have thought about though, is a line uttered by Oppenheimer:

“Only a fool or a child presumes to know someone else’s relationship”.

As social creatures, to whom social cohesion and stability is important, we constantly are keeping track of others’ relationships. It is essential for our social standing, relationship preservation, and ultimately survival, to have a complex understanding of others’ interpersonal relationships. Incomprehensibly subtle and almost entirely subconscious, we track infinite patterns of behaviour.

Are two of my closest friends on the verge of falling out with each other? Does my cousin have a good relationship with their dad? Is the relationship between my partner and their friend entirely platonic? And is my parents’ marriage in a healthy and solid place?

This instinct is predictive and anticipatory. It provides clues as to how our own relationships will develop. It provides insight into the potential kindling of emotional damage, as well as avenues of growth and health. It helps us put out fires, both our own and others’, before they have even started to visibly smoke.

This instinct is also empathetic and compassionate. It forms a key piece of our emotional toolkit, enabling us to be more receptive to the needs of those we love. In having a vague sense of others’ shifting relational tides, we can understand them more deeply and share with them greater understanding.

But it is also deceptive. The step from trying to understand others’ relationships, for the above purposes, to believing you know others’ relationships is a very short one.

Oppenheimer’s quote struck me directly, as it proved a provocation, a challenge. In believing that I know two people, I have often believed that in turn I know their relationship. I have spent much of my life acting in this way, if not consciously thinking it.

Does this make me a fool or a child? I may be too old to admit the latter, and too proud to admit the former. But the answer was probably both.

We can never truly know the mind of another. I know my brothers more intimately than I have probably ever known anyone. But there exists an infinite ocean of experience, thought, feeling and belief within their skull-sized kingdoms that I will never know.

A true knowledge of another is thus impossible – instead, it is an approximation of understanding. If we cannot know the minds of other singular people, how on earth can we begin to think we know the melting collision of two?

We have no idea of the shapes of the jigsaw pieces that slot into each other, of the curled talons which scratch the deepest parts of one’s grounded being. This gap between estimation and true knowledge cannot be filled by hubristic assumption. It must be filled instead by compassionate acceptance and an embracing of ignorance.

Indeed, we can never really know our own relationships. Instead, they are a constant process of co-emergent discovery, of which we are both witness and participant.

Your subconscious brain will whir and compute the relationships of others, regardless of your intervention. We must try to relax the conviction with which we believe we know relationships of others, as well as the relationships of our own.

When giving advice on others’ relationships, try to maintain an appreciation for our near total ignorance. Listen and explore, instead of imprinting and mediating. Be a sounding board, rather than a voice.

Perhaps in embracing this humility, we move away from foolishness and childishness toward something wiser—a recognition that the mystery of human connection lies so far beyond our simple powers of comprehension.