Their complicated behaviors are not the story, their complications are

​I've begun watching the show "This is Us."

Today, after watching one full season, if someone were to ask me to identify the message the show's writers are trying to convey to the audience, I'd simply say it is this: People are complicated.

That is the message. And that is a fact.

People are complicated.

The show beautifully untangles the impacts of intergenerational complications. Complications are inherited, often multiplying along the way. Relationships that aren't great at accepting or navigating each other's complications are often the primary multiplier of them.

I mean, once you accept this, that my spouse or my friend or my family is complicated - which for some of us can take a lifetime to to get to that place - to fully accept complicated, we respond one of two ways.

Ideally, we respond with curiosity. Curiosity is emotionally engaging. It says I accept that you are complicated, and I want to explore the depths and nature of your complications.

That you are being complicated isn't the story, your complications are. I want to know THAT story.

As the complicated suddenly feels seen.

The other response is to withdraw. To retreat from the complicated natures of one another. To hide from what we see instead of investing the emotional and spiritual and mental energy required to untangle the unseen complications.

It's why I've come to believe that curiosity is the foundation of a thriving relationship. Not curiosity about the moon and the stars, but about the scars.

It's not accepting challenging behaviors, but being curious about the complicated stories those behaviors are telling. Because challenging behaviors are never the story. It's always much more complicated than that.

You can spend decades together hiding from behaviors, inciting them, denying them. You can spend decades in a relationship full of behaviors without ever coming close to understanding the complications beneath them.

Some relationships will survive that. They will exist. They won't be broken in word.

But no relationship will grow inside that. It won't thrive. It will never produce beauty in spirit.

There are some thriving relationships in the show This is Us. And the writers are brilliantly using curiosity to help them grow before our eyes. Curiosity about each other's complications.

At the same time, they are making us curious right along with them.

I wonder if the writers hope to make us more curious about one another. I wonder if they hope to bring some of us out of hiding and into curiosity.

I wonder if their hope is to make broken relationships whole again.

It's a complicated question, for sure. One we can either run from, or get curious about.

Curious or withdrawn.

It's always one or the other. The difference will be felt for generations to come.