Connection

Balance is the whole of the first sense. An interaction is balanced when neither party ends it owing the other, so connection in this framework is not warmth, closeness or duration but a transfer that settles. The second sense builds directly on the first. Repeated balanced interactions construct an anima conduit, a standing channel through which energy moves between two sources, so a connection in the fuller sense is what accumulates when the balancing keeps happening. All connection is a series of interactions, each producing a debt or a credit that has to be balanced, and a relationship that keeps reversing credit is not establishing a connection at all but an endogroup, since energy running permanently in one direction is what defines the other structure. That gives a test which cuts across appearances, because devotion, sacrifice and long attachment can all be running one way. Connection is also not the one-sided relation that subject and object describe. In an exosocial world the drive towards expansion is a drive to create euphoric connections, and in such a connection the subject does not merely regard an object. Marsh's example is a person seeing their home after long absence, where the home fills them with euphoria and the emotional response is itself the evidence of a connection between what would otherwise be a person and a thing.

Attachment theory made bonding a developmental question, measuring security by how a child responds to separation and reunion, and most therapeutic language about connection descends from it. Sociology counts connections as network ties and studies their strength and number. Both traditions treat connection as a relation between people that is stronger or weaker. Marsh substitutes a property of the exchange itself, which produces different answers. A tie that is close, lasting and mutually acknowledged is not a connection on her account if the balance never settles, and a relation to a place, an object or an idea is a connection if it does.