The simple answer is YES.

Fun can help build relationships. It could help your personal and professional relationships, as well as your social relationships. When we think of relationships, we inevitably start to focus on the serious issues. From trust to loyalty, mutual benefit to interdependence or even codependency, everything gets talked about but fun. It is absolutely quintessential that two or more people in a relationship have fun together. Else, it is all a big uninteresting reality that everyone has to live with.

While the answer is simple, the reality is much more complicated.

Let us understand why fun can help build relationships.

• A relationship is about being with one another. That starts a relationship. If one or both parties are just not there, for each other that is, then there is no relationship. When you have fun, you would not only be with one another but you would like to spend more time, because you are enjoying it. This applies to personal and professional relationships. Colleagues that don’t enjoy the mutual company would be unlikely to gel well and would be less effective as a team. Compare that to a team that is always fun, upbeat and enjoying their time together and you would see an efficient, motivated, caring and successful team.

• Every relationship has phases when there would be mild or severe conflicts. It is just a part of life and no one can deny or run away from that reality. When the going gets tough, you have to prevent the tough from getting going. The only way you can do that is if you unwind, take a step back or just pause and have some fun. The purpose is not to make merry of a serious situation but to focus on the essence of the relationship, how significant it is and it is also imperative to remember the good times. While having fun, you don’t just build a relationship but you also salvage one, particularly in times of conflicts when people tend to part ways.

• Any relationship that is one dimensional will suffer at the mercy of time. It will get the job done but it would be nothing more. Whether you are into sales or networking, production or finance, a chief executive or an investor, you will need relationships to matter. You would need people who matter. That can only be accomplished if you share a multidimensional relationship with people. One way of doing that is having fun with the person or people.