Chapter Twenty: Assets or Liabilities, What We Bring to Our Relationships
“Treating people as objects to be manipulated is a denial of their humanity and our own as well.”
Stephen Covey
Author and leadership thinker Stephen Covey warns against treating people as things. This habit shows up more often than many of us want to admit. In dating, friendship, work, and family life, people sometimes start talking about others as if they were assets, liabilities, upgrades, burdens, or bad investments. The language can sound practical. It can even sound wise. But relationships are not balance sheets, and human beings are not line items on a ledger.
Where This Mindset Comes From
Part of the appeal is emotional. When people feel hurt, confused, or afraid, they often want a faster way to sort the world. If you can label someone quickly, you can pretend you understand the risk. Calling a person an asset or a liability can feel like clarity when what you really have is fear wearing a business suit.
Part of the appeal is cultural. Modern life teaches people to optimize almost everything. We compare options, rank value, and look for advantage. Market logic can help in some areas of life. It becomes corrosive when it is imported too directly into human relationships.
Some people also borrow this language from crude readings of economics or evolutionary psychology. There are real patterns in attraction, status, reciprocity, and mate choice [386]. But descriptive patterns do not give us moral permission to reduce people to usefulness. Understanding behavior is not the same as justifying dehumanization.
What This Language Gets Wrong
The problem with the asset-and-liability frame is not that discernment is wrong. Discernment is necessary. You should pay attention to who is trustworthy, kind, manipulative, irresponsible, selfish, generous, or safe. The problem is that the frame encourages people to evaluate human worth as if a person’s value lives mainly in what they provide.
In accounting, an asset is something you use. A liability is something you manage, minimize, or remove. That accounting posture is already the wrong fit for a human relationship. People are not tools. They are not problems to be optimized away. They are full human beings with dignity, complexity, wounds, gifts, limits, and freedom.
A spreadsheet can measure patterns, but it cannot love anyone. It can help you total numbers. It cannot tell you who is brave, honest, healing, selfish, ashamed, growing, or worth forgiving. Human relationships require judgment, but they require the kind of judgment that still sees personhood.
Discernment Is Not the Same as Dehumanization
Rejecting the asset-and-liability mindset does not mean becoming naive. You can say a relationship is unhealthy. You can say a person lies, takes without giving, drains your peace, or repeatedly crosses boundaries. You can leave. You can protect yourself. None of that requires turning a person into a category of market value.
The distinction matters because some people confuse compassion with blindness. Compassion does not require staying in harmful dynamics. It simply means you do not need contempt in order to have clarity. You can recognize damaging behavior and still remember that the person doing it is more than their worst pattern.
How the Asset-and-Liability Frame Harms Relationships
One cost is dehumanization. Once people are treated mainly as value containers, empathy starts to thin out. It becomes easier to use, compare, discard, or resent them when they stop serving your preferred function.
Another cost is chronic comparison. Rusbult’s work on alternatives and investment helps explain why relationships become shaky when people keep one eye on the exit and the other on greener options [173]. If a person is always scanning for a better deal, deeper trust has trouble growing. Security needs more than attraction. It needs some freedom from constant market logic.
The frame also harms the person using it. If you keep measuring everyone by utility, you will often start measuring yourself the same way. The habit can turn ordinary weakness, grief, illness, aging, unemployment, or need into shame. A person begins to ask not, “How am I doing?” but, “Am I still worth keeping?” A life measured that way is brutal.
What Healthy Reciprocity Actually Looks Like
Healthy relationships do involve exchange, but not the cold kind. Adam Grant’s work is useful here. Giving and receiving matter, yet healthy reciprocity is not the same as scorekeeping [215]. People in strong relationships do not usually keep a perfect ledger. They look for a pattern of goodwill, fairness, repair, and mutual care.
Gratitude research points in a similar direction [177]. Mutual appreciation strengthens connection. People feel safer giving when they are not being taken for granted. A pattern like that is very different from treating every act of care like a transaction that must be repaid on schedule.
Baumeister and Leary’s work also matters here [138]. Human beings need belonging. We are not built only to maximize advantage. We are built for attachment, recognition, and meaningful connection. When relationships become purely transactional, something deeply human gets starved.
A Better Way To Evaluate Relationships
If the asset-and-liability language is the wrong tool, what should replace it? A better set of questions helps:
- Is this relationship honest?
- Is there respect?
- Is there reciprocity over time?
- Can we repair after conflict?
- Do we make each other smaller, or do we help each other grow?
- Do I feel safer, clearer, and more myself here, or more confused and diminished?
Questions like these still allow discernment. They simply keep the focus where it belongs. The real issue is not whether a person adds prestige, convenience, money, sex, status, or emotional labor to your life. The real issue is whether the relationship itself is healthy, mutual, and human [392].
Why Mutual Growth Matters More Than Utility
Strong relationships are not built only on what each person can extract. They are built on trust, care, sacrifice, truth, repair, and shared growth. Commitment research supports that broader view [173]. So does the lived experience of almost anyone who has known the difference between being valued and merely being used.
A person may bring resources, beauty, humor, competence, stability, wisdom, or tenderness into your life. Qualities like those matter. They are just not the whole story. If admiration is present without reverence for personhood, the relationship will usually become shallow or cruel sooner or later.
People Are Not Spreadsheets
Calling people assets or liabilities can feel sharp, realistic, and efficient. Most of the time it is just a colder way of avoiding the harder work of discernment. It flattens human beings into functions. It encourages comparison, contempt, and fear. And it can quietly teach people to treat themselves like products too.
A wiser path keeps both clarity and humanity. Notice patterns. Use judgment. Protect yourself where necessary. But do not trade personhood for efficiency. Relationships are not spreadsheets. They are living bonds between human beings, and they deserve to be approached with more truth, more care, and more reverence than a ledger can hold.