Sometimes I'll use a word a millions times and then one day wonder if I even know what it means. Then I'll turn to the dictionary, or several of them. And flip through some etymologies. But once you question it, it begins a rabbit hole and here we are!
After a fairly random conversation I had to look up "relationship". So, yeah, we're in for it!
So. You know. A ratio. What person A is to person B. A little line between one thing to another.
One of our evolutionary advantages is that we see one thing and are able to connect it to a group of other things. And then name that greater thing and everything in its category.
It's efficient. If I see one tiger, my brain is able to abstract to "predator" and then I have significantly more information than I do if I see this as a singular creature. The more we can group things, the more we can make predictions about things we haven't previously encountered by their resemblance to other things. Naming is the basis of science, art, science, and society. It is the human mind at work. The more we can group and learn, the more sophisticated our understanding of the entire group of "things" may be.
And of course, things that can be named extend to something abstract like "the connection between two or more other things". If I want to understand the relationship between a tiger and a magpie, maybe I would guess that they have a predator-prey relationship. I've never seen magpie with a tiger. But tigers have all the hallmarks of a predator and smaller birds appear tasty snack sized. Or, maybe I know that they are representatives of the idiocy of authority and the canniness of the common man, showing a form of populist satire in Korean Minwa paintings. Relationships are key, but so is context.
The same is true for relationships. Say, I develop a romantic attraction to somebody. It's an intense and confusing experience. Everything previously understood about how I relate to other people is turned upside down. In a world where we don't abstract relationships into universal forms, I have no idea what I am feeling or why, or what to expect.
Several queer people, in fact, describe developing feelings or crushes in their childhoods that they couldn't understand or identify, because they were raised on an exclusively heterosexual template. The things we think we "just know" are often based on a wide cultural understanding that is fed to us before we can even form memory. And what we teach shapes how we see everything. By choosing what is and isn't teachable, society celebrates some relationship and marginalizes others!
If we as a society have abstract forms that we can teach each other, I can identify the nature of my attachment. I can gain a significant amount of knowledge about my experience without prior knowledge: I can draw from poetry, gossip, anecdote, sociology and biology. I can identify with other people who are also experiencing romantic attachments. Other people around me can infer an astounding amount of information about my connection to this person with a few words. They could alternately name it themselves based on identifiable actions that fit in that grouping
This is also why we value sex education. We value universal forms to avoid mistakes, give best practices, and agree as a society what a relationship should and shouldn't look like. Why we give parenting classes in the hospital and so on.
To survive, we define, codify, and occasionally institutionalize certain relationships, because they form the underpinnings of a society that is completely built on relationships. Knowing what they are and what the rules are is more or less a foundation of civilization.
So, we care. A lot. And if you look up "types of relationships" or "stages of a relationship" or just "relationship," you will be flooded with different takes, that all more or less enshrine similar values and expectations in different multistep diagrams and narratives. We want to map things, define things and name the crap out of them. And in doing so we say what's desirable and what's abnormal.
Within that, we make a lot of distinctions down to what we mean by "relationship" depending on the context.
For instance, a relationship and a Relationship are talking about totally different things. A "situationship" is a relationship of sorts, while pointedly not being a Relationship.
(More on that several paragraphs later).
While we depend on understanding relationships in our human experience, there's a decent amount of flux about what we even mean when we talk about them. And plenty of uncertainty over what is helpful to consider and when it matters to pay attention.
Who are You... to Me?
For me, I tend to view naming a relationship as identifying the structure that supports an underlying connection. A definition of roles, rules, and expectations. There is an implicit contract that emerges through a mix of (1) popular understandings of what certain roles provide in people's lives, (2) legal and ethical rules affixed to those roles, (3) specific agreements that emerge either proactively or through time as people react to what feels like violations of internal rules and boundaries.
I can see describing a relationship equally being "how so and so feels about somebody else."
Is feeling attached to somebody by necessity a relationship or is the attachment a thing that some additional structure protects and supports? My guess is both, but I think we mean it in different ways in different contexts.
Personally, I tend to veer towards the more legalistic and formal understanding when trying to wrap my mind around these things.
This is partially because I don't have a good intuition. Masking means mirroring, and mirroring means that nonverbal dialogues are often had at a level well over my head, even as I give my apparent agreement. Going on vibes often means confusion, being taken advantage of, and just being wrong.
If I don't explicitly know what's expected of me, then how can I just guess? I also rarely "just know" that somebody likes or loves me. I usually have to constantly reverse engineer actions-to-feelings, or just take it on faith because "why would they say they did if they didn't?" But this can get tricky in situations where somebody might have a reason to misrepresent their relationship to me.
And it gets tricky when failing societal rules has consequences.
I don't know if neurotypicals are better at navigating less defined relationships or not, (I know a lot of people in mediation certainly weren't) but I do know this: The act of naming actually does change something, and it's usually been safer to me to have objective external rules that I follow and hold to.
Whatever else, society has decided that categories matter, so they do. Sometimes a lot.
The Things We Name and Codify:
Some relationships are attached to significant rights and responsibilities merely in the formation. A marriage comes with legal liabilities and rights as soon as "I do" is signed off and entered. Giving birth creates a number of financial and moral responsibilities by law. This requires no intention or even planning to the parties involved. It's imposed from without.
A Very Brief History of the Institution of Marriage:
There is a lot of amazing scholarship on the development and significance of marriage. I don't want to retread too heavily, so to massively oversimplify: (1) it is a socio-economic construct that piggy backs on an innately human tendency to pair up to have babies, (2) but the legal and social constructs are so strongly directed that they almost entirely reshape this tendency and every relationship around it.
The concept of marriage as an essentially romantic relationship is a fairly new one. Throughout history, it has far more commonly been seen as a practical arrangement, with economic tradeoffs and kinship at the fore, and with wives viewed as something between property and employees/servants.
That said, the science and poetry is clear: humans typically experience intense bursts of romantic fixation with others, and the science suggests that this most likely facilitated childbirth and child rearing in early human cultures. It also seems like our bodies have evolved with an inclination towards serial monogamy, and some level of covert sperm competition.
Marriage coopted this natural tendency and substituted in elements of "pairing" (though man-and-wife usually lived within an extended family structure until more recently) and strong controls on sperm competition.
Marriage as the end goal of any romantic relationship is also a fairly modern concept, as most romances through history seem to involve friends and lovers, courtly or otherwise. Husbands throughout history have cultivated extremely close relationships with comrades, young men, boys, and courtesans, which more often resembled romance than marriage usually did. There were, of course, romantic moments within stories and plays, but, well...
During the 1800s, The Romantic Movement celebrated flouting convention, prioritizing feeling over reason. Over time this began to form the Marriage we see now. The obligation of family connections and the economic choices that underpinned marriage remained but were complemented with an emphasis on affection and romance that sometimes overtook the familial and the practical.
In the 1900s, individualism and self-determination emerged as a core ethoi of western society. The dawn of women's rights changed the essence of marriage as a contract between equals instead of a property exchange. The emphasis of this equality naturally extends into the 21st century with enduring and ever-evolving impacts.
And somewhere in there, love has become the "appropriate" motivation for a legal contract that redefines two people in staggeringly drastic ways! And marriage has become the ultimate end of romantic love.
The idea of romantic marriage has influenced every relationship around it - friendship, family, romance, etc. And what that "end goal" might be is heavily reflected in legislation and law.
Legally Related:
There are a number of reasons for the legal intervention. Most simply, in earlier societies, women were property. It's not until the end of the last century that women were even able to achieve financial independence enough to have a real say (and it's kind of funny that the more independent they become, the more seem to be noping out on the idea altogether).
But even in a modern society, there are reasons to encourage some form of arrangement that mimics marriage.
Obviously, it's in society's best interest that children are sufficiently cared for. Your next generation of citizens need to be brought up, and that will come with a substantial burden. Typically, we see parents as having inherent rights to raise their children, but they also have immense burdens to complement.
The state of Washington and almost every government body on this earth, has its own relationship to vulnerable minors, and passes along as many responsibilities as possible to legally defined parents or caregivers. If a child has none, the state must pay for placement and support. That's why it doesn't matter if you wanted the kid: you are going to pay child support right up until the state allows you to terminate your parental status.
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| And yes, the law has figured out how to deal with same-sex parentage, eventually |
It is also in a state's interest for adult individuals to have somebody else responsible for them, albeit in a less aggressive way. If one person becomes unable to work, it's convenient that they and their debts be tied to somebody else who might be able. Since health coverage is typically covered by employment, having one spouse able to maintain coverage for those who can't work also benefits the state. This is why disability and marriage are so at odds, and why many say there's a pointed lack of marriage equality for the disabled, who risk losing support if they want to marry. The state would rather a spouse pick up the bill where possible.
If one person is in the hospital, it's easier to have a default system that passes decision-making to their spouse before trying to sort out next of kin. Having a default for all these rules simplifies the bureaucracy, even if it can be somewhat arbitrary.
And, while this is becoming less feasible, it has generally been in society's interest for there to be people who are either completely out of the labor market or able to work at a significantly lower wage, due to having a family income. Volunteer work, teachers, and other poorly compensated part time work have made our society function for centuries. It's a bit of a crisis that this is no longer affordable and likely related to the declining importance of marriage.
And where law declines to proscribe, society steps in just fine. It makes sense that you'd want people to live with the child and sleep near them. It's hard for a single parent to both care for a child and provide for themselves without some assistance. So, isn't it better if the law and society encourage both parents to live together and potentially pool assets in a way that supports the child? Maybe there's nothing that says married people have to live together, but social pressures and financial incentives suggest it's expedient. Tax rules encourage it.
Granted, meeting those social interests doesn't have to be two parents or a spouse doing the support. It could be a parent and their family. Two or several friends. A communal neighborhood. A socialist state (gasp!) with Universal Basic Income or very different budgeting priorities.
But the law follows old conventions and made two parents the ultimate model; in doing so, it encouraged coupling these needs with love, marriage, and cohabitation.
Society has become increasingly aware and sometimes even tolerant of divorce (though it's still generally looked on as suboptimal to straight out failure) and single parent households. The thing about just one parent at a time, though, is that it will rely on a system of greater community support that currently doesn't exist. Or - heaven forbid - actual state support of parenting and individual health.
Even the fact that both parents have to work now is having longer term impacts on educational outcomes and childhood wellbeing. As much as we want to support equality between the sexes, we don't want to provide the support that would make this successfully streamline with raising children.
In some ways, allowing gay marriage that resembles the legally framed Romantic Marriage is an easier step than disrupting the Romantic Marriage paradigm altogether. Deeply engrained in our culture is the ideal of romantic love that leads to a merging of selves to the end point of raising children.
Socially Extended:
By redefining marriage as the ultimate romantic enterprise (and adding a bunch of legal incentives to viewing it that way), society redefined every romantic relationship in its image.
A couple who can't marry may still have "a commitment ceremony." Because in some ways marriage is both a legal contract and a Relationship and the overlap is occasionally hazy. You can end your Relationship with a spouse but remain married. You can violate a marital contract, but there is an entirely mechanical process that is required to null and void it. And many "serious" couplings ultimately resemble married couples even when they reject the institution itself.
My mom, for instance, has no desire to ever marry again. At the same time, her relationship with her partner resembles almost all aspects of an idealized marriage of romance. It's monogamous, lifelong, deeply loyal, and strongly adheres to the classical marital vows. They take care of each other through sickness and love each other in health. They live together. Pool resources. Share chores. They intend to spend their days together until death do they part. They even have separately crafted legal agreements that reproduce some of the rights and responsibilities that marriage would have afforded.
It's meaningful and intentional that they are not married. But in some ways they are more married (in the romantic ideal sense) than in either of her previous marriages. What does that say? Has the naming itself worn thin even when the institution still has a hold on our every move?
And even still, the structure created by the contract persists and defines what any Relationship should look like in popular culture.
If coparents and children benefit from living together, then that becomes the end goal for any romantic Relationship, even if you aren't actually parents or never intend to be.
Romantic couples live together, they pool their finances, they expect to be together forever (instead of "as long as our brains are exploding out happy chemicals"). Couples fight their internal programming and promise fidelity. They prioritize romantic partners over other relationships as an alignment of goals and life course.
Or at least, that's the ideal. It's an interesting time, because younger generations are starting to question these norms that honestly aren't as long established as we imagine. They still remain heavily heavily saturated within our culture to the point that they define anything that seeks to diverge from the model. And it remains the measuring stick for discrimination and marginalization.
The spousal relationship is far more complex and several very long PhD theses long, but ultimately, we can see how a marriage remains both a relationship and an economic partnership, even with the elements of romance and personal choice affixed to it. And that this remains so crucial - even in a world where marriage is declining - that it still dominates almost every other relationship besides the parent-child relationship that marriage was partially crafted to facilitate.
Less Legally Speaking:
Beyond those social pressures, there remain mixed interdependencies... definitions and rule and roles put us on the same page. Relationships of almost every kind are also defined in their own light.
It can be easy to describe several relationships as founded in either (1) what we do for each other, or (2) how we feel about each other.
Perhaps in a boss-employee situation, it will be very clearly defined exactly what each party owes to the other. Perhaps, in that situation the "feeling" is less relevant, though I expect a successful boss-employee relationship will require some level of trust and respect. I've discussed the practitioner/client relationship. This absolutely depends on both.
And I think every relationship has some element of clearly defined: "you do x and I do y" to it, albeit less explicitly defined in some. Arguably the "role" has a level of interdependency between what you do for each other and how you feel about each other. Particularly in more emotionally centered relationships.
The ratio of them to me:
I think that we may experience love, affection, fondness, connection in a million relationship types- but in clear and distinct ways depending on the role itself. The role that a person fills for us probably is determined by but also helps describe the specific way those feelings manifest in that situation.
I love and feel affection for my child. My love is all encompassing and inevitable and requires zero reciprocity. The love I give her is a different kind of love than she gives me, but they are symbiotic. My love is simply a product of her being alive. My duties and obligations to her exist regardless of my feelings, but far beyond that, it is simply my body and soul responding what once was my body and soul; we are beings with a biological imperative.
I don't really question "does my child love me?" Whether she does or not makes no difference, but love-need-attachment have a prominent and specific form. I know in my bones that she does, and in a very specific way. And she knows like she knows her own body that I love her. It simply is. The flow of energy goes from me to her, and this will continue into adulthood.
That I brought her to the earth, means I owe her in substantial ways that are well understood in popular culture and a million parenting books.
I love and feel affection for my mom and dad. The same as above, except with me in the place of the child. And, as an adult, a higher level of reciprocity. Legally, they ceased to be responsible for me decades ago, but the social fabric and general human chemistry will never fully change that connection. The connection between mom and me and dad and me are different in some ways, but they are based in these people being parents to me and the needs and attachment influences underlying
I love and feel affection for my family. This is so distinctly tied up into our familial roles. There are some legalities there - next of kin and the long cascade of inheritance and medical decision-making rules, but mostly non-parental family roles have been de-emphasized in a world of nuclear families and individualized marriage contracts.
I love my aunts as warm and accepting people in my life. I love my sister as a mirror and influence on all that I have grown to be, and a fellow survivor of these turmoils we call childhood.
In modern society we owe each other contact, attention and some regard. I barely know my cousins and many of my aunts and uncles. I don't know if I would say I actively "love" them. But I recognize them as sharing my genetics. The social role of less immediate family seems almost relegated to certain holidays and contact at various points of the year
I love and feel affection for my favorite teachers. They shared knowledge with me. For somebody who views info-dumping as an act of affection, I am overwhelmingly grateful to them even when the information isn't something I'm excited about. I felt a huge drive to make them understand that they were heard and seen, and this motivated a lot of my academic achievement beyond random hyperfixations. Sharing knowledge is a huge act of love. But very different than any other form.
I love and feel affection for my (good) friends. Friendly love is far more mutual than parental, but also quite loose and flexible. Most of my friends are not people with whom I share particularly strong interdependency in any tangible form. They are people I chat with, people I do things with. People I may sporadically have a long conversation with about how my life is frustrating or a funny thought I had. People I expect to understand where I'm coming from in some way. People who are more inclined to stand up for me, even, or pick me when something needs picking.
The expectation centers around a mix of flexibility and ongoing receptivity. It typically isn't hugely physically affectionate, but not completely ascetic either. And it is most largely based around similar experiences and similar interests. The connection is based on mutual understanding. Living parallel lives that intersect as we confide in each other with a widely varying level of intensity.
Friends and friends:
I've generalized a lot though to even say that about such a massively and maddeningly huge umbrella term as "friend". The role of "friend" is obnoxiously broad. Somebody I've met once twenty years ago but follow on Facebook could be called a friend just as much as somebody I have known actively for the same twenty years and maybe even lived with
It's a title liberally afforded long before other markers of safety and respect are earned. We fold in colleagues, schoolmates, neighbors, activity partners and all manner of people who will come and go through our lives like the tide, and mix them along with the forever folks.
Friend might be a diagnosis of exclusion, really. Friend is a person you have a positive relationship that's not.... business, family, romantic, sexual.... etc etc. We just don't bother to define and investigate the platonic outside of the Nichomachian Ethics (don't get me started there...)
Which, I dunno, I think gives short shrift to one of the fundamental relationship structures of society.
This wasn't always the case. Throughout history, many cultures codified meaningful rituals that may be best evoked to the modern mind by the term "blood brothers." Typically between men, various rituals solemnified a deep pledge of loyalty between each other. No need to comment on the mixing of the most sacred of bodily fluids and how significant this has typically been. Not all friends are the same.
Elementary school kids get this. They qualify "friend" with a series of modifiers. Best friend, school best friend, camp best friend... My daughter started a relationship crisis when she informed her previous best friend that she'd been demoted to second best friend. I remember similarly complex hierarchies from elementary school.
And we do capture this in adult language as well: Old friend, work friend, and, yes, bestie is still in the carousel, though it's rarely a superlative so much as a qualitative descriptor of a different kind of friendship. There are people we're intensely fond of, but don't interact with much. People we're ambivalent about but share so much life with. And everything in between.
There are friends you entangle with. Friends where there's a certain level of specificity that makes them essential. Friends that take a level of priority and loyalty that rivals romantic Relationships. Where what you do for each other and how you feel about each other is almost qualitatively different than how you feel for a person you are just mildly fond of. Makes one want to have the language to describe that more easily...
Best Friend is to Friend as Spouse is to Romantic Partner?
I've had a handful of best friends and in some ways, I think it's an entirely different category than "friend." Largely, it remains "friend" because the deep love and affection are clearly platonic, but in a close friendship, there are deep levels of emotional interdependency and often physical interdependencies as well. Friendship is almost never exclusive in the way other relationships can be, but there is a pointed "one of a kindness" to a bestie relationship. You may not live together or raise a family together, but you likely are intertwined in essential and identity-affirming ways.
They are possibly your primary emotional support. They are likely people who share your communication preferences, who are there for you, who have your back and who function in ways we traditionally expect of family. They are our attachment figures. And they are the people who "know" and "see" you.
To some extent, the platonic nature of the relationship allows an intimacy that's more complicated than romantic/sexual relationships in a world that considers sex and romance to be the ultimate intimacy. The absence of that physical and logistical vulnerability allows a deeper emotional openness. And the absence of tangible financial and life interdependence can also make a bestie a better confidant than a life partner could be, given their own conflicts of interest. They fill a different need. Though they can also overlap significantly with a life partner in several areas.
Not Necessarily Marriage: The RELATIONSHIP
But of course, in our society, there's nothing so pointedly defined as The Relationship. Even if two partners reject marriage as the ultimate goal, the heavy social conceptions of romantic love seep into all Relationships.
To some degree, this is understandable. You may eschew the patriarchal hetero-mononormative colonial structures, but be queer... be poly... be disabled... and you come to understand that not being able to marry somebody is a huge huge disadvantage in our current life. And even just knowing it's an option changes how a relationship feels. The language of commitment and connection are so permeated with marital mythology, it's hard to escape it.
And of course, because of how we stack our social expectations, the Romantic Relationship is considered the most deeply vulnerable (this is debatable, but nonetheless, the neurochemical explosions between falling in love and feeling attached are very intense for those of us who are prone to those feelings). Romantic love is essentially both creative and destructive in ways that rarely attend other formal relationships. Though I do have to point out that they can. A person can get a squish (which is a non-sexual non romantic crush) and they can become limerant about a friend. But it's less within our vocabulary and there do seem to be biological underpinnings to the coupling of sexual and romantic focus.
The Relationship carries huge social privileges. It carries significant expectations. And - in a world where friendship is harder to form and sustain - it often provides the exclusive emotional connection and caregiving for people.
The structure of a relationship draws significantly from cultural expectations. Like parenting, there are a million books about what a Relationship should look like, how to maintain one, how to revitalize one, how to get over one, or how to get one back after it's been lost... The collected "wisdom" about this particular relationship is vast and broad. It can be contradictory, because our society is not fully homogenous and relationships may still serve different ends in different groups, but similar themes will no doubt emerge.
And it's easy to be so certain of the social expectations of a Relationship that you don't even bother to proactively define heated things like "what do we consider infidelity?" Spoiler alert: most couples who don't define it explicitly actually don't agree and there's research to back this up.
Breaking the Mold:
Life is complicated and messy. Maybe you married your high school sweetheart, but they died and left you with a child to raise. Maybe you - surprise - just don't feel those feels with members of the opposite sex, and maybe not for anyone at all! Maybe you come to realize that your gender identity doesn't align with the ideals. We keep churning out models and social caselaw for each variation, but every individual situation is unique and sometimes the models for less common cases vary.
One of the things I loved about family law is understanding how many unique relationships can be built by diverging from the norm; and I loved trying to find ways to fold those into our current social expectations. Surrogacies, Stepparents, Thruples, Polycules, More Than Two Parent situations... the way that society comes to view these and proactively pass judgement on them lays the groundwork for what the law will move to reflect. It is frustratingly slow. And sometimes the way unfamiliar relationships are marginalized is outright toxic. But fascinating. Because progress does get made.
And because it shows you how many of our preconceptions "don't have to be that way!"
The queer folk lead the way! When you tweak the formula often enough to make a new one:
There are other generally unprotected relationships that carry a certain sense of ambiguity due to their unconventionality, but which have become common enough that there are terms and expectations more clearly associated with them in various sub-cultures.
At the different but not-so-different end of the scale. There are romantic relationships where people choose not to join their lives. Outsiders can look at those as some form of arrested development of the traditional relationship escalator, but for some it's a conscious choice of "what works." Maybe you choose to never live together. Maybe you already had kids and enough's enough. Maybe you never wanted them. And that's just marginally not-the-ideal but kind of acceptable.
This may be becoming closer to the norm, as marriage falls slightly out of favor. The model still seems to mimic marriage as the default form, but rejects certain elements. As we become more discerning, we may reevaluate almost every aspect of the model. It seems that Gen Z is poised to raise all those questions, though never count out the rubber band effect and the potential for a trad-marriage backlash!
Similarly, you have relationships that arise typically in a non-monogamous context. And I don't care if the idea appeals remotely, it is fascinating to see all the different ways people can codify relationships once you just question "is there a different way that works better?"
Maybe you live alone and are intimately committed to several people, none of whom you plan to "nest" with. Maybe you live with one person but consider another person the love of your life and yet another person visits from time to time for romantic weekends. Or maybe you live with your five partners and their partners in a giant commune. Maybe you're romantically exclusive, but sexually free (open or swingers), Maybe you believe love is never exclusive. People have been mixing up the norm as long as there have been norms, but over time the non-norms become their own alternative norms.
It's fun investigating queer, poly, and ace spaces. Because there are norms, straight up within those sub-cultures. And the more a culture establishes itself, the more heavily defined and normative they become in their own right. And while some of these are just based on emulating the Romantic Relationship with a little extra here and there. Others completely redefine what two people can be to each other.
Once you break relationships into components of platonic, erotic, and romantic love, you can mix and match across a wide spectrum. Especially when you get to pick and choose which are exclusive, if any.
Queer Platonic Relationships are generally - as you might glean - platonic relationships based in deep emotional intimacy and an alignment of goals, in which people share the signs of devotion associated with Romantic Relationships. Forget "my husband is my best friend" and go more for "my best friend is the person I choose to navigate this world with." It follows several of the rules of a highly committed romantic relationship without the romance and most often without the sex.
It's a commonly celebrated structure in asexual and aromantic spaces, though it should be said that asexual people may simply prefer a more conventional romantic relationship with or without the sexual aspect. Life is complicated. Who says, your commitment life partner and the person you're in love with have to be the same? Wouldn't a life partner be more preferably stable a relationship? There's reason to it.
Friends with Benefits. A predominately sexual relationship without romantic commitment. Yes, we've seen this go wrong several times in plenty of romantic comedies. Pop culture definitely sees FWB as a lesser form of a Relationship. But the ideal of this relationship is quite simple, and people fail to live up to relationship goals in any number of relationship structures. It's explicit and clear that the basis of the relationship is friendship (in whatever casual to serious range we're talking about there) and sexual contact is added on without the trappings of a conventional Relationship.
This might happen between two people who are too busy to pursue a committed relationship. It might be a role somebody takes when their FWB is already in a romantic relationship, but one that is not sexually exclusive. It might evolve into another relationship, but it usually isn't intended to.
Romantic Friendships. This has a bit of a history. Back in the twentieth century, this often was an intentionally ambiguous way to honor "friendships" between (mostly) women, who had such a deep and undying devotion to each other that required the language and gesture of romance.
As you can imagine, naming a romantic friendship was often a way of being close to a loved one while obscuring the homosexual undertones that underlined the connection. Many romantic friendships were just queer relationships coming up for air and some form of guarded public recognition. However, it's probable that many of these relationships often were denied a full Romantic/sexual relationship because of the circumstances.
Things have evolved. It's come to be understood as a relationship between people who share romantic and platonic devotion... without engaging in a full spectrum sexual relationship. This can look different for different people, as it's ultimately still in the shadow lands of relationship structures. Go on any forum for ace/aro or poly people and everyone has their own distinct definitions. But generally speaking, you may actively go on dates with your romantic friend, snuggle with them, feel devoted to them, exchange tokens of affection, be very physically connected; some even kiss each other on the lips, while others draw the line at snuggling.
Distinct from QPP, it is not fundamentally platonic.
Distinct from FWB, it is not fundamentally sexual.
Distinct from both of these, it does have fundamentally romantic elements.
And we aren't being all that novel for having these slightly off-label "friendships" and relationships. In Medieval period, courtly loved consisted of romance and erotic longing that was most often unconsummated. A knight would perform feats of chivalry, compose poetry, sing songs to their lady fair. Not a spouse, but somebody else's wife. Never intended to be a traditionally together, though affairs certainly happened. In modern times I suppose it would be an emotional affair at least, but it followed its own rules that were well spelled out in the music and literature of the time.
Throughout history, relationships that don't fit the mold have persisted under the radar and within covert subcultures. With fewer supports. With outright discrimination. And with endless misunderstandings. People persist to find new (and entirely not-new) ways to be X to somebody else's Y.
In other words, the range of platonic, romantic and sexual entanglement is about as broad as "friendship" but only a few more formally conforming manifestations even reached the point of having titles. As queer culture in all its glory evolves, it leads the way in building up expectations, rules, and roles to the point of developing new cultural templates. As marriage falls out of fashion, these new templates may become more and more common until even pop culture has to recognize them.
Alternately...
Relationship Anarchy addresses every single relationship as custom designed. Instead of starting with The Template that society brings, it is entirely individual. You and the person you relate to pick from an infinite number of experiences, obligations, and commitments. These are based in the roles that have been previously defined, but take on no defaults.
No way of relating is seen as intrinsically superior. Each are simply what two people define to themselves and each other. It seeks to break free of all the pressures and mindsets that press relationships in cookie cutter form instead of honoring the unique natural connection underneath.
The person you live with is no more important than the person you have strong emotional ties with. Marriage may occur but it is not considered The Big End goal. You may choose to be monogamous in one way or another, but your platonic relationship may be more important than or equally so to your romantic Relationship.
The Situationship!
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| Situationship: What it Is and 5 Signs You’re In One |
In some ways, a situationship can mimic an RA relationship, by eschewing the templates. In other ways it's the complete opposite. If RA discards the societal rules in lieu of deeply personalized rules, situationships decline to make rules. Any agreements between "partners" are vague and ambiguous. They may rely on resembling familiar structures... without ever actually being any of those.
This brings a flexibility that can be freeing, but also chaotic. Because there are no agreements, people may or may not be on the same page at any given time. And the way one person regards another one day might change the next.
Typically, the situationship depicted in a somewhat negative light, despite having its place. I think most people begin almost any relationship with a period of swarming ambiguity as they figure each other out. And I think space should be given to suss people out before actually assigning them to any given category. Exactly when a relationship fails to be defined and thus becomes a situationship is about as ambiguous as anything else!
Because platonic relationships can so easily be categorized as "friendship," I would far more expect a situationship to be referring to a sexual relationship with variable hallmarks of romantic connection and no formal commitment. Though arguably it could look any number of ways, since the essence is largely the intentional lack of definition.
The term came up well after I was married, but it was certainly familiar before then. I've had what constitute situationships plenty in my twenties. And many of them were almost identical to relationships in the middle part. Definitions don't always protect you from getting hurt, and a lack of rules doesn't imply that certain rhythms won't evolve and become predictable.
In my twenties, I had a situationship and a relationship that looked quite similar in several ways. To really hammer down on the similarities, one was named Derry and one was Darren. So, we'll call them Situation D and Relationship D, or SD and RD for short.
Both were people I had known from dance. Both are people I'd been acquainted with for about a year before hand. With both one thing led to another somewhat at random in weirdly similar circumstances, and then a bit later evolved into a more regular in a flurry of text messages and conversations that could be interchanged. Both are people I mostly saw on the weekends and occasionally over text for a 4-6 month period. Both moved away at the end.
They were really similar in a lot of ways, but there situation/relationship did create differences:
Termination:
Relationship required termination. Situationship did not. SD simply moved, and we very occasionally hooked up at parties over the course of several years, despite anyone's better judgement.
Both guys made it pretty clear they weren't that committed to me, but somehow the fact that Relationship D had to feel the discomfort and pain of terminating our relationship was emotionally freeing for me. I had something to hold onto, something to mourn and something to move on from.
I blamed myself less about getting hurt. There was always the sense that "I knew better" with SD. I knew there was no safety net in falling for him. I knew his affectionate moments were grounded in nothing and secured by nothing. Maybe I knew that about RD as well, but he still made promises he couldn't live up to and that seemed to me more on him.
Intensity
Ironically, I was less attached to RD, and I think that actually may be a feature of Situationships in general. Because with SD, the intermittent reinforcement leant an intensity that kept me hooked. Random and unpredictable rewards sustain the suspense and keep the attention. Particularly for an ADHDer who does tend to respond to novelty and seek intensity. We had patterns but they weren't super predictable. I had no clear expectations of anything ever occurring again, so every moment of connection was a giant dopamine rush.
Concentrated down to moments of passion with surrounding moments of flirtation and afterglow. Because nothing was guaranteed, every time was the last time, and thus the last chance to go a little further and be a little more physically vulnerable.
Ambiguity lets you fill in the gaps in a way a clear contract - or plenty of down time to actually get to know each other - never does.
Meanwhile, instead of focusing on the "rewards" of the times of affection, my relationship with RD set a certain floor to my expectations.
Meaning instead of getting excited about when I received love or affection, I was more aware of how the love and affection I expected wasn't happening. I could actually point out to myself that RD constantly failing to show up to meet my friends or forgetting to call me was a sign that he was a sucky boyfriend. I knew that the way he treated me failed the mark of a boyfriend.
And honestly, that constant feedback mixed with a far higher proportion of casual "down time" together (which was nice, but also easier to take for granted and less of an emotional high) led to a pretty decent amount of disenchantment way before he so aptly pointed out that he felt "like a bad boyfriend".
With SD, there were no rules, so there was no way for him to fail (or succeed, I suppose). I had straight up agreed to the arrangement, so it was my problem if he didn't introduce me to his friends or think of me. And if he did - if he met the baseline of what I would have taken as given from a partner - it was a giant gushy rush! Because I had no expectations to live up to.
Which is to say... situationships confer a lot of advantages to the less invested partner. And they do have some short-term advantages to the less invested partner in their way.
Self Owned to Taking Ownership:
I'm not saying Situationships are inherently manipulative. If there was manipulation, I manipulated myself. The haziness of the rules, absolutely allowed SD to express intimate feelings and affection without the risk of a higher stakes relationship, and with no obligation to feel consistently about me from day to day. The inconsistency boosted the excitement and the fixation. I understood that going into it, and I had reasons at the time to want those highs and lows. I have no idea if the feelings were genuine or if they were of a moment playacting. I'm not good at reading those things. But whatever they were, they weren't particularly enduring and that was part of the intensity.
To some extent the lack of definitions allowed for a mutual play-acting of all the appealing features of romance without any of the dull parts. Quite possibly if SD hadn't moved, it simply would have run its course, because that kind of thing inevitably does get old eventually. And, having interacted online a small amount since then, if I had actually gotten to know SD, I probably would have found several aspects of his values and personality deeply objectionable. But I didn't have to face that straight up.
In other situationships that developed after breakups, I again understood that it was an unhealthy choice and even found that part of the appeal. I knew what was wrong with the prior relationship. It was, if anything, feeding off of the guilt and tension to amplify the dopamine burst of "absolutely doing the wrong damned thing." It paid off with damned high peaks. Temporarily. The oh-so-wrong-it's-amazing intimacy was incomparably intense, just with a nasty withdrawal hook at the end of it. I was focusing on immediate rewards at the cost of long term well-being. It was less innocent and naive, and more addictive behavior. I wanted to be misled.
I wonder how much situationships are our free will kicking in against all the shoulds of society. A fucking around that we need in order to actually find out. And honestly, if I had to choose between a tepid relationship or a situationship with an equally incompatible person, the situationship appeals to my ADHD wolf and horrifies my autistic wolf, so I'm not really sure what I found out, except it's safer for me to know my damned boundaries.
Structure
For me, I do feel the complete lack of rules allowed me to become inappropriately vulnerable with somebody who was never or no longer safe for me. As much as I enjoyed that extra kick of risk and anxiety, it was also... really crushing. Because despite my theoretical savvy, I let myself fall for it all. I tricked myself by refusing to look at the metrics a formal relationship would have demanded me to see.
In some ways, the formal structure of a Relationship, even a bad one, is protective., but in other ways not. You can absolutely get hurt in a romantic Relationship. Often to a point of trauma. There is nothing worse than having your deepest vulnerabilities betrayed. Nonetheless, it provides a structure to even say that you were hurt in the first place.
Are Some Relationships Inaccurately Named Situationships?
A defined structure doesn't guarantee anything if you both turn a blind eye to the intrinsic rules or those you previously agreed to. A boundary is only as good as a person's willingness to enforce it. Rules are only rules if they are followed. And in many ways, people turn their formal Relationships into situationships merely by being unwilling to hold or examine the rules and definitions of their connection.
In particular, several Relationships have a tail off period where one or both partners have begun to withdraw from the relationship without actually making the termination official. This can happen for possibly years, and it's almost impossible to put a finger on who did what when in this case, as intimacies ebb and flow regularly. Inertia is a powerful force and it's fairly common to simply not know whether one wishes to continue or not with a commitment that was made. It's usually not black and white. Does a relationship end when the agreement fails to be honored in some fundamental way or does this always necessitate and official termination?
Contractually it feels like when you've hit the end of your lease and move to month to month. If you violate a clause of your rental agreement, the landlord can evict you with less red tape, but they still have to take that step, or else you're still living there. They are still your landlord even if you brought a forbidden pet into the house and made a hole in the wall. You may not have to provide the same notice if your landlord violates their end of the lease, but you are again still living there and paying rent until somebody says "no".
So even if the terms are broken, I would think a formal Relationship doesn't end-end until somebody calls it. But something weird happens to what it was and what it can be.
But at what point does it become more squatting in a relationship and is that ultimately a situationship passing itself off as something more formal? If you cheat on your spouse, and they find out but say nothing and you both continue on... does that mean you collaboratively altered your relationship contract and are still essentially partners? Does it mean you're no longer emotionally married? It's not really clear and probably varies by relationship.
We fail each other all the time, meaning we break our relationship commitments and contracts semi-regularly. It's usually the repair that matters. So even a violation of the relationship contract, even an essential one, seems to require a period in which is it neither addressed nor fixed to become fatal. And what is that period? Who knows!
And in that way, perhaps it matters less what you call something as much as how willing you are to hold and enforce the boundaries and stick to your agreements.
Not Setting Up to Fail?
So all the ado about nothing? Is there a middle ground? Having complete anarchy doesn't seem ideal. But if an agreement is unworkable then isn't it anarchy anyways?
The middle ground to me perhaps involves a working template, and one needs to be aware of the influences of social preconceptions and norms, but with the awareness that nothing is truly solid. Maybe there is an intentional level of flexibility that needs to be mixed with something solid. I'm not sure what that looks like.
How do you get "on the same page" with somebody while also allowing a relationship to grow, bend and breathe? The less we need each other, the easier this feels, and this is why more casual friendships are often so flexible, but what about when we are essentially entangled?
Some couples schedule regular "relationship check-ins". I'm not sure how honest these become and how deeply they dig, but perhaps this is a path to hold the constant flow of time and change?
We know some rules are automatically created at certain points: marriage, cohabitation, children. But many aren't. When do we need to start naming them and how in flux are they? How often do we need to check in if we decide to?
A few points of caution to any agreement:
(1) We aren't great judges of our own abilities or preferences:
You think you want to get married and have kids someday, but do you actually if you consider all that's involved in that? You think that you can absolutely have a casual relationship with the hot neighbor down the street and not get the feels. Can you? You think you can have a platonic friendship with a person you're in love with, but will that actually work for you? People made it to adulthood thinking they were heterosexual and only realized their true selves years into a first marriage. It's hard to say how well we understand ourselves when a world is telling us we're something other than we are.
We are often bad at understanding and predicting our needs. And we often agree to relationship set ups that turn out not to work out for us. Or that we are straight up incapable of. Things can sound great in theory, but not function at all in practice The more we define ourselves to somebody else and force them into a box, the more we may set ourselves up for failing them and being failed by them.
If things remain more flexible, perhaps there's time and space to learn about yourself and where you do and don't meet. You might both discover your wants are different than you thought, and that's ok. Or you might realize you are incompatible.
This is essentially why people recommend not "rushing" into a seriously committed relationship, but it might go further than just the evaluative "do they fit" process, and right to the core of "what should this fit anyways and how is it changing over time?"
(2) Being too specific thwarts finding the best fit for the two people:
Simply this. We can't predict every outcome or eventuality, and we can't know until it's happened how we feel.
You can set boundaries very strongly, and should, but often you'll find that what seemed tolerable in theory isn't actually and vice versa. And the way two people bend and fold and groove with each other is something unique to them. Requiring one relationship to look like another relationship with another person misses the uniqueness of the individual bond. Being at least able to bend means that you might both learn about yourself and have the flexibility to change and try different configurations out.
(3) People evolve, so relationships must too:
All the things I described above but also understanding that where we're at now might not be who we will be in the future. We can't "change" people in a specifically directed way, but we do change and they will change. Always. What we learn about ourselves one year, may change the next. What we are able to offer somebody one month may change the next. The ability to escalate and deescalate a relationship to fit a range of possibilities can constantly preserve and adjust.
(4) Negotiating every single relationship down to the specific nuts and bolts is flat out too much work.
There's a reason that "friend" is generally a loose contract. The need for security is lesser, the investment of negotiating hundreds of interactions daily would be exhausting.
We navigate a large percentage of our interactions with a mix of social template, standard expectations, established agreements, and improvisations.
*****
So what's anyone to do?
On the one hand our social upbringing and participation in society has more or less indoctrinated us to relate only in certain ways, and to value relationships in a very specific hierarchy. There's nothing inherently wrong about that. There have to be norms and defaults. Sometimes society just needs to pick a way and double down on how relating should look.
But it does leave room to question if those norms actually serve us. And the social script absolutely invalidates, persecutes, and marginalizes people who don't comfortably fit in that mold. There's even reason to question whether the current model is ideal on a more global level, and several in the later generations seem to be starting the big social evolution towards new and different ways of relating.
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| We just can't all be ducks! |
Within every default relationship, are a million uncritically ineffective relationship contracts. Just because social conditioning tells us we want a certain thing, doesn't mean that we ultimately will or that it would make us happy if we got it. And even if we want something, it may not actually work for us without an additional level of flexibility and unofficial improvisation. If the rules can't be followed or tolerated, if boundaries aren't enforced, then we simply have slapped a name on anarchy without providing any safe container for the intimacy it asks. And without some clarity within ourselves and within our relationships, it's perhaps simply counterproductive to have unlivable expectations.
For every several relationships that just *fit* this or that, there's going to be a few that sort of don't. A little more than just a variation. And possibly into less well charted territory.
The way that we break down and group different relationships into proscriptive categories might miss the outliers and the edge cases. It may also be time to investigate our building blocks and decide if there's a superior way to view the different ways we can love and feel affection, and how those things interact with the promises we make each other.
On an individual level, I pretty much follow the crowd because it's still the easiest way to raise your kid and live your life. Being in Family Law, I know exactly how big a deal marriage is and how much signing a contract puts on you. And it's a lot. I'll be more inclined to conform, because I know on a very personalized level the way not-conforming (even unintentionally) can create challenges, micro-barriers, isolation and raised eyebrows.
People who don't follow relationship norms are swimming constantly against the tide, so I'm going to assume that instead of being "childish" or "just like being different," it might well be that they so essentially don't fit the norm that they can't even pretend. That it is actually worth it to them to spend their whole lives defining, fighting, explaining and trying to decide how closeted they need to be about their non-conventional approach. This is likely why the most marginalized (nothing left to lose) and the least (privilege is always protection to push the envelope) are going to be the leaders in these ways, and those of us in the middle will follow along decades later when it's safe.
And I'll keep my eyebrows square as I see other people relating in ways that don't fit my boxes, even while letting my curiosity make me want to keep tabs on them a little more... Because from a greater perspective, they might be onto something.
And, ultimately, I will continue to wonder where the crowd is going and what the next generation's normal might be.
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