What Is a Relationship?

Despite relationships typically being labeled only a limited number of ways, there are in fact as many types of relationships as there are people in them.

A while back someone in a bar asked if I was "in a relationship" with the guy I was hanging out with because we looked "intimate" to use his words. While the guy I was hanging out with is indeed someone I love deeply, we wouldn’t be categorized as in a relationship per most people’s criteria.

But, we are in a relationship. It’s just that it’s a relationship that doesn’t have a convenient name or label to attach to it. Not quite partner. Not quite a member of my polycule. Not quite an erotic play buddy. We’re extremely good friends who were physical in the past but now our connection is platonic. At least for now.

Friends? No, we feel like more than just friends.

Years ago, this same guy turned to me when we were out at an event and asked me if I had heard the rumor that he and I were dating. I had. We chuckled. He said, “Did you tell anyone that we’re not?” I said, “No.” He said, “Me either.” And we laughed again and hugged. Evidently, we were entirely fine with people thinking we were in whatever form of intimate relationship they envisioned for us.

I can understand why people think we’re in something akin to a traditional relationship. We walk down the street or through crowds at events holding hands and have for years. We’re clearly close based on how we interact with each other. Anyone witnessing that would likely think we’re at least dating.

What crosses my mind at such times is that despite the expanding vernacular becoming commonplace to describe an assortment of relationship styles, many relationships don’t fit any of those molds, at least not perfectly.

I get it. I’m a language person. Words are kind of my thing. I’m a writer after all. Categorization is a key component of language. Humans are culturally, and perhaps innately, compelled to define things by a name. Those names allow us to use some precision to manage communications that allow for a common understanding of the world in which we all live.

Labels provide comfort. They provide shorthand convenience. Naming things lets us discuss them knowing that we’re starting from a place of some common definitional understanding.

In “Why Do We Have to Label Everything & Everyone?” Hannah Hutcheson pondered the question of our seemingly ubiquitous tendency to label things.

The whole idea that we place a label on something that will never be the exact same idea, concept, vision, object, etc. to two people!

That amazing idea sent me over the edge when I was a child—that’s when it first clicked. Over the years, I’ve begun to understand why we label things for the most part. We almost have to.

This is a way we can communicate with one another allowing us to deepen our relationships and connections.

Regardless of how open minded we are when we are young, we end up using labels to differentiate us from one another. To separate us from one another. To divide us from one another.

Accepting that there is a practicality to naming things, including relationships, I also contend those same names and labels can indeed divide us from one another, and not always in good ways.

In the adventurous sexuality and relationship communities, we’re awash in labels but sometimes not enough of them. Take the common kinkster verbiage of dominant, submissive, and switch. Just three buckets into which to place every kinky person who includes power dynamics in their play? That’s limiting.

Plus, the same person might on one day be feeling dominant and on another submissive. So, what label do we use for them? Switch often has the general connotation of an equal amount of dominant and submissive, but how many of us are exactly 50/50? How do we describe 90/10 or 20/80?

It’s a moving target for many people because everyone gets to be the erotic person they want to be, labels be damned.

When it comes to non-heteronormative relationship structures, there’s a growing language used to describe the various types of relationships. What was once simply the progressive concept of polyamory is now a bunch of subsets of types of polyamory, each with their own unique variation of poly.

Anyway, back to the impetus for this post, deciding what is a relationship.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines relationship as the state of being related or interrelated, the relation connecting or binding participants in a relationship such as kinship or a specific instance or type of kinship, a state of affairs existing between those having relations or dealings, or a romantic or passionate attachment.

Those are all apt definitions for the word relationship, but it’s the last one that seems to understandably garner the main focus when people think of a relationship. The problem is that what I consider appropriate criteria for a “romantic or passionate attachment” might be entirely different than someone else’s criteria.

Where is this post going? I’m not entirely sure. I guess what I hope is that those reading it will open their minds to not so rigidly assuming a relationship between two or more people is only whatever the convenient label being used might signify.

I recently began to become more intimate with a longtime friend who is now more than just a friend. But we’ve intentionally hesitated to label it. Since we’re part of the kink community our fear is that if we label it others will immediately place us into a box that neither of us wants to be in. When someone asked me what this guy is to me I said we’ve been “doing the dance” together for more than a year. That was about as specific as I could or wanted to be, but I could tell it didn’t fully satisfy the questioner. They wanted more specificity. Lately I avoid specificity.

When I tell people I’m poly (I have multiple love relationships), I’m sure most people immediately construct a narrative that fits their view of poly even though my poly might look and function entirely differently than someone else’s. When I tell people I’m non-monogamous, I know many wedge me into their mental concept of what that means even though when I start to describe my version of non-monogamy it challenges their own norms regarding what a “proper” non-monogamous relationship is supposed to be.

The bottom line is that while we need names and labels to understand each other, engage in discussions, and avoid lengthy explanations through label shorthand, I hope people stop for a moment and realize that their conception of what constitutes a relationship and how a relationship is supposed to function should be formed malleably so that the target of their labeling doesn’t feel like they need to somehow conform to a specific relationship structure or way of functioning.

You can use this link to access all my writings and social media and ways to support my work.