No, Not All Relationships Are Transactional

How being vague created a cynical cliche

There is a statement I see over and over again (especially in popular discussions of romance) that I wanted to talk about:

“All relationships are transactional”.

On one level, this may be not only true but desirable. What would be the alternative of a transactional relationship? Would it be a one-sided relationship, where one person gets nothing out of the pairing, and the other parasitically takes? That is hardly the model we want to promote. You certainly wouldn’t stay with someone if being with them genuinely added little or nothing to your life, would you? Would the other person even love you if they wanted you to stay in such a situation? It does seem like there is some truth to the notion that all relationships are, at some level, transactional.

So why am I complaining about this? Well, partly for the love of the game, but I do have a point to this. The trouble is, this statement is often used to equivocate between two meanings of the word “transactional”. One of which is probably true (or mostly true), and the other of which is probably false, but deeply cynical. Often the plausible version is argued for, only for people to act as if the cynical version has been proven. The two interpretations of the statement, as far as I can see, are as follows:

“All relationships are transactional”_1¹ (or just Transac_1 for short): Relationships are transactional in the sense that everyone should, over the long-term, get something out of the relationship. Moreover, long-term imbalances in what someone “gets” out of the relationship will likely lead to the deterioration of the relationship.

“All relationships are transactional”_2 (or just Transac_2 for short): Relationships are “tit-for-tat”. If someone is not getting exactly as much as you are out of a relationship, they will leave you in the immediate future. Moreover, one person’s gain comes at a cost to the other person.

The difference between these two positions is largely one of time horizon. Transac_1 is a long-term prediction, and can accommodate large periods of imbalance, so long as it does not reach a “breaking point”. Transac_2, on the other hand, is a much more short-term notion. It suggests that even temporary imbalances in what one person is “getting out of” the relationships will cause a disaster. It also sets up an adversarial relationship between the pair. It assumes that if someone is getting something out of the relationship, they are taking that from the other person. Transac_1 does not imply such a zero-sum game.

Transac_1 strikes me as pretty plausible, for the reasons I have given above. But people often move from Transac_1 to Transac_2 without noticing the stark difference between the two ideas. Transac_1 should invite basically no cynicism, and just amounts to saying that people want to feel somewhat fulfilled in their relationships. But Transac_2 paints us all as narrowly egoistic agents, looking to suck our romantic partners dry for all they have. I’ve had a few relationships, and while they had their ups and downs, I can’t say that this tracks my experience at all. Though perhaps I’ve just been extraordinarily lucky.

As we just saw, much of the difference between Transac_1 and Transac_2 is scalar. The agents in Transac_1 are still deeply interested in what they can get out of a relationship, but the level of flexibility is much higher, and there is no assumption that happiness is zero sum. Since the difference (for the most part) is in degree rather than kind, it can seem appropriate to use the same word, “transactional”, for both. But I think this is a mistake, because the difference in degree has profound behavioural consequences. If Transac_1 is true, we should not panic, but if Transac_2 is true, then I would forgive you for swearing off romance entirely.

Think about it this way. If the transactional nature of the relationship is evaluated over a long period of time, say, 2 years, then that is a pretty robust connection, especially if you are quite young. It would take 2 years of “not getting enough out of the relationship” for it to collapse. But if all relationships only worked on a very short time horizon, like a month, then it robs us of the ability to be confident that any of our relationships can weather hard times. If I may digress slightly, I imagine part of the potential benefits of being married is that then splitting up is a total ballache, and this naturally extends the time horizon of the evaluation. It means things have to get really bad for a while before it is “worth” getting a divorce over it.

Of course, the relationship will be able to evaluate over longer time horizons as a greater degree of trust is built up between the pairing. An analogy with repaying a debt might help here. In long-term friendships, I don’t split the bill after a meal. We just alternate and know that things will “sort themselves out over time”. This would not be possible if I could not trust them, and so had the lingering thought at the back of my mind that they might want to rinse me for whatever they could get out of me. Increased trust and reliability allows us more flexibility in how much temporary “debt” (be that monetary or otherwise) we are willing to let the other person be in, before we suspect that we are being taken for a ride. We find them credible (to blur the lines of etymology).

Additionally, the (often unstated) premise in Transac_2 that relationship satisfaction is a zero sum game just seems false. It ignores the fact that people can enjoy doing things for their romantic partner, especially if those things are appreciated. I don’t think this is even that unusual. Even outside of romance, I’m sure most of us have bought a gift for someone, and took pleasure in someone else receiving and enjoying the gift. And that is not to speak of all the things that couples enjoy doing together. If a couple goes out for a walk, or has a conversation, or sleeps together, this is something they both enjoy, and does not cost the other anything, in either emotional or monetary terms. I feel like this is so obvious that it almost seems strange to say it out loud, but two people can enjoy something together, without that enjoyment coming at the cost of each other. The amount of pleasure in a relationship is not a fixed quantity.

Which is why I don’t like it when people say “all relationships are transactional”, because there is too much ambiguity to know what they are saying. So, I prefer this formulation:

“All relationships are reciprocal”.

“Reciprocity” just doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of cynicism that “transactional” does, and it gets across the longer time horizon at play in Transac_1. Moreover, I think it is probably true in most cases (especially romantic ones). We would not want people to stay in relationships that are not reciprocal. That would just be allowing someone to be taken advantage of. But we no longer have the image of two adversaries, carefully keeping track of what they get out of a relationship, to ensure that at no point they give more than they get. We instead have a picture that allows for even quite long periods of one person in the relationship requiring more from the other than they are able to give.

Statements like “all relationships are transactional”, by conflating Transac_1 and Transac_2, encourage a kind of romantic nihilism that I really think is unhelpful. We already have so many who think that love is either impossible or foolish (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). I think that the equivocation of these cynical maxims only exacerbates this issue.

Equivocation man. It’s a scary beast.

1. I am so sorry I cannot for the life of me figure out how to subscript on Substack. Please do let me know if you have figured it out.