See, my understanding of intimate relationships—not necessarily romantic or sexual, though those fall under the umbrella—has always been, this is a person I really like, whom I want to understand more than anyone. I want to watch how they do things, follow the way that they think. To see the way that they function gives me joy. To know them and to learn to see through their perspective makes me a greater person.

It has taken me many years to see that this is… not the perspective other people take. For other people, relationships—including and perhaps especially intimate ones—are transactional. There’s this built-in power dynamic, based on service and cost and reward and punishment. For other people, it seems that maintaining a relationship is like running an AirBnB.

A thing that’s stuck with me; my ex-spouse would assert that unless two people were having sex constantly they were no different from roommates. I used to wonder what they imagined a roommate was. Now I realize I got that backwards. It’s that in this model, every relationship is a cynical transaction. There’s no personal element. It’s an agreement based on goods and services, and all that distinguishes one relationship from the next is the wallpaper. So a roommate relationship is based on an exchange of personal privacy for lowered rent. Okay, fine. Then you do a round of Mad Libs, and say, oh, this other relationship is defined by an exchange of sex—and this one by an exchange of food, or cleaning services. It’s all the same! This is how we use people, you dummy. We’re all out to get what’s ours.

And now that I’ve identified the logic, it’s not just them. I see this in popular media, in the way other people talk about their relationships. If anything, the more intimate and vulnerable the relationship, the more meaningful that I would expect it to be, the more transactional they seem to be about it. And it’s just bewildering to me. What are you all doing? Is this really the way you want someone else to treat you? What kind of a life is this?

I just want to know a bunch of sincere weirdos who have no interest in power games—to make my own society where people can be vulnerable and honest and feel like they belong; where people will appreciate them as they are, all the more for their strangeness and the closer it brings us all to the truth. And, maybe I can make that kind of a world. It’s all just mutual agreement, right? I don’t know how I’d begin to go about it, but you have to start with an idea.