All Relationships Are Transactional

But when they feel that way, something is usually wrong.

Photo by Nationaal Archief on Unsplash

Earlier this week, I wrote about how your average disgruntled mom’s beef is not with feminism or capitalism but with the fact that it would just be much easier if they were rich—and that living in a communist society (people will still have to work shitty jobs!) or a society where women don’t have rights (women would still have to work shitty jobs!) wouldn’t help. One of the points I made was that while they want more help, it’s not really a village they want (I wrote a whole thing about that a year ago) because a village requires contributions from everyone, including them. And it’s not always the fun stuff like helping your friend decorate for their child’s birthday party—it could include boring slogs like helping your pain-in-the-ass neighbor move. A lot of people want to take the help, but don’t want to pour a lot of free time and energy into helping other folks who aren’t necessarily their favorite people.

Sometimes you can have a village in the form of a religious institution, like a church. But churches are not just buildings of free stuff. Members of your church will notice if you never bring anything to the potluck, never organize anything, don’t donate any money, and repeatedly take favors from other people. The “village” also won’t want to help you if you have a bunch of onerous boundaries about the type of people with whom you can interact (nobody who doesn’t share my political views, nobody I find annoying or who TikTok deems toxic) or “boundaries” in general (Don’t visit to see the baby! Don’t text about the labor and delivery! Don’t let our kids watch movies! Don’t buy us garish Fisher Price toys!)

One piece of pushback I got was that relationships shouldn’t be so transactional, and in fact, to receive help from the village, you should not be expected to contribute in any symmetrical way, because people should just want to be nice to you for the sake of being nice. I got this feedback primarily from women, but it reminded me a lot of the husbands who react to the “invisible domestic labor” discourse with the statement, “Relationships shouldn’t be about keeping score” or “Relationships aren’t tit for tat.” In fact, when a guy says that, I can pretty fairly assume either he’s not pulling his weight, or he has a partner with much higher standards for cleanliness or childcare than he does (I will reserve judgment about whether she’s too neurotic or he’s too laid back.)

At the end of the day, nobody wants to look at their relationships as transactional, but of course they are! Relationships are “give and take,” as they say. That’s literally a transaction. Not every relationship needs to be perfectly symmetrical, but a wild imbalance usually creates resentment. Of course, this doesn’t apply to relationships with young children, but even older children and teenagers are expected to treat their parents and siblings with some degree of respect and probably contribute to the household via chores. It’s not possible for a three-year-old to behave selfishly, but it is absolutely possible for a teenager to behave selfishly, and to be reprimanded for doing so.

Most relationships aren’t as explicitly transactional as a sugar baby and her wealthy boyfriend, but they are transactional nonetheless. And if everything is going well, it won’t feel that way.