The Terms

September 16, 2026

A friend told me yesterday that she loved how invested I am in humanity, especially when relationships have become so transactional. I didn’t immediately know what she meant. Not because I don’t understand the word transactional. I have worked in executive roles. I have signed enough contracts to know exactly what a transaction is. I just had never really applied that word to the way people relate to each other. I had to sit with it for a while and think about what part of me she was actually seeing, because I have never thought of myself as unusually generous in some grand moral way. I just don’t think about people in terms of what they can provide to me. I don’t meet someone and start mentally filing them under useful, connected, interesting enough, potentially helpful later. That sounds exhausting. I am interested in people because they are people. I like hearing how someone thinks. I like the odd details, the things they notice, the things they avoid, the way their life has shaped them. I have always been more interested in the person than in whatever access they might give me to something else.

That does not mean I am naive enough to think people do not benefit from knowing other people. Of course they do. Relationships naturally create opportunity, support, introductions, comfort, information, advice, company, and sometimes an emergency ride when your car decides it has had enough of your lifestyle. There is nothing inherently wrong with benefit. The part I have become much more aware of over the last year is what happens when the benefit becomes the reason the relationship exists. There is a difference between receiving something from a relationship and requiring the relationship to keep producing something in order to survive. I had not spent much time thinking about that difference before. I assumed, probably because it is how I operate, that people could simply matter without having to continuously justify their position.

Over the last year I have become much more conscious of the expectations people can attach to proximity. Access. Information. Agreement. Availability. Influence. Emotional labour. Sometimes usefulness is the currency. Sometimes it is loyalty. Sometimes it is being easy. Sometimes it is simply continuing to play whatever version of yourself made the relationship comfortable for the other person in the first place. I think what surprised me most was not discovering that people have expectations. That part is hardly breaking news. What surprised me was realizing how quickly some relationships become unstable when you stop providing whatever benefit was quietly holding them together.

And that is where the word transactional started making sense to me. If the relationship is fundamentally built around what I provide, then my value inside it has conditions. I am safe as long as I remain useful, agreeable, responsive, successful, uncomplicated, entertaining, healthy, available, or whatever else has become part of the arrangement. That is a strange kind of closeness because it asks people to keep performing in order to feel secure. It makes intimacy look a lot like contract renewal, except nobody gives you the courtesy of sending the terms in writing.

I think that lack of safety matters more than I understood before. If someone knows that the relationship depends on their continued usefulness, then they can never fully settle into it. They know that there is some invisible point where they may become too inconvenient, too complicated, too unavailable, too sick, too depressed, too unsuccessful, too much work. And life is eventually all of those things. Nobody gets through it remaining endlessly beneficial to everyone around them. If the relationship only works while everyone is functioning beautifully, then it is not really being tested by life. It is being protected from it.

I started wondering what that does to longer relationships, especially the ones that are supposed to survive different versions of us. Maybe it is part of why so many relationships seem unable to tolerate disruption now. I don’t know. But life guarantees disruption. There are stretches when one person is carrying more, when attention shifts elsewhere, when someone is less interested in sex, when the relationship simply stops being the most rewarding thing in the room for a while. Sometimes nobody is becoming their best self. Sometimes everyone is just trying to get through Wednesday. If we have learned to understand relationships primarily through what they give us, those periods must feel like evidence that something has gone wrong rather than evidence that life has arrived.

Reciprocity is not the same thing as transaction. That distinction matters to me. Reciprocity can survive imbalance. It assumes there will be periods where one person gives more because life is not remotely interested in keeping things even. I might carry more now. You might carry more later. Nobody sensible is standing there with a spreadsheet trying to reconcile the emotional accounts by quarter end. Transaction is different because it notices the imbalance immediately. It becomes uncomfortable when the relationship stops paying out at the expected rate. And when people start organizing relationships that way, performative behaviour becomes almost inevitable. We learn to remain useful so we will not be abandoned.

I think that may be the part of my friend’s comment that stayed with me. I have always been invested in people without realizing that this was becoming unusual enough for someone else to notice. I do not mean that everyone deserves unlimited access to me. I have learned far too much about access for that. I have boundaries now that I probably should have had years ago. I am more selective. I withdraw more quickly when something feels wrong. I am much less willing to confuse familiarity with safety. But none of that has changed the basic way I see people. I still do not want to reduce someone to what they can do for me.

Maybe that is the contradiction I am sitting with now. I want to remain interested in humanity without being careless about how people use access. I want to believe in depth without pretending every relationship has it. I want to care without turning caring into an invitation for extraction. I do not think becoming more discerning requires becoming more transactional. If anything, I think it requires the opposite. It means knowing the difference between someone who values you and someone who values what you provide.

And maybe that is the simplest version of what I have been learning. If I have to keep proving my usefulness in order to keep you, then I was never actually safe with you.