What’s It All For?

I recently came across a TikTok video that asked a question I hadn’t considered before: what is the purpose of a romantic relationship?

Now, I watch a lot of trivia videos and usually answer (in my head) immediately when a video asks a rhetorical question, shooting straight from the hip. And something new happened when I watched this video: nothing. I had no answer. I didn’t know what my answer was.

As someone who has been pursuing romantic relationships (and now writing about them), I have no answer. It baffled me. I moved on from the video, but the question kept turning over in my mind, days later. What IS the purpose of a romantic relationship? I have the most useless of liberal arts degrees, and this existential question was driving me mad.

So I started with: what’s the purpose of any relationship? To connect, to experience life with another person, and to share an emotional thread. Those things can be done with many different kinds of people, and develop into many different kinds of connections. I certainly don’t have any two relationships with anyone that are similar or the same. They all make up different facets of my community.

Maybe our community is the portfolio of relationships we have. It represents all the nodes of connection we have to the world outside ourselves. There is no one relationship that can singularly tether us to the world. We need a mix of friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors, and lovers. Instead of binary code, it looks like one of those spider web graphs. It is multi-dimensional and always changing.

A few years ago, I made a list of all the things I wanted to do with a boyfriend - and realized that 90% of them can be accomplished without one. I can still dance at weddings with other guests, cook nice dinners for friends, and call my mom when I’m sad. Relationships are necessary. But romantic relationships are optional. The purpose of a romantic relationship is to be the cherry on top, to have fun, and to feel something unique.

For everything else, there’s community.