Labels: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I often complain about how unnecessary it is that we feel the need to label everything, especially our relationships. Often when two people start seeing each other, they will eventually reach a point where deem it necessary to DTR (define the relationship), which amounts to putting a label on it. The label serves two main purposes: it helps the couple understand what they are, and it lets outsiders know how to cognitively categorize them. The problem with these labels is that we have a tendency to not ascertain that the agreed upon label shares the same qualities to each person. If I ask a girl, "So are we friends or dating?" and she responds, "We're dating." - I could take that to mean we are going on dates, while she means we are in a romantic relationship. There is a world of difference between these two conceptions of "dating", and yet we throw the word around and expect people to immediately understand which version (I'm sure there are even more) that we're talking about.

It is worth asking what the purpose of these labels is at a broader level. Labels serve their purpose by taking a continuous variable and making it discrete by restricting the range on that variable. Think about how age works. Is there a difference in a person who is 20 years and 364 days old, and someone who is 21 years old? Not really. But we have to draw the line somewhere in order to get coherent categories. Without categories, we'd be lost on many subjects. Similarly, this distinction of labeling is how we take a piece like this and draw an arbitrary line where blue ends and green begins:

But you could also argue that there is a third color in there between them. Or maybe there are five colors. If you looked at any individual pixel, it would look indistinguishable from its neighbor, yet we can see the gradient changing colors. This is both the purpose and problem with labels. When you want to paint your house teal and the only listed options are green or blue, what do you do? Imagine that everyone can see the middle of the gradient, but there was no name for teal - and teal was what you wanted. So clearly this act of labeling becomes problematic sometimes. What about in relationships? What is it that defines the label we get it? I'm going to propose how things are currently (for most people), and then how I think they should be. 

People get their own idea of what constitutes a relationship from their experience. You witness your family, friends, and fictional characters entering and leaving various relationships throughout your whole life. In the same way that we learn the meaning of most words without ever being told directly, we form a schema of a relationship. A schema is a set of characteristics that defines something. It is similar to the word concept, except that each schema is filled with other schemas which link to other schemas. If that sounds confusing, maybe this confusing picture will help:

Imagine that the word "relationship" is in the middle. Each person is going to have a different set of other schemas branching out, which means that each person's idea of what a relationship is, is going to be fundamentally different. Now, a relationship is a trickier and broader concept than an egg. So when two people decide to be "in a relationship", they're bringing different schemas to the table. The problem is, rarely do people ever define the word "relationship" when they define the relationship. 

What is desired from the labeling is a concreteness that is otherwise fleeting. When discussing abstract concepts such as thoughts and feelings, there is no object in the world that we can point to and say, "This! This is what I mean!" in the same way that we do for physical objects. Because we cannot do this, we are left hoping that we use these words in the same way when we frequently do not.

What I instead propose is that relationship categories should be defined based on their qualities, not the qualities based on the relationship category. To make the example simple, imagine that there were five qualities relationships could have:

1. General interest [y] or [n]
2. Physical intimacy [y] or [n]
3. Priority over other individuals [y] or [n]
4. Exclusivity [y] or [n]
5. Living together [y] or [n]

If you just have (1), then it sounds like friendship. If you have (1) and (2), you probably have some form of a friends with benefits. If you have (1), (2), and (3), then it sounds something like a polyamorous "main" or an open relationship. If you have (1), (2), (3), and (4) that sounds like a traditional committed, monogamous, romantic relationship (CMRR). If you have all 5, then that sounds like a possible engagement or marriage, or it could just be a CMRR living together. The point of this all is that relationships are built on qualities, qualities that far outnumber the ones I've listed here. I didn't even include the other possible, non-sequential combinations such as (1) and (3), maybe we'd call that best friends.

The issue is that the number of categorical labels we have is finite in practice, whereas the the number of possibilities is infinite in principle. The labels we have just don't cut it, and they're not informative. This is partly why I eschew them altogether when it comes to my relationships. Everyone is a "friend" although I do varying things with each of my friends. But no one else feels the need to get different labels for "the friend I go shopping with" and "the friend I play video games with" - they all collapse into friend, which we generally understand. It's when sex gets involved that we want all sorts of labels - and it's where I disagree that sex is important enough to warrant the change.