Relationships Aren’t Real

If aliens landed tomorrow and asked humans to explain relationships, we would struggle. Not because the concept is complex, but because it’s fragile. We would stumble over our words trying to describe something we insist is foundational, yet rarely agree on. We’d talk about love, connection, commitment, and meaning, but most of our explanations would contradict each other. The aliens would likely conclude that relationships are less a system and more a collective improvisation we refuse to acknowledge as such.

Modern relationships feel inevitable, as though they’re hard-wired into human existence. But they aren’t. Humans weren’t born with dating rituals, labels, anniversaries, or expectations around exclusivity and emotional availability. Those came later. Relationships, as we understand them today, are frameworks we built to organize intimacy, attachment, and fear. They are not natural laws. They are negotiated structures. That doesn’t make them meaningless. It makes them revealing. At their core, relationships are agreements. Not legal ones, and often not explicit ones, but emotional contracts negotiated over time. They determine how much access someone has to your inner life, how much responsibility you take for theirs, and how much uncertainty you’re willing to tolerate together. We wrap these agreements in romance because romance makes the transactional nature of intimacy easier to accept. Anthropologists and sociologists have long noted that human bonding takes wildly different forms across cultures and history. Marriage, monogamy, lifelong pair-bonding, and romantic exclusivity are not universal truths. They’re cultural solutions to practical problems: resource sharing, child-rearing, social stability. Over time, these solutions became moralized and romanticized, turning survival strategies into sacred ideals.

In modern life, relationships are expected to do far more than they were ever designed to do. They’re supposed to provide emotional fulfillment, identity, validation, sexual satisfaction, companionship, stability, and meaning…all while accommodating individual freedom, personal growth, and self-actualization. That’s a heavy load for one person to carry. The language we use around relationships reflects this tension. We talk about “connection” as if it’s a measurable substance, something that either exists or doesn’t. But connection is vague by design. It allows people to feel close without defining what that closeness requires. When things go wrong, we retreat into emotional jargon that sounds communicative but often avoids clarity. Phrases like “I need space,” “I’m not ready,” or “I don’t feel emotionally safe” can be honest, but they can also function as buffers, ways to delay confrontation without rejecting the relationship outright. Psycholinguists have pointed out that much of modern relationship communication is performative. It signals effort without necessarily revealing truth. We learn how to sound emotionally aware long before we learn how to be emotionally honest. It’s not because people are malicious. It’s because exposure is risky. Real honesty threatens the structure. It forces both people to confront uncomfortable realities: insecurity, resentment, boredom, and power imbalances. So instead, relationships often operate on curated vulnerability, sharing enough to feel close, but not enough to destabilize the bond.

Attraction complicates this further. We tend to describe attraction in spiritual terms, as if it were mysterious or fated. In reality, it’s largely biological. Neurochemistry does most of the early work. Dopamine reinforces novelty. Oxytocin encourages bonding. Serotonin drops, increasing obsession. None of this is poetic, but it is effective. Evolutionary psychologists have pointed out that what we experience as “chemistry” is often the nervous system responding to familiarity or stimulation patterns formed early in life. Attraction doesn’t prioritize emotional health; it prioritizes engagement. This is why people can feel intensely drawn to relationships that later feel destabilizing. The body isn’t looking for peace. It’s looking for activation. Compatibility, then, becomes less about shared values and more about tolerable friction. People often feel compatible not because they align, but because their emotional patterns interlock without immediate collapse. One person seeks closeness. The other seeks distance. Together, they create motion. This gets labeled as chemistry, even when it’s simply managed tension.

True compatibility is quieter and harder to market. It’s about nervous system regulation, conflict tolerance, and mutual respect when novelty fades. It’s about how people respond to stress, boredom, and disappointment, not how well their personalities sparkle on a first date. But those qualities don’t photograph well, so they’re rarely emphasized. Every relationship eventually reveals itself as a contract, even if no one signs it. Expectations form quickly. How often should we talk? How much reassurance is required? What counts as loyalty? What behavior is forgiven? These expectations are rarely aligned perfectly, which is why relationships generate so much confusion. People assume shared understanding where none exists.

As emotional reliance deepens, the contract expands. Partners begin to regulate each other’s moods, self-esteem, and sense of safety. It can feel comforting at first. Being “chosen” provides validation. Being needed provides purpose. But it also introduces pressure. When one person becomes the primary source of emotional stability, the relationship becomes fragile. Romance culture rarely acknowledges that fragility. Instead, it sells reassurance. Movies, books, and social media frame love as a cure for uncertainty rather than a relationship with it. Romance promises that the right person will make things feel easier, clearer, safer. When reality fails to deliver that fantasy, people assume the relationship is broken rather than the expectation. Capitalism amplifies the illusion. Entire industries depend on romantic dissatisfaction. Dating apps profit from churn. Weddings monetize milestones. Self-help content sells solutions to problems it helps define. Romance becomes a product, aspirational, curated, and endlessly optimized. The message is subtle but persistent: if love is hard, you’re doing it wrong. Frameworks like “love languages” thrive in that environment. They offer structure and explanation without requiring deep introspection. Categorizing emotional needs feels productive. It gives people a sense of control. But these frameworks often simplify complexity rather than resolving it. Most people don’t want one kind of love; they want attuned love from someone they trust. No framework can substitute for that.

Communication is often cited as the key to relationship success, but communication is not the same as honesty. People communicate constantly. What they struggle with is revealing desires that might disrupt the bond. Saying “I’m afraid you’ll leave if you see all of me” is riskier than saying “I don’t feel heard.” One invites resolution. The other invites negotiation. Gender norms further complicate relationships. Many people enter partnerships carrying scripts they didn’t consciously choose. Expectations around emotional labor, vulnerability, independence, and desire are shaped long before adulthood. Those scripts collide in relationships, creating frustration that feels personal but is often cultural. Modern relationships also struggle under the weight of contradiction. People want autonomy and security. Freedom and reassurance. Novelty and permanence. They want to be chosen daily without feeling constrained. Those desires aren’t wrong, but they are competing. No relationship structure can satisfy all of them indefinitely. That doesn’t mean relationships are doomed. It means they are not fixed entities. They are ongoing negotiations that require adjustment, honesty, and tolerance for discomfort. When relationships fail, it’s often framed as personal failure. But many failures are structural. Expectations exceed capacity. Narratives exceed reality.

Monogamy, polyamory, casual dating; none of these are inherently superior. They are tools. Each comes with trade-offs. Each demands skills rarely taught: emotional regulation, boundary setting, and self-knowledge. No structure removes the need for effort. It only redistributes it. The myth of soulmates persists because it offers relief from responsibility. If there is “the one,” then outcomes are destiny, not choice. Suffering becomes meaningful. Waiting becomes virtuous. But statistically, emotionally, and socially, the idea collapses quickly. People don’t find “the one.” They build something with one of many possible partners, until they don’t.

So why do people cling to relationships so fiercely, even when they hurt? Because relationships offer something fundamental: witnessing. To be seen, known, remembered. To have someone else confirm that your life is happening. That your thoughts matter. That your existence registers beyond your own mind. Humans don’t just want companionship. They want acknowledgment. That is the part that is real. Relationships, as romantic myths, may be constructed. The scripts, the expectations, the labels, all of that is made up. But the desire beneath them isn’t. The urge to connect, to be understood, to share reality with another consciousness, that’s deeply human. The tragedy is that we often bury that desire under performance. Under romance. Under fear. We chase the structure instead of the substance. We protect the illusion instead of telling the truth.

Relationships aren’t real in the way we’ve been taught to believe. The fairytales aren’t real. The guarantees aren’t real. The permanence isn’t real. But intimacy, the act of showing up honestly, imperfectly, without armor, that is real. And it’s harder. And rarer. And worth more than all the stories we’ve built around it. The good news is that illusions can be dismantled. Not with cynicism, but with clarity. Not by abandoning relationships, but by seeing them for what they are: fragile, negotiated, imperfect attempts to meet a very real human need. With truth.