> If your relationship with me involves any kind of labor for you then it's not a good relationship
Depends on your definition of labour, but this doesn't make sense to me. Relationships require conscious effort (labour) to maintain. I've been in a relationship where I was too passive, didn't end well. The hard part is finding a balance, where one person is not doing too much or too little.
Labor in my definition is something you do for someone, rather than [for yourself, because that's exactly what you want to do].
> Relationships require conscious effort (labour) to maintain.
Absolutely not. You can just live in a relationship and labor no more than you would be living alone. I know because I've done both for extended period of time. The presence of the other person should make your life easier not harder (and vice versa). Good relationship is when you and your partner do only things each wants to do and do them for yourselves not for each other. You offer generously, you accept graciously, you thank profusely.
Anything else is tainted by transactionality and becomes balancing act and harder and harder as relationship ages and/or life becomes harder. That's why so many relationships break down. Transactionality gets off balance in perception of one party or the other.
Finding a person you could have a good relationship with is harder than finding a person you could have some relationship with obviously. But it's worth it. In 14 years a word chore didn't pop up once and neither any disagreement about money. Of course some of it is finding the right person but a lot can be done just by having proper framework of what life and relationships are (not labor) and leading by example.
Oh my... you really need to look around you. The world of relationships is a fucking mess. You speak as if it's super easy. How old are you? 18? If you haven't been in a bad relationship or brokenhearted, I can only assume you're in completely unexperienced or one of the luckiest people on Earth. You need to drink a huge amount of reality tea.
Yeah, I can see that. It's one of the reasons I'm currently abstaining from relationships of this kind. The other is simply because I can, due to having schizoid personality and no specific goals that would require having a relationship.
> You speak as if it's super easy.
I don't think I explicitly said that but I might have given that impression. While the target might not be realistically achievable for many people in their lifetimes due to something as simple as lack of luck I think it's still worth to point whomever I can in, what I believe is, the correct direction so at least they can adopt the right framework that could enable them to achieve the target if they are lucky enough.
> How old are you? 18?
I'll be 47 soon.
> If you haven't been in a bad relationship or brokenhearted, I can only assume you're in completely unexperienced or one of the luckiest people on Earth.
I'm prone to landing in situations that produce incels and as a young person I spent years in this kind of "relationships" (which constitute mostly of being constantly brokenhearted, betrayed and feeling inadequate and powerless) before I actually found (due to sheer luck in timing and match) someone that decided to spend the rest of their life with me and seen what a good relationship might look like and what nourishes it. One relationship I never been in so far was the transactional kind, the one where the labor is expected, the one where labor might give any illusion of contributing positively to the relationship. The ones that most Americans see as a default, desired mode despite of having divorce rate of more than 50% (and that's not counting the ones that fall apart before marriage).
So all of your assumptions about me are false unfortunately. If I can recommend something, which I personally also struggle with... When talking to people try to ask more and guess less. Smart people like you and me naturally lean towards guessing because it worked for us in the past across many domains. What I noticed so far is that it's not a great strategy when interacting with people about their personal perceptions and experiences because variety and absurdity of this ___domain makes us guessing wrong way to often.
Depends on your definition of labour, but this doesn't make sense to me. Relationships require conscious effort (labour) to maintain. I've been in a relationship where I was too passive, didn't end well. The hard part is finding a balance, where one person is not doing too much or too little.