Lexicon ·
relational equity
noun phrase, also 'relationship equity'
- Stated meaning
- Everything put into a relationship, emotional, financial and familial, counted as a stake that should secure it.
- Operating meaning
- Past spending held as a claim on future loyalty, against a counterparty who never signed for it.
- Origin
- Named on The Rational Male on May 21, 2012, for the investment a man believes he has built up in a relationship.
- Synonyms
- relationship equity
June 17, by text. After 4 days of silence I wrote that it took “a significant amount of time, energy, and driving” to make our dates happen, that I was “more than happy to invest that,” and that I needed to know we were “aligned on building something consistent.” The phrase was not used.
The Rational Male (opens in a new window) gave the belief its name in May 2012, in a post about men who could not believe their breakups. They had expected “all of the investment, emotional, physical, financial, familial, etc.” to be weighed before the other person left. “For men, this is a logically sound idea,” the post said. “All of that investment adds up to their concept of relationship equity.” The rest of the post explains why the account is not honoured, by a theory of attraction this file does not reproduce, and it ends on a line of plain accounting: “you do not buy into a good marriage or LTR, you create one, you build one.”
The belief has an older name outside the dating market. Accounts of sunk cost (opens in a new window) describe “a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made,” and give one reason people keep paying: to stop “would constitute an admission that the prior money was wasted.” Relational equity runs the same arithmetic with the direction reversed. The investor does not keep paying in to justify the spend. He asks the other party to stay, so that the spend is never written off.
Under load, relational equity is a ledger kept by one party and presented to the other at the close. The deposits are real: the dinners, the drives, the holidays with the family. The claim on them is the invention, because the counterparty never signed for a return and was never shown the statement. The account is usually read out in full once, at the breakup, as an itemised bill, which is the one moment it can buy nothing. Every entry on it is accurate, and the total is owed by nobody.
The message of June 17 set the investment at 585 minutes of road and $932.62 across 6 dates, and asked for alignment in return. The account stayed open and I kept depositing. By August 18 the figure was $2,570.94, so 63.7 percent of it was paid in after the claim was lodged. When I ended it on August 13, the message said I had no more energy for effort. The statement went out in June, and the balance was never presented.