Relation, Relational, Relationality but not Relationship?

This post is one of struggle.

A struggle to articulate deep-seated ideas, notions, beliefs, emotions about something as fundamental and internal as our understanding of how we relate to others.

How we perceive our interpersonal interactions with others and what importance do we accord these interactions, how meaningful are they to us and how aware are we of their effect on us.

How aware are we of the kind of effect we allow these interactions to have on us.

And I struggled to define what is a 'relationship'.

You see my dear reader, I don't know what are the parameters that define 'a relationship'.

How do these parameters function within our context.

The context of Cairo, the conservative, oppressive, heterosexist, patriarchal, socially backward, stifling context.

In that context, what is a 'relationship'?

And in our context, the same-sex relationships, how is that fathomed?

Its already an incredibly precarious question vitiated by all kinds of postmodern nonsense, crude biological determinism and mainstream pop psychology.

So how to navigate this terrain, with all these vicissitudes, added to the horrors of your own context and still maintain a semblance of humanity and dignity?

How can we think of a relationship not as follows:

1) A social upgrade

2) A social upgrade

3) A social upgrade

4) A loose arrangement for blatant promiscuity

5) A fictitious construct to spite fellow vicious queens

How can anyone be in this personal arrangement that is not a construct to fulfil some pathetic social function, or to act as a social upgrade for an aspiring oppressed homosexual or that masks an inherent inability to go beyond adolescent sexuality?

It is impossible.

And I can think of relations, relational, and relationality.

Relationality as the idea that reality is contained within the positions of the objects existing and their relationships to each other.

So there is no reality beyond these relationships.

Reality does not, in that view, exist independently of those entities, objects and the positions they take and how they relate to each other.

So what if these entities are in different positions where they can not have a relationship with each other?

What kind of reality is that?

Or maybe the relational, the interpersonal interactions one has with his fellow human beings that ultimately constitute or constructs his personality.

In that view, even if one does not have 'real' relationships, one develops imagined ones.

Rendering one's reality on the margin of psychosis.

But then it is only in this framework, where even if there is no 'relationship' within a context, one develops imaginary ones.

In this light, cyberspace and all its configurations becomes intelligible to us.

The notion of a 'long-distance' relationship that is only activated through cyberspace.

That for me while I think borderlines the hallucinatory, it is a reality for a great number of people.

Myself included.

A week elapsed since I wrote the very first lines of this post, and taking the advice of a very dear friend, I am going to mark the passage of time by using a different ink colour.

I have not-I could not stop thinking about that post during that time.

But I could not write either.

My overwhelming sense of fear and anxiety - at such a profound level - stops me cold from being able to write.
I am paralysed by my own dread and the very fact that what I will write will acquire shape and form, will somehow have its own existence, it will become "real" and I will have to confront it.
While if it remains just a few ideas roaming in my head, the shape and sound of words will not face me as they do now on screen.

For amusement sake, lets be honest, I could never relate but to two kinds of men:
A. Deeply eccentric
B. Psychiatrists/Psychologists

A for their unusual ways in relating to other people and B for their unusual habit of not judging.

It sounds funny (but it is not) but there is this effusive sense of relief one (myself in particular) feels when you are sitting with someone who is not at all surprised, offended, turned off or the least bit judgemental of who you are.

It soothes my constant feeling of anxiety and self-consciousness.

So for all the men that were in my life at different points in time, only those who were adventurous enough to explore alternative ways of "relating" managed to get through and only those who could see the humanity behind it all are the ones that I could relate to.

Not the wisest or most enduring choices.

For those hallucinogenic and hallucinatory encounters were a completely subjectively imagined relatedness, that never transformed into 'relationship'.

And by 'relationship' I mean the universally acknowledged social arrangement that is so well publicized in Novels and TV.
One could go on and critique it and even point out to its apparent "whiteness" or "heterosexuality" or "Westernisation" but somehow the notion in its form endures.

Anthropologists and Psychologists say that any human being needs one caring parent (of either sex) to be able to grow and develop into a healthy, sane adult.

I would extend the same theory and say that an adult needs the presence of one caring partner to maintain his well-being.

So we might form endless modes of relatedness (cyberspace, aerospace, urbanspace,..etc) and explore hundred relationalities (long-distance, short-distance, three way, groups...etc), but the basic drive or impulse, our intention will remain the same.