Are all relationships transactional?

No. But they should probably be (at least a little bit) conditional.

Red-pillers, trads and female dating strategists agree: all relationships are transactional. To protest is only to reveal that you're on a massive dose of copium. Everyone knows hetero partnerships are just another form of prostitution—it's time to wake up and smell the marriage debt! I think it’s true that most relationships are mostly transactional. And transactional relationships are not bad in general. But… I actually think people are capable of love! And I think loving relationships, those with your family and chosen family, especially your spouse, are ideally, at the very least, not purely transactional.

Unfortunately, convincing yourself of the 'truth' that “all relationships are transactional” risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy since, as

Alex Kaschuta

phrased it on a recent

Moral Mayhem Podcast

episode, “you’re putting yourself in the transactional corner”. And at least in some cases, those who talk about relationships in this way, rather than brutally uncovering a reality most of us are afraid to face, instead publicly reveal how loveless their lives are. But first…

What is a transactional relationship?

Transactional relationships involve ongoing transactional exchanges. And transactional exchanges are interactions in which each party consents to giving up something of value to the other in order to get something of value to themselves. The qualifier ‘transactional’ implies that each party is trying to get the best possible deal for themselves. And it becomes a relationship when you expect to have many future exchanges with the same counterparty. 

While you may be totally self-interested, the ongoing nature of exchanges in a transactional relationship means that being fair to the other party is often rational. We don’t have to have a 100% guarantee that we’ll transact again in order to incentivize cooperation, but the more likely future transactions are, the more incentive there is to not screw the other person over, i.e. to exchange with them in a way that’s beneficial to them as well as to you, taking into account opportunity costs since there are likely other people you each could’ve exchanged with instead. 

Transactional relationships aren’t necessarily bad. In fact, they’re mostly good, and some of them can even look similar to non-transactional relationships so long as incentive structures are well aligned. But the classic examples of transactional relationships are those in which trades are made explicit and which involve money from one party being traded for goods or services provided by the other.