This seemingly endless pandemic is certainly not doing any favours to anyone's mental health.

So I probably have a few posts worth of thoughts on the concept of "friends with benefits". I've given the reasons I don't particularly like the term itself, but for these posts I'm using it, as it's well understood.

Still have the first of the Hang-ups posts in the development stage, and will post in the next few days. In the meantime, here's a part of a reply I made in a group that I thought might resonate here.

A conversation came up in one of the groups I'm a member of, asking how people define the difference between a friendship, and a partnership. As a relationship anarchist, I think that can be really tricky, and the lines between the two can get really blurry. To keep things super simple, I would say a friendship is someone with whom I have a positive bonding connection with. Be that social, platonic, romantic, sexual, any combination thereof, or something else entirely. A partnership is a friendship with mutual commitment to grow together in the aspects of connection we share. This is why as individuals we can have friends-with-benefits (a phrase I don't particularly like, but am using here for ease of reference), while at the same time having platonic partners. It's not about the "level of intimacy" (another phrase I'm not super comfortable with), but about the mutual commitment. The concepts are not mutually exclusive. And relationships are not static, they change. A friend may become a partner, a partner may become a friend. You can find you have relationships that don't fit into any pre-conceived categories. That's all okay! In the end, I don't think there are any set-in-stone definitions that everyone can agree upon, so just enjoy all of your interpersonal relationships for what they are: unique!

This is going to be a large topic, so I’m going to split it into a few parts to make it easier to write. In our interpersonal relationships, not everyone involved is always going to have the same attractions towards each other. They may be out of sync, or asynchronous; they may be completely different shapes, or asymmetrical. There are many variations on this theme, but probably the most famous is unrequited love. Songs, movies, and social movements have been born from this one seemingly simple topic. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as most depictions would make it seem though.