There's a framework lurking here I need to workshop out. We tend to conflate these concepts or imply missing one creates the other e.g. assuming a good relationship has no problematic elements.
* Healthy
* Dysfunctional
* Loving
* Predatory
* Problematic
* Nonconsensual
I'm missing plenty I'm sure
I do not have an ideal relationship. In fact many facets of my marriage could probably be described as problematic. Yet if you were to rend my marriage apart neither my wife nor I would become happier, healthier or wealthier. I think many people are in a similar situation.
However our imperfect our relationship is, however, it is consensual. It is not predatory. Those are threshold requirements, degrees of wrongness that perhaps cannot be overcome, and necessarily imply wrongdoers that must face some degree of sanction by the community.
Relationships can be dysfunctional without being problematic or having a wrongdoer. People can be perfectly matched in power and enthusiastic in their consent and still ruin each other. No one who promised us perfectly clean narratives has a right to do so.
The foregoing was meant to be descriptive. The following is prescriptive.
Being loving is necessary. It is necessary to be good and it is necessary to survive the world. When you love you worry about the harm you can unintentionally do in a relationship not just following the rules.
Nothing is more contextual than a relationship, and (arguably) no one can know most about the context than those who are in it.
(Of course, even then, some context will be missing because some of it can only be accessed from the outside, but I’d argue you’d still be missing more than from within.)
yea, even the author under discussion was already having affairs with said people, boundaries still weren't respected
Like marital rape to get more dramatic, is a concept that took years to put in the legal terminology
