On Transactional Relationships

In recent years, it has become difficult to not be unwittingly exposed or wittingly ignore the ongoing conversation regarding relationship and gender dynamics in the Western and Western adjacent worlds. This is due in large part to the sheer production of online material discussing these matters, which includes tens of thousands of hours’ worth of podcast and blog materials. This content is regularly discussed and shared ad nauseam on all social media platforms and is even breaching into real life in the forms of public media figures such as brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, Hannah Pearl Davis, and Brian Atlas, host of the Whatever Podcast. While this material can be beneficial in that it rejects the standard feminist narratives promulgated in the 1960s and ‘70s by state sponsored spooks Gloria Steinem and Betty Frieden; these discussions are tainted by our broadly secularizing society in that they reject the historical western conception of love, on both philosophical and theological grounds. Amidst this confusion, only the rediscovery of charity – the theological virtue of love, can restore a properly ordered, enduring vision of relationship.

The greatest obstacle to approaching a historical western understanding of love is the concept of transactional relationships. This premise is one of, if not the bedrock of all so-called “manosphere” content. This notion is a cudgel used to attack disparate contributions – both immaterial and material to a relationship, with a bias towards material beneficence.

This is an important discussion, as the traditional, cooperative expectations of the sexes have become distorted in the hyper-modern West. While this transactional understanding of relationships has become normative for friendships and romantic relationships alike, it is not historical, nor the ideal we should strive towards. We must rediscover our past selves, and ways. While this conversation is an attempt at such a thing, it will ultimately fail, as it is couched in the dialectic of the past 60 years; unrepentant materialism and second wave feminism. It is not the fault of these manosphere writers and podcasters, they are correctly elucidating the nature of a modern, secular relationship, but the true answer to our foibles requires thinking outside the confines of modernity.

A relationship built on transactional grounds is as a house built on sand. It will not endure hardship. Its foundation will wash out when the tide rises. This is why relationships in all forms across our society have degraded over time. Eventually, one party will not be able to give or transact with the other party. For this reason, the relationship will die. The solution to this problem is recognizing the centrality of the theological virtue of charity. That is loving people not for their own sake, but for God’s sake as an extension of Christ’s charitable, undeserved gift to us on the cross. For this reason, it is the greatest theological virtue. Thus St. Paul says, “So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13).

While secular moderns would reject this sentiment on the grounds of its immateriality or supposed dreamlike qualities. However, it is a widely observable phenomenon in both reality and the greatest depictions of reality; pre-mid 20^th century works of art. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is unparalleled in its depictions. Frodo’s mercy towards Gollum, and Sam’s sacrificial loyalty. Wherein Frodo’s mercy reflects divine charity, in loving the unlovable, not because they deserve it, but because they still bear the image of something worth redeeming. Sam’s love is utterly selfless, he does not seek reward or recognition for aiding his friend. He is willing to go to hell and back for his friend, as an act of charity.

In the absence of charity, love collapses into utility, and persons become commodities. We see this in the hookup culture, in estranged families, and in the deep loneliness of modern digital life. When love is reduced to exchange, the image of God in the other is obscured, and relationship becomes domination or convenience. Only charity can resist this collapse.

On the Mechanisms that Undermine Our Charity

The world today is more capable than ever of disconnecting us from our innate disposition to love others charitably. The acceleration of digital technological growth, the proliferation of the ideology of marketplaces, and the erosion of sacramental and communal life have emptied our relationships of transcendent meaning, thereby denying the potential for charity. “And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold.” (Matthew 24:12). Where charity once bound souls in truth and sacrifice, the modern world fractures this bond through mechanisms that isolate, commodify, and desacralize the human person.

Chief amongst our plight is the development and proliferation of digital media technology. Which has not only superseded our real-life interactions; due to its inherent ruthless efficiency but has enhanced our interactions to such a degree that real-life cannot compare. Many today feel more authentic in digital spaces than in real life. While this can partly be attributed to the increasingly dystopian nature of the flesh world, the digital realm attracts a growing number of the disenfranchised who have no other outlet for expressing or exploring their interests, whether those involve politically radical ideas (considered extreme by the bland standards of the flesh world) or deviant sexual behavior that is best expressed in the digital world, i.e. auto-gynephilia, and transgenderism.

“Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.” (Romans 1:25) Whereas man once exchanged the truth of embodied, incarnational life for false constructs, or idols; the digital world has taken on a pseudo-reality that supersedes flesh-and-blood life, offering an attractive but ultimately hollow substitute. “So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but also, the temple of the great Diana may be despised, and her majesty should begin to be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshipped. And having heard these things, they were full of anger, and cried out, saying: Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” (Acts 19: 27-28).

The dignity of the human person is actively restored in being rooted in community, not in abstraction or consumption, but rather incarnational presence and sacramental life. It is through the flesh, not in spite of it, that God chose to reveal Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. “He was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Charity demands real presence through which we encounter a living soul made in the image of God. It is here, in this embodied encounter, that the coldness of the digital age is rekindled by the warmth of true communion.

A close second is the proliferation of market ideologies following the collapse of metaphysical foundations—a collapse driven largely by the rise of logical positivism and scientific materialism in the early 20th century. As Cardinal Josef Ratzinger observed, the “dictatorship of relativism” has hollowed out truth, leaving man vulnerable to systems that treat him as mere data, instinct, or consumer. In this vacuum, evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, neoliberalism, and rational choice theory have conspired to reduce human dignity to mechanistic and transactional terms. The result is a culture marked by deep alienation, where even the most intimate dimensions of human life are commodified. Nowhere is this crisis more visible than in the breakdown of relationships between the sexes, where love itself is often stripped of its sacrificial and transcendent character and redefined by the logic of exchange.

“Love is patient, love is kind… it is not self-seeking… it rejoices in the truth… it always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-7) It is contrary to the essence of charity that we go about our relationships in this commodified, rational-choice conceptualization.

The Four Loves

Aristotle identifies three kinds of friendship: those based on pleasure, utility, and virtue – the highest being the friendship of virtue, in which each person loves the other for the sake of the good that resides in their character. In such a bond, the individuals are not closed in on each other but are drawn together by a shared pursuit of a transcendent good. For Aristotle, this ultimate good is the Unmoved Mover, eternal, immaterial, and perfect, the end toward which all things strive. St. Thomas Aquinas later identified this Unmoved Mover with God, who is Goodness itself. The Greeks called this highest form of love agape, distinct from the natural loves, storge (affection), philia (friendship), and eros (romantic love). While each of the natural loves has its place, they are not ultimate; only when they are subordinated to and transformed by divine charity do they become wholly true, life-giving, and enduring.

“In this is charity: not as though we had loved God, but because he hath first loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10). Prior to St. John’s gospel, Agapeic love was the least outlined of the four loves. Storge, philia, and eros are widely emergent amongst the classical texts. Antigone’s devotion to her brother Polynices, Achilles’ intense bond with Patroclus, and Sappho’s Lyrics… notably her Ode to Aphrodite respectively depicts the natural loves in varied and layered tone. St. John introduced a new paradigm that redefined reality through the lens of divine love and so St. John writes “He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is charity.” (1 John 8). In depicting the incarnation, St. John presents agapic love in its most concrete form. Where God humbled himself to assume human nature. “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14). It is in St. John’s Gospel that we charity breaks into history forever elevating human love by revealing its true source and ultimate end.

Divorced from its transcendental source, the natural loves spiral into the worst possible iterations of themselves. Affection can become possessive, friendship elitist, and eros idolatrous. In hyper-modernity, where divine reference has faded, and metaphysical foundations have eroded, the loves often collapse into self-interest, mutual utility, or fleeting satisfaction. The natural loves, storge, philia, eros, are no longer anchored by a higher end, and so they begin to orbit the self. This is why modern relationships, though saturated with desire for connection, are marked by instability, fear, and unmet longing. Without agape, love grounded in God and modeled after His self-emptying gift, there is no stable center to hold them together. The Cross, once the symbol of love’s truest form, is now unintelligible to a culture that equates love with affirmation or gratification. But without sacrifice, without transcendence, love loses both its depth and its durability.

If human love is to endure, if it is to become more than appetite, sentiment, or transaction, it must be drawn into the life of the divine. The Incarnation and Cross reveal that love is not defined by mutual advantage, but by self-emptying gift. In this light, agape is not merely one love among others, it is love’s perfection. The classical world intuited the greatness of love, but it is only in the person of Christ that love becomes fully knowable, and fully livable. In recovering charity, we do not reject the natural loves; we redeem them, fulfilling their longing by anchoring them in the eternal.