Junaid Khan

Relationships Aren’t Transactions

In a world where we weave through the complexities of human connections, it is perhaps a little too easy to forget that the only person we truly know is ourselves. Everyone else—those friends, family members, colleagues, and lovers—are, in a sense, unfamiliar and unpredictable entities that we attempt to bring into our lives. We think of them as extensions of our desires, functions in the greater machinery of our day-to-day existence. But perhaps, relationships are less like the human connections we idealize and more like machines we expect to perform specific tasks for us.