When Relationships Start to Feel Like a Transaction

I have been thinking a lot lately about how often I can feel alone in the room.

This is not a new feeling for me. I remember a conversation with my late father. He once asked me if I believed all people were inherently good. I said yes. He laughed.

At the time, I did not understand why. As an adult woman now, in my forties, I do.

For many people, relationships are largely transactional. That is not a shocking statement. Relationships involve exchange, reciprocity, and mutual effort. We show up and we expect others to show up too.

But what I am talking about here is something different.

What I have come to see is that many people approach relationships instrumentally. They view them through the lens of what can you do for me, how does this benefit me, and where does this position me.

I have always felt a little out of place in that world.

I often feel like Big Bird in a room full of people who are navigating relationships as strategy, tracking social capital, aligning quietly, and protecting their position.

I do not want that kind of relating.

What I want is connection. Connection has very little to do with leverage. It is not about extracting value from another person. It is about genuinely liking someone for who they are and how they move through the world. It is wanting them around and wanting to be someone who has their back and supports them.

Yes, there is mutual care. Yes, there is reciprocity. But I do not experience that as a transaction. I experience it as basic human decency.

There are certain things that have to exist for a relationship to truly be a relationship. There has to be trust. There has to be some level of commitment to the bond itself. There has to be a foundation of friendship, enjoyment, warmth, and goodwill toward one another.

Those are the ingredients.

And yet, over and over again, I’ve watched relationships that were framed as friendship shift into something more strategic, where alignment happens elsewhere and advantage takes precedence over care.

Not because people are cruel.

But because the relationship was never the point.

Which makes me wonder if we have lost the art of friendship?

Are people even friends anymore, or are we simply using one another in polite ways to climb ladders that do not actually lead anywhere meaningful?

I look around the room and find myself searching for the people who truly care. Not performatively. Not when it is convenient. But on a deep, meaningful level. People who would speak up for me in a room I am not in. People who would protect the relationship rather than themselves. People who would hold me with the same care I hold them.

I do not think I am alone in longing for this. In fact, I see this pattern not only in my own life, but repeatedly in my clinical work and conversations with women who long for deeper, more meaningful ways of relating.

I think this is part of the intimacy crisis we are living in.

So many of us feel like we are walking alone, not because no one is around, but because we keep choosing our own advancement, protection, or positioning at the expense of the very relationships that make life feel meaningful.

As long as we continue to treat one another as means to an end rather than people to be with, loneliness will remain, no matter how full the room looks.