Reciprocity in relationships vs. transactional relationships?

September 7, 2023 9:38 AM

While my ex and I were in the process of becoming exes, I said that I hadn't felt that labor was equally divided in our relationship, and I had often wanted him to step up more. He returned that I turned the entire relationship into something transactional. I don't think he was right, and I'm not interested in litigating it at this late date, but... I'm still not sure I understand what the dividing line is between reciprocity and transactionalism. Do you, and can you explain it to me?
posted by humbug to Human Relations (23 answers total)

Without litigating your particular relationship, you can think of this in terms of other relationships, like friendships.

I would see something as transactional if it feels like there is a running ledger. "I can drive you to the airport next week if you can take my dog out next Saturday while I'm in training" is a really obvious example. Do you always alternate hosting dinner parties (transactional) or does everyone host a few times a year, Steve and Javier don't host since they had a baby but always bring really nice wine, and Kai always does Friendsgiving because they're the only one that like to cook a turkey (less transactional, still reciprocal)?

Going back to coupled relationships, this sounds like a compatibility issue. I have seen couples in a romantic relationship be very transactional. It is commonly the chosen method for engineers and other detail oriented types. These people see being visibly fair as honoring and valuing their partner. Others feel like true love means you don't keep score, which means you also don't have any formality to who is responsible for what.
posted by Narrow Harbor at 9:59 AM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Sure. Reciprocity or a holistic approach is common contribution within the limits of one's abilities and resources to a shared enterprise for the benefit of all, which by definition will not mean exactly equal contributions or benefits by or for each person at every moment. Transactionalism is score-keeping.

Turns out that while a more holistic approach is, indeed, better for all, jerks will abuse the concept to cover willful failures to contribute.
posted by praemunire at 10:00 AM on September 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

Anthropologists call exchange without an expectation of some return "generalized reciprocity." The link goes to Wikipedia which has more detail and relevant context. But I assume your ex was manipulating the conversation by making your reasonable requests sound manipulative--the reverse of what was likely the case. Generalized reciprocity is, like, even more altruistic than the norm, and it doesn't sound like you were aiming at negative reciprocity, just symmetrical reciprocity. Symmetrical reciprocity is normal even in situations where kinship-based relationships are more common than what anthropologists call 'dyadic contract' relationships, and I suspect it was your ex who was angling at negative reciprocity. Anyway, the Metafilter Emotional Labor Thread has many relevant examples of women in the same circumstances--you're far from alone.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:00 AM on September 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

Best answer: The dividing line is, imo, the reasons behind why the person who does less is doing less, and whether that reason is taken into account by the person who is unhappy about doing more.

If the person who is doing less is doing less due to genuine inability - either permanent disability/ illness, or a temporary crisis/emergency situation, and the person who is doing more got huffy and blamey about the imbalance, that to me would be a transactional mindset on the part of the person who is doing more, since they're not considering their partner as a whole person inclusive of all their circumstances and limitations.

(This is not to say that we are beholden to care for anyone indefinitely even if their reasons for doing less are good. While there is transactionalism inherent in ending a long term relationship with a partner because they became disabled and thus unable to do chores, I would also suggest that transactional thinking of this kind may be necessary for us to save our own lives, sometimes. It's not black and white.)

If the person doing less is doing less because they can get away with it, because they have the power to do less and still be considered fine by society, because carrying an equitable burden rubs against their cultural programming, because they don't mind letting their partner do extra, because they're lazy or hypocritical or manipulative, etc. - THAT is a failure of reciprocity. None of these are valid reasons why someone cannot share the burden equitably.

One sneaky way to fall into the latter category is working long hours at a paid job, or claiming an inability to take time off from one's paid job to care for children - this is a move that ensures career advancement for themselves at the expense of their partner's ability to do the same, and even if their higher income is shared with the lower earning spouse, they alone keep all the *other* benefits of their career advancement, including higher social status, greater earning potential for the future, bigger retirement/pension/social security, more voice & power within and outside the home, etc. This becomes quite stark if there is a breakup, especially.
posted by MiraK at 10:00 AM on September 7, 2023 [22 favorites]

I could be oversimplifying but for me;

Transactional brings to mind scorekeeping and unmet, sometimes unexpressed, but specific expectations. Reciprocity, on the other hand, seems more spontaneous and genuinely free of expectations.
posted by sm1tten at 10:01 AM on September 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have seen couples in a romantic relationship be very transactional. It is commonly the chosen method for engineers and other detail oriented types. These people see being visibly fair as honoring and valuing their partner.

Since the background cultural assumptions guide people towards permanently unequal contributions between men and women, I think many couples who want to fight against that find it necessary to make explicit rules around, e.g., domestic labor, even if that would otherwise not be their preference.
posted by praemunire at 10:02 AM on September 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

Best answer: Reading between the lines, it sounds like in his head, reciprocal is when you have the agency to choose to whatever you want to fulfill the needs of the relationship, and transactional is if someone has to ask for something in specific that you probably didn't want to be bothered with. Freely given vs. negotiated. Now, this is a totally unworkable model because in that case, no one does the hated tasks. If we park ourselves in guess culture, you end up often falling into gendered roles and feeling a ton of resentment.
posted by advicepig at 10:13 AM on September 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Some relationships are fundamentally transactional, and it's okay. My relationship with my boss is transactional: I do stuff they pay me to do, and would stop if the money stopped. Sometimes bosses try to make those appropriately-transactional relationships feel reciprocal, and boundaries get blurry, and often resentment builds because things aren't and can't be equal as long as one person is in charge. But probably in your romantic relationship, the idea was that nobody was supposed to be in charge in that way. What that looks like for folks can vary, from aiming for a very loose sense of "fairness" to something very formal and even tracked if everyone's into that, but the defining factor is, in my opinion, that each person has an equal level of agency.

With my boss, if I do them a favor outside of what's been contractually negotiated, I have no way to actually make them reciprocate. I could give and give and give and never get anything back, and all I'd actually be entitled to do is walk away. Whereas, if they get tired of me not reciprocating their favors (actual or perceived), they can fire me. In the context of a more personal relationship, I think it makes it transactional when someone starts trying to claim that kind of power. I have a family member, for example, who, after many years of casual give-and-take, unilaterally decided that everything would be precisely accounted for and equally returned, and who now gets upset with me when I want to be more generous than they'll be able to directly reciprocate, or if I miss an opportunity to make them whole for something even quite small. That feels like it's shifted a reciprocal relationship to a transactional one even though I probably come out "better" this way in a strict accounting. Although technically they can't "fire" me, it certainly feels like they might eventually decide to end our relationship in retaliation for me not behaving as they would like, versus a more neutral parting of ways due to a lack of shared values, much less them putting up with my haphazard but well-intentioned adherence to their system just because they like me. However, I have another friend who's also very into precise reciprocity, and that doesn't feel transactional in the same way because I knew about it going into the relationship, and, if I failed to keep up with it, they'd just stop giving to me unless they intended it as a gift, and we might not be as close in the long run. There wouldn't be the emotional reactions trying to get me to behave like they wanted, or the sense that I might be outright rejected over it, which is more like the power my boss has than the equality I want to share with my friends and family.
posted by teremala at 10:52 AM on September 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I tend to think of the difference as being whether or not one person feels they have substantially less power in the relationship. In a healthy, equal relationship temporary imbalances are fine, because the structure of the relationship as a whole is fair--it all comes out in the wash, so to speak. People only start counting when they feel hard done by, and people only hate having their contributions noted when they know they're not carrying their weight.

To use an example that occasionally comes up in my own relationship: we normally alternate buying dinner. But suppose for various reasons that I've bought a few dinners in a row.

Transactional: Well now you have to buy the next three dinners in a row (and maybe I am storing this up later to use in a fight about how I do more for the relationship than you do).

Reciprocal: Well, let's just get back on our schedule now and maybe you can get me an extra round sometime when we're out next (and honestly if you don't I literally will not remember, because it doesn't matter, but you probably will, because you are my kind and fair partner and you'll definitely do like 11 nice things for me somehow in the next little while).
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:54 AM on September 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I said that I hadn't felt that labor was equally divided in our relationship, and I had often wanted him to step up more. He returned that I turned the entire relationship into something transactional

So, at least the way it's phrased here, he sidestepped the issue you raised. I'd expect someone who hears their partner feels things are unbalanced to engage in a conversation rather than jump to an accusation that their partner is transactional. The implication is that only transactional people would be aware of/bring up an imbalance.

To me transactional means you're constantly checking the balance sheet and you don't let it get too out of whack.

I think it's also important to note that transactional can still be fair: think of the friend who asks to be paid back immediately for putting dinner on their credit card who in turn pays you back immediately when you do the same.

Reciprocal people/relationships check the balance sheet less frequently. They'll assume things are about even or will be even put soon enough. They're more comfortable taking turns paying for dinner (I get this one, you get next) and don't need the "debt" settled" right away. But they'll still notice if someone never picks up the check.

In both kinds of relationships, if the person is fair and just heard the complaint, they'll have a conversation
instead of deflect, even if they're pretty sure they disagree. Things can be imbalanced for all sorts of reasons. Or maybe things aren't imbalanced, but the partner is overwhelmed with a bunch of things and needs help.
posted by ghost phoneme at 11:01 AM on September 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Back in my 20s, when I used to keep a journal (Moleskine, so hipster), I remember writing an entry that said "one of the things I like about [my girlfriend at the time] is that she's not an accountant", by which I meant that, if she bought dinner one night, and the bill came out to $47.32, that the next time I bought dinner, she didn't care if I paid exactly $47.32. If it was $45.68, if it was $53.22, that was good enough. She wasn't measuring dollars and cents. More like orders of magnitude. If the bill on my turn only came to $25, then yeah, I'd probably pick up the one after that as well. Or if it came to $75, maybe she'd get the next two. But if both were around $50, "around $50" was good enough.

Having been in other relationships both before and after this one, what I've come to realize is that when this leads to problems is when the two partners are defining "orders of magnitude" differently, which is pretty easy to do when you're talking about labor instead of money. So for example, if one of you drops the kids off at school, is mowing the lawn enough for the other person to balance that out? It's especially complicated when you're talking about real people, rather than economists who can put a precise price on everything. My wife and I generally split things up so that I cook dinner most nights, and she does the dishes. I might end up doing a little more work than she does, but that's OK, because I enjoy cooking. If you're dating Jan Brady, you might have to put more in to overcome her issues with not being recognized. Or, to go back to money instead of labor, if you're dating someone who's pretty poor and not sure if they're going to be able to make it to the next payday, you might have to be more exact in your accounting. "Around $50", to use my example from above, might not suffice.

A couples therapist I knew a while ago told me about the concepts of complementary vs. symmetrical relationship styles. Complementary is like me cooking and my wife doing dishes - each person has their own responsibilities, and together they should mostly balance out. Symmetrical is when either person could do any of the required tasks, as long as they get done. It's easy to see how a supplementary style could lead to an imbalance over time, with one person slacking off and the other person picking up after them. But that's not to say that complementary is inherently better, because in the complementary style, you get into the explicit discussion of "I did this, so you do that", which comes across as transactional. Just throwing it out there as a way to think about assumptions regarding division of labor in a relationship.

Of course, the same guy once summed up his practice to me in a single sentence: "Do you want to be right, or do you want to be married?" Do you want your ex to do an equal share of the labor, or do you want to be in a relationship with him? Because, for better or worse (pun somewhat intended), relationships require to you to deal with the other person's imperfections. You're never going to find someone who thinks about these things exactly the same way you do. And so that's a pretty good determinant of whether you should continue in a relationship or not: Do you love this person enough that you can overlook an imbalance? If not, break up. It'll be better for both of you.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:07 AM on September 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

In the context of a relationship, maybe a more useful / succinct framing is:

transactional => obligation to return the favor
reciprocal => do the favor because you want to

ideally, both parties are wanting to do favors for the other, doesn't matter who did what when.
posted by cfraenkel at 11:07 AM on September 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I've been wrestling with this question because, as ghost phoneme points out, it's kind of a bad-faith response on his part. In either a reciprocal or transactional relationship, both people are doing things they might not ideally prefer to do. The difference isn't how many things or which things they do, but how they view the purpose of doing things.

In a transactional relationship, I do things for you, you do things for me. We can negotiate how we weight the various things and how many or which things get done and by whom, but the question is, are we feeling like we're getting back what we're putting in to a tolerable degree of precision?

In a reciprocal relationship (and I think that's a bad/confusing way to describe it), you are both doing things for the relationship. I'm not mowing the lawn to pay you back for taking the kids to school, I'm mowing the lawn *and* you're taking the kids to school so the relationship (our home, our family, our finances, etc) is healthy. In this kind of view, one of the things that really needs to be kept up with is the question of whether everyone involved is getting the leisure time, spending money, etc, that they need to be happy and secure. And one of the points of failure is often when one partner protects their time/money/etc at the cost of the other person's, thus making the whole relationship less healthy. If you see having these things as necessary to the relationship, pointing out an imbalance isn't transactional, it's functional.

And absolutely there are gendered differences about whose responsibility which parts of the relationship are and who is entitled to take Saturdays off to go golfing while their wife watches the kids all day. That imbalance isn't a failure of transactional equality, that is a failure of the golfer's responsibility to the relationship.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:17 AM on September 7, 2023 [15 favorites]

I think "transactional" is a word some folks use when they're made aware that the easy, balanced relationship they thought they had … isn't that. I see it as a kind of "wait, you want me to think about WHAT?" moment, not dissimilar to, say, artists accused of cultural appropriation who get defensive – in both cases thinking about the balance in ways beyond their natural intuition is very foreign, to the degree that it feels incompatible with how they relationship (or how they art).

The balance of reciprocity in successful relationships is dynamic, and is based on sooo many things beyond the list of chores. Imo a lot of hetero men don't actually understand this in a truly reciprocal way (though they will definitely understand it if their needs aren't being met).

I also don't know that "transactional"/"reciprocal" is the best line here – in a vernacular sense me buying a bag of chips from the corner store is both transactional AND reciprocal. Conversely, my relationship with my (7 year) therapist is not at all reciprocal, is very transactional, and yet I get some significant part of my needs met in that relationship (and if I tried to tell them at this point that they only act like they care because I'm paying them, they'd be pretty offended!).

All that said, I don't think the line is particularly bright, if it's there at all, and the question really is: "am I getting my needs met, and if not is this person willing to hear me and work on the overall balance of the relationship." If you raise that question and your partner says "you're being transactional" then, imo, you have your answer, and the answer is "no".
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:23 AM on September 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

Best answer: This response feels like a dude trying to redirect the conversation as a way of getting out of domestic labor and very much on the side of “weaponized incompetence” and similar patterns of deflecting behavior.

It’s valid to want balance in your relationship - regardless of whatever technical term you want. It doesn’t sound like you were keeping a chart on exact chores and behavior. You felt an imbalance. To me transactional in this context means “score keeping.” But many people, often men, weaponize those ideas to get out of tasks or deflect.

I think wanting balance and discussing how to achieve that balance and fine and good and healthy. It doesn’t have to mean you each do the dishes the same amount but that you each have an equal share based on ability. Give that whatever name you want but giving it a name to redirect energy to an argument over semantics isn’t solving the problem of balancing the to-do list. Everyone’s definitions of these exact word meanings is often subjective. The crux of the issue is the behavior.
posted by Crystalinne at 11:25 AM on September 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

The sneaky answer to this is "I completely agree! I would love for your share of the housework to happen reciprocally, so I don't feel like I have to choose between being your bookkeeper or your maid. What would need to happen for you to do your share of the housework of your own accord?"
posted by quacks like a duck at 11:34 AM on September 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I agree with others that is mostly a qualitative distinction: if the driving force is "what's in it for me?", that's transactional. Reciprocity (I like to think of this as mutuality) is more about "how can we care for each other?" MiraK makes a great point about the why behind what's happening, as well.

Another way to get at it might be the idea of each person giving 50% vs. each person giving 100%.

But yeah, it sounds like your ex kinda sucks.
posted by wormtales at 11:56 AM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Christ, what an asshole.

Transactionalism is when someone would not do something if they weren't getting a specific thing in return. Reciprocity is when you give freely of yourself and are delighted to have a partner who gives freely of themselves in return. I'm glad you are free of someone who would engage in such an insincere way to your sincere statement.
posted by corb at 12:25 PM on September 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

My guess is that when you told him you expected more from him, that made HIM feel very defensive - because what kind of an answer could he give? "Yeah, I don't love you enough to do more," and "I'm sorry! I have disappointed you. I am bad and stupid and insensitive! I will do more!" were both alternatives that he couldn't handle, so he went the defensive route of "You are nickle and diming me to death!" If you were talking to a guy who just didn't have what it takes to contribute more to the relationship, it was probably a better response then promising to do more and then failing to do so, or flatly telling you that if you want more you are SOL.

He doesn't have to have been a complete asshole. When you tell someone that the relationship isn't working and you need them to change you are basically giving them an ultimatum. It's not unreasonable for you to do so. You have both the right to get out of an relationship that you don't want to be in, and it's not cruel to give a partner a chance to change to try to make it work. But at the same time if your partner cannot or does not want to deal with changing to improve the relationship for you, it's not a surprise for them to see you as rejecting them and ruining the relationship they found good and worth continuing in.

A lot of people are crap at looking after other people. Someone who is crap at looking after themself is very often even worse at looking after other people. To someone who is good at life, and good at care taking, they will frequently be a disappointment, especially when they were briefly able to do better at the reciprocal behaviour during the courtship phase. But often they went into the relationship and did their best... but they were just so bad at it, that it turns out to be smart to get out before you start to resent them too much.
posted by Jane the Brown at 2:30 PM on September 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

So, here’s my two cents: you’re making this an intellectual question (understandable!) when it’s really just that your ex was — and surely still is — a jerk. A good partner — or even a kind ex — wants to understand you and find something that works for you both, trying their best and giving you the benefit of the doubt. I’m sorry it was painful and I’m glad it’s over so now you can enjoy being single and/or find someone better!
posted by smorgasbord at 2:49 PM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

For him transactional meant "I learned just enough therapist jargon to try to weaponize it."

Balance issues in a relationship can be very hard, for all sorts of reasons. It's nice if everyone just contributes naturally, enough to make everything work, but no one should count on that. It takes talking, listening, and organizing, and doing that is not "transactional."
posted by zompist at 3:01 PM on September 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks, everybody. This was the last vestige of post-divorce rumination, and you have all very neatly dealt with it. I appreciate you.
posted by humbug at 4:04 PM on September 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

It kind of sounds like your word "reciprocal" meant "I am working hard for us and I would like you to also work hard, approaching an even split" and his word "transactional" meant "I am quite happy with the amount of work I'm doing, not interested in adding more even if that would make things more fair to you, and how rude you to ask".

In other words, there is no formal delineation, he was just saying whatever buzzword he could think of to make you feel bad so you'd stop asking him to do his fair share.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 11:44 AM on January 26