Relationship Types as Viability Manifolds

Relationship Types as Viability Manifolds

A relationship type $R$ defines a viability manifold $\viable_R$ for the dyad (or group) with characteristic:

1. Optimization target: What the relationship is for—what gradient it follows
2. Information regime: What is shared, what is private, what is legible
3. Reciprocity structure: What is exchanged and on what timescale
4. Exit conditions: How and when the relationship can be dissolved

Example (Relationship-Type Manifolds).

• Friendship: Optimization target is mutual flourishing. Information is open (vulnerability welcomed). Reciprocity is implicit and long-horizon. Exit is gradual and costly.
• Transaction: Optimization target is mutual material benefit. Information is limited (relevant to exchange). Reciprocity is explicit and contemporaneous. Exit is clean (transaction complete).
• Therapy: Optimization target is client flourishing. Information is asymmetric (client reveals; therapist contains). Reciprocity is formalized (payment for service). Exit is structured (termination protocol).
• Employment: Optimization target is organizational output in exchange for compensation. Information is role-bounded. Reciprocity is contractual. Exit is governed by notice and severance.
• Romance: Optimization target is mutual flourishing plus embodied coupling. Information regime is maximal (vulnerability is constitutive, not incidental). Reciprocity is implicit, long-horizon, and encompasses the whole person. Exit is devastating precisely because the manifold includes the body and the self-model—dissolution tears at the substrate, not just the contract.
• Parenthood: Optimization target is the child's flourishing, asymmetrically. Information regime is radically unequal—the parent holds the child's manifold before the child can hold anything. Reciprocity is structurally absent in early stages (the infant does not reciprocate; the parent gives without return). Exit is, in the normative case, impossible: the parental manifold is designed to be permanent.

Each of these defines a distinct region of social state space with its own persistence conditions.