Relationships are work.
They are.
Any human interactions are.
There is a cost in friction because you and another are not the same. Besides, what fun would that be? That would be somewhat masturbatory, wouldn’t it?
But we bond with another because they make our lives better somehow. They give us a different way of looking at the world because their eyes are not our eyes; their view is filtered by their life experiences, their experiences are not our experiences. And even when we are at the same place objectively doing something together, it is not the same experience. We hit it from different angles and the shared experience has more dimension than a singular point of view.
But because we are different, sometimes we clash. We want different things. We’re at different places. Sometimes it’s worse and clash becomes outright collision. How much more convoluted when we find that words we take for granted may not even mean the same? Words like, “love” and “friendship”. What about “commitment” and “partner”? Can one make love? Is it something that happens and one nurtures, or is it something that is decided and grown?
And maybe we are so different, so much in conflict that we should diverge. Being alone has less dimension, but there is no conflict outside of my own skull.