I believe we create human relationships out of necessity and desire. We create relationships for utility, for pleasure, and for virtue. We create them for specific, common goals. Mostly, we create relationships because we are communal by our very nature, seeking to be with others for the sake of being with others.
Understanding why and how people build relationships helps us understand institutions and communities, and thereby how to strengthen them when they are fragile or broken. Today, in Western societies, our understanding of relationships and relationship-building relies not only on a distorted understanding of the human person, but also on an incomplete and faulty premise of sociology, promulgated by José Ortega y Gasset and others who thought like him: people do not come together to be together, they come together to do something together. This is a sort of reformulation of the philosophies of social contract theory. This is not a misreading of Gasset, who vacillates between saying that man “is social in his most intimate texture,” and yet that “living is always, ceaselessly, restlessly, a doing.” The doing for Ortega and other existentialists is what to be means.
Read the essay at Public Discourse