Personal Relationships: The Key to Social Identity
Personal relationships are of many kinds, depending on experience, interest, economic status, political affiliation, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and an endless plethora of other criteria. Regardless of who one is, she or he depends on personal relationships for growth and to establish her or his particular identity in society. For this reason, personal relationships are integral and essential in human existence.
As stated above, the most distinctive and important effect of personal relationships is to establish and exercise one’s particular identity in society. Without a social identity, a person is lost and is lefting drifting without purpose or contribution to the growth and maintenance of that society. It is imperative, then, that one forms relationships with others to make a way through life, to find direction.
This is particularly true with intimate and romantic relationships. These are the most influential, even more than those connected with occupation. Why? Because sexuality and mate selection hold a primacy in the life of every human being; people are formost sexual beings by nature, so that drive holds the strongest need for satisfaction, whether one is heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or any one of a host of other preferences. Personal relationships based on sexuality and companionship, then, are a priority for everyone.
This is why there are so many online personal sites and why so many young people are drawn to social events and places that facilitate dating and mate searches. A young man’s first date generates more excitement and anxiety than a twisted ankle in a high school game.
The sex industry fits right in here as well.Not only are there more adult-oriented materials to reinforce an individual’s sexual status and intimate attraction to other human beings, but the industry that markets those materials accumulates a higher profit than any other industry in the world. This is not contingent on morality or immorality; it is reality.
This is no surprise. As said, all humans sexual beings, always in search of the exciting and ideal, and quite often elusive, personal relationship that confirms who they are as human beings, clarifies their respective social roles, and facilitates their desires and needs for closeness and sexual satisfaction. In this sense, personal relationships are humanity’s primary need for survival; without them, human are nothing.