Other People’s Relationships Are Not Yours to Define
Picture this: two people are hanging out one-on-one together. One of them appears to be a man, the other a woman. With no other context, what do you think is going on? If your first thought is that they are romantic partners, you are by no means alone. This is what many people would instinctively think. In some cases, however, this perception is wrong.
Sometimes the people who perceive an interpersonal relationship this way have a personal relationship with one of the individuals in that interpersonal relationship, such as being their family member. Sometimes, these people will not revise their belief about that interpersonal relationship even when the person involved in it has explicitly told them they are wrong. I have had the experience of people in my life responding to my friendships this way, including my mom, therapist, staff at my high school, and parents/guardians of people I wanted to be friends with, and have heard from many others, especially in the LGBTQ+ community, that others have responded the same way to their friendships. When someone not involved in an interpersonal relationship imposes their own label on it, this can be majorly invalidating of non-heterosexual identities and of what people are feeling inside.
The perception of an interpersonal relationship as romantic seems to be arrived at by what is known as the . The premise of the duck test is as follows: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” This means that a thing can generally be identified by observing its characteristics. In the case of an interpersonal relationship, the test could go something like: “If it is the number of people in a typical romantic relationship, the combination of genders in a typical romantic relationship, and they are interested in each other as individuals like people in a romantic relationship are, then it probably is a romantic relationship.”
The logic of the duck test initially appears to make sense. Most things are what they appear to be and we would not be able to make any sense of the world if this were not so. However, some things are hard to categorize or easy to miscategorize based on one’s own limited knowledge. For example, my mom once told me that when she was walking the dog my family had at that time that was around 45 pounds, a kid had pointed to the dog and said “dog.” Then, the kid had pointed to a much smaller dog, one that was about the size of a cat and had a flatter face, and said “cat.” Even though this smaller dog was actually a dog, it looked more to the kid like what fit into the kid’s understanding of the category “cat” than the category “dog.” In another example, there was an online viral video trend, made into the Netflix game show Is It Cake?, of . The show involves people guessing which object is really a cake which is deliberately made difficult.
Though it can be objectively learned that small dogs are dogs and these cakes would reveal themselves to be cakes if someone tried to do anything beyond look at them, there is another major reason the duck test is not reliable on interpersonal relationships: feelings. One of the most important things that define an interpersonal relationship is the feelings of the people in said interpersonal relationship, and feelings are not possible to observe from the outside. The defining characteristic that makes a duck a duck is belonging to a genetic species, and therefore any doubt that it is a duck could be resolved with a genetic test. The defining characteristic that makes a relationship romantic, on the other hand, is how the people in said relationship define it based on how they feel about each other and about the relationship. These feelings about any particular interpersonal relationship are not felt by anyone not involved in that relationship, nor can they be objectively measured, and therefore people not in that relationship are not in a position to define what kind of relationship it is.
The assumption that people are together romantically is specifically made about pairs of people who are or appear to be one man and one woman. This is the case even though some men and women are not romantically interested in the opposite binary gender and some people do not identify as either binary gender. Some people, such as myself, are aromantic, meaning we are not attracted to anyone in a romantic way, and others want to have romantic relationships with people who are or appear to be the same gender as them. But this does not factor into the way many people make assumptions about relationships. In fact, LGBTQ+ romantic couples may have of people not recognizing them as romantic partners even when they are. At the center of all this is heteronormativity, i.e. the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm, as well as the assumption that people prefer to be friends with their own gender.
Even someone being out as something other than cisgender heterosexual does not stop or alter these imposed labels coming from some people. I had those labels imposed on my friendships even when I was out as aromantic. I was labeled as a boy and was struggling to find and keep any close friends at that time, rarely having more than one short-lived friendship at a time, and my mom told me what I really wanted was a girlfriend. When I had one close friendship that lasted several months but became increasingly unstable, she said she thought that friend seemed like my girlfriend. This view of my friendships was echoed by my therapist who basically told me I must not really be aromantic unless I was at least as likely to find male as female friends. My mom also told me that staff at my high school had said behind my back to her that I basically was dating when they also knew I identified as aromantic, and in one case the legal guardians of someone I was trying to be friends with had a big problem with me based largely on the belief that I liked her romantically even when I had explicitly said otherwise.
Though aromanticism is , even being out as gay does not always stop people from making such assumptions. I heard from someone who had been out to their parents as a lesbian for 10 months at the time that their mom responded to them mentioning a cis man they were interested in being friends with by saying she thought they were actually heterosexual. This was as she was just getting used to the idea that this person, who is assigned female at birth and not out to her as non-binary, was planning to be roommates with a friend who was assigned male at birth but the two of them were not a couple. This shows that the idea that it is never possible for men and women to be platonic friends is so strong in some people’s minds that they believe it over someone explicitly being out to them as gay, and when someone believes, as this person’s mom does, that there are only two genders, they think that way even about interpersonal relationships between two non-binary people based on what genders they falsely believe the people to be.
In addition to the duck test being less reliable on interpersonal relationships because they are defined by feelings, it is more harmful to come to a wrong conclusion on an interpersonal relationship due to how that affects the feelings of people involved. Though a , a type of bird commonly mistaken for a duck, cannot understand human language and therefore does not care if it is mistaken for a duck, human beings have a need to feel validated for who they are. Though strangers you walk past quietly will never know what you believe about them, . When the duck test is used heteronormatively on the friendships of people who identify as gay or aromantic or non-binary, that is inherently invalidating of their identity. Even when it is used on friendships between heterosexual men and women, it is still invalidating of peoples’ feelings and can still make the people involved feel they are not being listened to if people keep expressing the same wrong belief about their friendship after they have said it was wrong. Men and women may just want to be friends with each other the way two men or two women can with no one batting an eyelid (). Their friendships deserve as much respect and validation as any friendship.
Though partners in monogamous relationships do have a legitimate interest in finding out if their partner is having another romantic or sexual relationship behind their back, using the duck test in the way I have described here can easily lead them to think this is happening when it is not. I remember how strongly my mom and therapist seemed to believe that I secretly wanted something romantic when I explicitly said I did not, and a partner having an equally strong belief that their partner’s friendship is secretly romantic could undoubtedly lead them to react in an accusatory tone that would cause the partner with the friendship to act defensive even when there is really nothing romantic or sexual going on with that friend. I believe the only way for a monogamous relationship to survive one partner having any friends of the other partner’s gender is if the other partner gives them a chance to explain without having a pre-drawn conclusion based on the duck test. It would probably be most helpful for partners to agree when first deciding to be a monogamous couple what behaviors are out of bounds with friends, as behaviors are much more possible to operationalize than types of feelings which are always subjective. I believe these boundaries should always be gender-neutral as anything a person can do with another person without it being a form of cheating, they can do with another person without it being a form of cheating, and people have a right to choose friends of a gender they relate best to or feel most comfortable with. If two partners have very different ideas about what is acceptable with friends, this suggests to me that they are not the greatest match for each other.
An aromantic Tumblr user that “nothing is inherently romantic. [T]hat is, there are romantic-coded actions like kissing or holding hands or giving flowers, but those are only considered romantic because the people involved (and the larger surrounding culture) consider those actions to be romantic. [Y]ou can hold hands or kiss someone without it being the least bit romantic” (emphasis original). This quote perfectly sums up the subjective nature of the feelings involved in human relationships. For the reason described in the quote, no one outside an interpersonal relationship has any standing to label what that relationship is. People have their own feelings about their interpersonal relationships, and having someone else’s label imposed on them is always invalidating of their feelings and often invalidating of their identity as well. Though something that looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck probably is a duck, something that is a relationship between human beings, regardless of its observable characteristics, is whatever type of relationship the human beings involved in it define it as. It is not anyone else’s place to question or deny that.
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