#< that tag tho is because this spawned from my apl thoughts

[orange-orchard-system]

It's so wild to me sometimes that people cling so hard to the idea of having specific relationships automatically meaning that you are "healthy" in some undefined way. Maybe it's just because I grew up with a lot of "the popular kids are actually unhappy" stories as a child, but it's not actually the amount of relationships, kinds of relationships, or desire for relationships that indicates "health" – it's whether someone's social needs are being met.

The problem is that no one actually talks about social needs; when you get into the specifics, you find so, so much stigma. And so what happens in the end is that we end up with a lot of people equating their needs being met with the main method(s) they've been taught to meet them.

Attention – so stigmatized it feels like a crime. Socialization – poorly understood and mistaken for socializing. Support networks – wrapped up in so many expectations and rules that accessing it as a resource can be ridiculously difficult. Community resources – look, if I took a shot every time I saw this phrase thrown around with no elaboration or examples, I'd be dead by now. Interpersonal connection – now we're getting somewhere, but I bet most still confuse this for having specific flavors of relationships, don't they?

We don't talk about needing attention in a destigmatized way. We don't talk about the difference between socialization and socializing. We don't talk about what it means to have a support network or how to build one, except maybe as far as people assume "You have family and friends you can ask for help, right?" We don't talk about what community resources are or how they can be created, shared, and accessed. We don't talk about interpersonal connection in general, especially without immediate attempts to categorize such connection into specific relationship flavors.

Instead, what we talk about is sex, romance, friendship, and family, and the categories these relationships are sorted into: sexual, romantic, platonic, and familial. Doing so in favor of specificity, however, muddles the actual problems people face with their social needs, and prevents proper solutions from being considered. The popular kids with lots of friends can still end up lonely; the adults in their "perfect" marriages can still feel unfulfilled. Despite checking all the boxes on socially acceptable relationships, people can end up without their social needs being met.

Am I going to explain all these individual concepts today? Am I going to speak about my first draft ideas on how we could potentially fix these problems referenced in this post? Not a chance; I'm too busy right now to write essays on these things. But I want to introduce this seed of a thought to people's heads; we need more discussion about social needs as something separate than the idea of "you must actively desire, pursue, and partake in these specific cultural categories of relationships with other people", because otherwise, we don't actually address the needs of the people, and can't help all the people out there who struggle to meet those needs on their own. We need to dig deeper to move forward.