Geographies of interpersonal relationships

Abstract

Interpersonal relationships underpin everything that is ‘social’ or ‘political’ and are fundamentally spatial, therefore a core concern for human geography. Yet despite the growing dominance of relational approaches, geographical scholarship on interpersonal relationships remains limited and fragmented. Geographies of intimacy, encounter, care, and emotion offer rich insight into the spatiality of interpersonal relationships, yet limited dialogue between them constrains our ability to theorise interpersonal relationships as a coherent object of geographical analysis. This paper advances a more joined-up field of geographies of interpersonal relationships to explore how the spatial, institutional, relational, and political dynamics of interpersonal relationships interact.

“Spirit is not in the I but between I and You” (Martin Buber, 1970; p. 78)

Introduction

Many pressing contemporary social and political problems manifest within the sphere of interpersonal relationships. An epidemic of loneliness (Holton et al., 2023) is one current example. Intimate partner violence, also of epidemic proportions (Sheppard-Perkins et al., 2025), and the criminalisation and discrimination of non-heteronormative relationships (Hubbard, 2008) are examples of more longstanding problems. But more than ‘problems’, interpersonal relationships are central to everything that is ‘social’ or ‘political’. Interpersonal relationships in the corporate world shape economies (Murphy, 2006), just as those between government officials shape systems of governance (Zeemering, 2021), and relationships between caregivers and receivers shape welfare states and post-welfare societies (Jupp, 2022). The quality of a person’s interpersonal relationships is among the most powerful determinants of their health and wellbeing (Mertika et al., 2020; Umberson and Karas Montez, 2010). Yet, despite the relational turn in human geography, interpersonal relationships remain a surprisingly peripheral, fragmented, and under-theorised disciplinary concern.

The relational turn has profoundly changed how human geographers think and write about space and place. It marked a shift away from a conception of space as absolute, like a fixed container or stage on which objects exist and events happen. It also moved away from a relative understanding in which space-time still exists as a distinct entity, even if its coordinates are continuously redefined by observers’ perspectives. In contrast to absolutism and relativity, relational thinking more thoroughly dissolved the boundaries between objects and space, and helped geographers reimagine space as being made of objects themselves, or more precisely made of the relations between objects (Jones, 2009: p. 491).

Strongly influenced by Doreen Massey (2005, p. 31), relational thinking understands space as the product of political, social, economic, more-than-human and other relations operating at every scale. Space is conceived not as a singular entity, rather a multiplicity, a sphere in which heterogeneous trajectories intersect and interact. And despite being a ‘product’ of relations, space is never an accomplished achievement, rather understood as ‘always under construction’ (ibid). Founded on these propositions, relational thinking has become widespread and dominant across diverse sub-fields of human geography since the early 2000s. Relational approaches have inspired geographers to rethink fundamental spatial concepts – space, place, region, and mobility – and to intervene in territorial politics from parochialism (Massey, 2005) to discourses of planetary urbanisation (Qian et al., 2025). During this period, in this journal alone, 19 papers in various fields – including environmental, more-than-human, economic, social, cultural, political, and urban geographies – include the term ‘relational’ in their title.

Doreen Massey (2005) called on geographers and others to reimagine space as created through relations at different scales, ‘from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’ (2005; p. 31). Yet, despite the growing dominance of relational thinking, in 2008 Gill Valentine observed a puzzling silence in human geography on the intimately tiny scale of interpersonal relationships. Reviewing geographical work on sexualities, youth, and families, she argued that these subfields had ‘not provoked much work on, or interest in, any form of personal relationships’ (2008, p. 2098). While this critique may have been valid at the time, since then the study of interpersonal relationships has expanded across the discipline, especially in the subfields of geographies of encounter (Fincher et al., 2019; Wilson, 2017), emotional geographies (Davidson and Milligan, 2004; Thien, 2016) and intimate geographies, which also include geographies of friendship and the family (Brickell, 2015; Bunnell et al., 2012; Hall, 2019; Pain, 2015).

In this paper, I explore geographical engagement with interpersonal relationships in these subfields. I draw out their rich insights about the internal dynamics of interpersonal relationships, the political contexts that shape and are shaped by them, and their spatialities. However, I also address significant gaps within and between these literatures. Firstly, while intimate geographies foreground interpersonal relationships, in emotional geographies and work on encounter engagement with sustained interpersonal relationships remains limited. Secondly, dialogue across these subfields is minimal, limiting their collective capacity to establish interpersonal relationships as a central and coherent object of geographical inquiry. To address these gaps, I address four primary questions that unpack the spatial and political dynamics of interpersonal relationships, while bringing existing geographical literatures into dialogue to lay the foundations for a more integrated field of research.

First, what are the spatial and temporal patterns through which relationships form, endure, transform and dissolve? In addressing this question, I propose that we should approach interpersonal relationships as open-ended continuities of encounter and non-encounter. This proposition helps bridge geographies of encounter, that have often focused on fleeting interactions, and intimate geographies that have often focused on more sustained relationships.

Second, how do different forms of interpersonal relationships – such as friendship, intimate partnership, or kinship – come to be defined and differentiated? I propose that such labels function as relational institutions which encode norms and scripts that shape lived relationships and their spatialities. This framing helps connect geographical literatures on family, friendship, neighbours, colleagues, and others, directing attention to both their differences and convergences as relational institutions.

Third, what conceptual and ethical frameworks are needed to make sense of the everyday lived dynamics of interpersonal relationships? In addressing this question, I draw attention to power imbalances, care relations, and affective qualities such as trust, commitment and love within a relationship. I argue that it is reductive to view an interpersonal relationship through any one of these three dimensions, rather attention is needed to the interplay between them.

Fourth, how do interpersonal relationships connect to wider social and political processes? Addressing this question, I explore the complex and often nonlinear ways in which power, care, and affective dynamics within a dyad relationship interact with wider politics. Drawing on existing literatures, I sketch a few paths through which these inter-scalar relational dynamics unfold, in both reactionary and transformative ways.

The next four sections directly develop each of those questions and propositions in turn, while the overarching themes of the political significance and spatialities of relationships are threaded throughout them.

Relationships as open-ended continuities of encounter and non-encounter

One way to map the spatial and temporal patterns through which any relationship forms, endures, transforms and dissolves, is to consider its rhythms and spaces of encounter and non-encounter. In geographical scholarship, the concept of encounter has typically been used to describe fleeting interactions between relative strangers (Fincher and Iveson, 2008). More enduring relationships have been examined through the lenses of love, friendship, and family within the growing field of intimate geographies (Hall, 2019; Valentine, 2008). To initiate a dialogue between these two bodies of work, I propose reframing enduring relationships as open-ended continuities of encounter and non-encounter. This extends the insights of encounter scholarship, its attention to the unexpected and potentially transformative dynamics that unfold in each moment of interaction, into the analysis of longer-term relationships.

As argued by Wilson (2017: p. 464), the term ‘encounter’ is not merely a referent for any form of meeting, rather encounters are the coming together of different bodies in ways that ‘make (a) difference’ (Wilson, 2017: p. 464). Existing geographical research offers rich insight on the kinds of spaces that are likely to facilitate convivial encounters between people who are still strangers (Fincher et al., 2019), including the roles of micro-publics (Amin, 2002), atmospheres of inclusion (Mayblin et al., 2015), and hybrid or virtual spaces (Koch and Miles, 2021). The focus is often on the role of such everyday fleeting conviviality in challenging dominant identity politics (Fincher et al., 2019), as opposed to their role as the beginning of a more enduring interpersonal relationship as I approach it here. While not every encounter becomes a relationship, every relationship begins with an encounter, a moment of direct interaction between strangers that has made a difference.

The first encounter is not yet a relationship, nor would it necessarily lead to one. The relationship is formed over time, through repeat encounters between the two participants, and just as importantly through periods of separation. Encounters in a relationship involve direct interaction, which can happen in the physical world, but also ‘virtually’ – over the phone, over the internet and other media – mediated by technology and distance (Koch and Miles, 2021). Encounters are moments of connection where intimacy, trust, and commitment in a relationship are established and performed, sometimes in mundane and unnoticeable ways (Amin, 2002; Koch and Miles, 2021). Some encounters can also be more conflictual (Bigby and Wiesel, 2019) – say an argument between two long-term friends – and become moments when a relationship is put to the test.

As Holt (2024) argues, the repetition of encounters between two or more people creates conditions for development of shared memories, deep affective connections, empathy, and moments where difference is performed otherwise, and new ways of being emerge. Holt’s concept of ‘immersive geographies’ is focused on repeat encounters that occur in the same place (such as a school). A dyad relationship can include immersive spaces (such as a couple meeting every day at home), as well as many encounters that occur in a range of other spaces.

For the duration of most if not all relationships, a great deal of time is spent separately, in what might be called periods of non-encounter. Non-encounter is not the end of a relationship, but its continuation through distance, absence, reflection and expectation. The small literature on non-encounter is primarily focused on non-encounter between strangers (Blonk, 2021; Straughan and Bissell, 2022). These non-encounters are not simply the absence of interaction, rather are laden with meaning, which is defined and experienced in reference to previous, anticipated, or imagined encounters. For example, in some contexts non-encounter experienced by people with disabilities can signal their exclusion, while in others it signals respect to their privacy and personal space (Blonk, 2021). Straughan and Bissell (2022: p. 537), drawing on their research on gig economy delivery workers in Melbourne during the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrate how previously vibrant urban environments were experienced differently by these workers as sites of non-encounter characterised by feelings of disconnection and boredom. Similarly, periods of non-encounter in an interpersonal relationship are no less ‘material, embodied, and performed’ (Fincher et al., 2019: p. 9) than any moment of encounter, yet they materialise in a more dispersed spatiality, where participants are in different places.

Moran and Disney’s (2019) geographies of (present) absence provide another useful frame through which to examine such periods of non-encounter in a relationship. They discuss incarceration, and the importance to prisoners of visits from family and friends. Prisoners they interviewed described the experience of having scheduled visitors ‘ghost’ them, failing to arrive for an arranged visit, leaving them alone in the visits hall while other visits take place. Such ghosting evokes feelings of loneliness, and in the longer term may contribute to stress, self-harm and suicidal behaviours. The study highlights not only the significant impact of non-encounter, but also the ways it can be imposed on a relationship by external circumstances (such as incarceration), and by the agency and spatial practices of one or both participants (such as ‘ghosting’).

Another take on the continuation of relationships through non-encounter can be found in the small body of geographical literature on death and grief. Hockey et al. (2005), for example, discussed how people grieve the death of significant others through the reinterpretation of home spaces and items such as clothing. More recently, Alavez (2022) developed new cartographic methods to map the stories of two migrants who lost a close friend. This innovative cartography visually represents the spatiality of death not as the end of a relationship, but its continuation in the form of grief, mourning, and remembering.

A relationship is an open-ended continuity, but it is not necessarily permanent. The question of whether and when a relationship has ended is not straightforward, as the examples above of people separated by death illustrate. A married couple ‘ending their relationship’ often continue to have a relationship, just a very different one, as divorcees or co-parents (Viry, 2014).

For Wilson (2017), encounters make a difference because how they unfold is never predetermined by any external social structure or circumstances. On the contrary, encounters that are experienced as ‘meaningful’ are often experienced in terms of ‘rupture’, ‘surprise’, or even ‘shock’. In these moments, ‘something is unexpectedly broken open’ (Wilson, 2017: p. 456). Such moments of rupture are not necessarily confined to encounter between strangers, rather can occur even within an enduring relationship. For example, an encounter between two long-time friends or lovers after a long period of separation, or in an unfamiliar context, can be filled with similar emotions of shock, surprise and even a sense of estrangement. Indeed, such rupture can be particularly charged, precisely because it is embedded in histories of prior, and expectations for future, encounters and non-encounters.

Thinking about relationships as open-ended continuities of encounter and non-encounter opens a new way to think about the spatiality of relationships. From this perspective, the spatiality of a dyad relationship consists of the frequency and places where two people encounter one another; the distance between them, and places where each is present, when they are apart; and the spatial and temporal practices they enact to come together or to move apart. I use the term ‘spatiality’ – rather than space – to capture the multiple spatial dimensions through which a relationship is experienced and imagined. Space and spatiality are distinct but closely intertwined. Shoorcheh (2019: p. 65), defines spatiality ‘as the spatial dimension of human agency’. Similarly, for Kobayashi (2017), spatiality is a condition of being, and indeed a condition of relationships, rather than a thing in itself. Both terms, space and spatiality, have been approached with caution by geographers, due to their relative abstraction. Concepts such as place or region offer a more embodied alternative (Merriman et al., 2012; Shoorcheh, 2019). However, the heterogeneous nature of spatiality – as abstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and material, structured and lived (Merriman et al., 2012: p. 3-4) – makes it a useful concept for mapping the geographies of interpersonal relationships.

Although every interpersonal relationship produces a unique spatiality through its rhythms, places and spatial practices of encounter and non-encounter, that spatiality does not necessarily ‘mirror’ the relationship. On the contrary, often frictions emerge between relationships and their spatialities, as I discuss in the next section on the formal and informal institutions that structure relationships and their spatialities.

Relational institutions

Geographical scholarship has examined a wide range of interpersonal relationships – including family, friendships, intimate partnerships, workplace, and neighbour relationships – often treating these as distinct analytical categories. Attending to the institutional processes through which these diverse relationships are classified and differentiated illuminates both similarities and differences across these categories. Referring to another person as one’s ‘husband’, ‘daughter’, ‘colleague’, ‘neighbour’, or ‘doctor’, is by no means a neutral factual statement. Rather, each of these labels positions the relationship between two people within a set of formal and informal normative expectations and scripts, or what I refer to here as a relational institution.

Relational institutions vary in the extent to which they are formalised. Institutions such as family, kinship and marriage have been rigidly formalised in both traditional and modern laws, establishing and enforcing strict norms and expectations for relationships between people who are kin or married. Family is one of the most intensely moralised relational institutions, at the centre of social and political life (Tarrant and Hall, 2020: p. 615). Families are an arena in which morals and political ideologies are transmitted and negotiated in everyday life (Hall, 2016). In contrast, friendship is a more informal relational institution. Friendship is voluntarily entered into or dissolved (Bunnell et al., 2012). Nigel Thrift (2005) characterised modern friendship as a light-touch intimacy, compared to the formal duties of marriage and kinship, in an era of individualism and mobility. However, Thrift’s (2005) characterisation of friendship as ‘light-touch’ risks obscuring the intensity of informal regulation that often structures such relationships in practice. The degree of formalisation matters not because some relationships are regulated and sanctioned while others are not, rather because the mechanisms of regulation and sanction are different.

Relational institutions also vary in the level of intimacy they instruct for relationships. Valentine (2008: p. 2106), defined ‘intimate relationships’ as a ‘specific sort of knowing, loving and caring for a person’ that can embrace not just sexual and parenting relationships but also forms of care and affective structures including friendship. Other relationships, such as those between colleagues, neighbours, or service users and providers, are perhaps less ‘intimate’. However, as discussed below, even these seemingly non-intimate relationships can carry equal emotional depth or intensity.

Relational institutions are products of their time and space, and geographies of the family provide some of the most illustrative examples. Hall (2019) exposes the ways neoliberalism and austerity policies in the UK shape everyday family relationships. Families, friends, and intimate partners are recruited to fill in the gaps left by welfare retrenchment, including everyday practical support such as child-minding, help carrying bags from bulk shopping, lifts to appointments, and emotional support (Hall, 2019: p. 778). In a different national context, Oswin’s (2010) work on family norms in Singapore describes these as a product of colonial legacies, post-colonial nation-building ideologies, and deeply embedded norms of heteronormativity. Oswin argues that as part of its modernisation and development agenda, the Singaporean government has used housing policy as a tool to promote a family model that is underpinned by heteronormative norms, understood as composed primarily of a married, heterosexual couple with children. These policies exclude not only gays and lesbians but also other non-heteronormative figures such as single mothers, migrant workers, and unmarried individuals. Oswin traces the roots of these policies back to colonial times, showing how both colonial and post-colonial governments have shaped what are considered ‘proper’ family relationships, and the home as a central part of the family’s spatiality.

As Oswin’s analysis demonstrates, relational institutions are not only products of different times and places, but also actively produce spaces. These institutions encode expectations for how two or more people should relate to one another, and also for the spatiality of that relationship. For example, in some cultural contexts, relationships between neighbours often tread a delicate line between ‘friendly distance’ where neighbours seek to perform positive ‘friendly’ neighbourliness, while avoiding excessive intimacy (Ruonavaara, 2022; Terruhn and Ye, 2022). Terruhn and Ye’s (2022) study in Auckland describes a norm of pragmatic, light-touch neighbouring – friendly but not intrusive – through which residents negotiate differences in a socially diverse neighbourhood.

While some lived relationships follow and reproduce the norms and scripts prescribed by relational institutions, others contest or subvert them. For example, Morrison et al.’s (2013), in their critical geographies of love, call on geographers to consider love as spatial, relational, and political. They argue that a critical geography of love can challenge patriarchal or heteronormative conceptions of love in relationships from feminist or queer perspectives. This includes acknowledging different ways of ‘doing’ love such as non-monogamous, non-cohabiting, or online intimate relationships (Morrison et al., 2013: p. 508).

Frictions can arise when the relational and spatial dynamics of a lived relationship do not align with the expectations of a relational institution. For example, Cloutier et al.’s (2015) work on relationships between paid home care providers and recipients in Canada highlights the tension between the professional and the more personalised and even intimate aspects of this relationship. This tension is reinforced by the spatial setting, which is at once the care recipient’s home and a workplace for the caregiver. Similarly, while home is associated with family and intimate relationships, it is also the space for a different relational institution: housemates. Although not necessarily intimate or family-like, sharing a home can create a degree of intensity in a relationship. Raynor and Frichot (2023) discuss the experiences of housemates during a strict COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. They describe small acts of caregiving and resource sharing that emerged in these circumstances. This example illustrates how extraordinary external circumstances, such as a lockdown, can sharpen the friction between the spatiality of home and the norms of housemateship. This friction, in turn, requires housemates to renegotiate the boundaries and practices of their relationship.

Lived relationships are rarely confined to one relational institution, rather often operate across multiple institutions at once or shift between them over time. These blurrings and crossings of institutional boundaries can create further frictions. Friendship, for example, often overlaps with other types of relationships and this can be a source of friction. For example, frictions can emerge between friends who are also kin. As Bunnell et al. (2012) argue, friendship and family are not mutually exclusive, but friendship can be voluntary ended in ways that kinship cannot. Frictions can arise when a friendship between two people has ‘ended’ (which, as I discussed earlier, is rarely a straightforward matter), while they remain connected as kin.

Friendship between colleagues can also be a source of friction, and a small body of geographical scholarship illustrates this point. Kaufman (2021) examined workplace relationships in academia by women in their childbearing years. Kaufman, based in Kentucky, describes her interpersonal relationship with her adviser as characterised by care in ways that challenge strict norms of ‘professionalism’ (i.e. too personal), yet she experienced it as crucial to her wellbeing and survival in academia. Similarly, Webster and Boyd (2019) highlight the importance of friendship as an act of support and self-care, and a form of resistance to the neoliberal metrics that govern university life. But Webster and Boyd also acknowledge the potentially negative role of some types of workplace friendships, such as exclusionary cliques or old boy networks that produce unequal power relations. In a very different ‘workplace’ context, Dyson’s (2010) work in the Indian Himalaya illustrates the blurring of lines between work (collecting leaves) and young girls’ friendships.

In summary, relational institutions are dynamic products of different places and times, which encode social expectations about relationships and their spatialities, but lived relationships do not necessarily comply. The following section explores the vocabulary and frameworks needed to discuss the qualities and dynamics of lived relationships. I turn from the spatial and temporal process of relationships (continuities of encounter and non-encounter), and the institutional contexts in which they are embedded (relational institutions), to their relational substance.

Relational qualities

Terms like ‘kin’, ‘friend’, or ‘colleague’ situate a relationship within a specific relational institution, each with its own norms and expectations. But other terms describe more substantive qualities and dynamics of lived relationships. A relationship can be described as loving, competitive, intimate, tense, caring, abusive, committed, fleeting, exploitative, or distant among numerous other terms. Different, even contradictory, qualities can apply to the same relationship. In this section I distinguish between three broad categories of relational qualities concerned with power imbalances, care, and affective dynamics. I argue that there is a risk of reducing interpersonal relationships to any single one of those categories, and that it is necessary to explore the interplay between them.

Power imbalances

In some respects, a relational approach is deeply optimistic. The possibility of multiplicity co-existing, and the potential for change since space is never ‘finished’ but always in the process of being made, means space is a ‘sphere of possibility’ (Massey, 2005: p. 31). Traces of such relational optimism are found, for example, in more recent geographical work taking relational thinking to challenge epistemological hierarchies between the urban and the rural (Qian et al., 2025). Specifically, the authors challenge the concept of planetary urbanisation, which depicts a unilateral process and privileges urbanity as an ontology for planetary futures. Relationality allows rethinking rural-urban relations as a bilateral or multilateral process. But geographical scholarship also presents caveats to a kind of relational thinking that imagines space as being entirely open and in flux. From Harvey (1996) to Jones (2009), geographers draw attention to the relative permanences that emerge from the intersection of diverse relations. Others, such as Heley and Jones (2012) emphasised that while relations are not unilateral, they often embody power imbalances.

In critical social theory, power imbalances have often been examined through the lens of social justice and the concept of oppression. Here I draw specifically on Iris Marion Young’s (2008) five faces of oppression. Young argued that oppression appears in different forms, including exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. While Young applied this framework to broader social and spatial scales, some of the concepts can also be adapted to describe and analyse power imbalances, and indeed oppression, within dyadic interpersonal relationships. In the paragraphs below I consider how exploitation and violence appear in the context of dyad relationships. I also offer a third concept of ‘domination’ which overlaps to an extent with both of Young’s concepts of powerlessness and cultural imperialism, again adapted to the context of dyad rather than group-based relations.

Exploitation occurs when one person in a relationship benefits from the material resources or labour of the other without fair reciprocation. A more extreme form of exploitation is expropriation (Fraser, 2018) which involves confiscating one’s capacities and resources and conscripting them into another’s own interests. Exploitation and expropriation are significant themes in geography but are dealt with primarily at larger scales (Fraser, 2018; Ricci, 2021; Strauss, 2012). Nevertheless, some studies illustrate how larger scale systems of exploitation can manifest in an exploitative dyadic relationship between an individual employer and worker. For example, an employer can exploit a migrant employee’s precarious legal status to impose longer hours or lower pay (Frydenlund, 2024; Strauss and McGrath 2017; Yea, 2015). Yu’s (2018) study on elderly care workers in Shanghai and Beijing suggests dyadic relationships of care between care givers and recipients create a ‘prison of love’ through which low-wage carers are exploited.

Domination concerns relationships where one person has disproportionate control over the other’s life and decisions and is able to impose their own values and preferences. Work on domination in interpersonal relationships can be found in geographies of disability. People with intellectual disabilities, for example, often experience interpersonal relationships where carers make decisions for them on big and small matters affecting their lives. Recent changes in guardianship legislation in some countries seek to promote a shift from ‘substituted decision-making’ (where decisions are made for a person by others) to ‘supported decision-making’ (where a person is supported to make decisions that reflect their own ‘will and preferences’). However, Wiesel et al. (2022) argue that the boundaries between making decisions for or with a person with intellectual disability are often blurred. In practice, the process of decision making is shaped not only by legislation and legal status, but also by interpersonal relationship dynamics as well as the spatial and temporal contexts in which decisions are made.

Violence includes both direct violence and the threat of violence by one person in a relationship against the other. Violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, and financial. Work on intimate partner violence against women connects violence at the intimate scale of interpersonal relationships with larger, more structural forms of violence, even when disguised as ‘peace’. Katherine Brickell’s (2015) work on the intimate geographies of peace in Cambodia examines the link between local reconciliation efforts, and women’s experiences of violence and abuse by intimate partners, where women are compelled to stay with abusive partners as a domestic form of ‘reconciliation’. Similarly, Rachel Pain’s (2015) work examines the connections between dyadic and global scales of violence. Pain describes the warlike nature of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes, where abusive partners employ psychological and warfare tactics such as collateral damage (see also Fluri, 2011). Crystal Legacy (2024) draws a parallel between gaslighting in an intimate relationship and structural gaslighting by governments in transport planning public participation processes. Gaslighting can be understood in terms of both violence and domination, as a practice that undermines the authority of one person (or institution) to protect the authority of another.

While power is a crucial lens for evaluating interpersonal relationships, it is also limited. Relationships marked by oppression can are unjust, but is the absence of oppression sufficient for a relationship to be considered ethical? A feminist ethic of care suggests otherwise: to live well, people require not just freedom from oppression, but also active care from others, as discussed in the next section.

Care relations

Maria Puig de La Bellacasa (2017: p. 156) argued that for humans and other living beings, ‘to be alive, or endure, something, somebody, must be taking care, somewhere’. Power and Williams (2020), expanding these insights, chart an agenda for urban geographies of care that explore the webs of care relations that sustain the conditions of life, wellbeing, and flourishing, especially in the context of social inequalities and climate change.

However, not all care relations are beneficial, and some can be harmful and indeed oppressive. Care can be oppressive when the labour of care is unequally spread, when some people are deemed more worthy of care than others, or where care relations produce harms to those being cared, often because their own wishes are ignored (Lawson, 2007; Power et al., 2022). Indeed, care relations are entangled with power dynamics in complex ways, or as articulated by Lawson (2007: p. 5), ‘Caring involves complex flows of power in which the carer exercises (often unwittingly) control and influence over the cared-for’.

As a contextual ethic of practice rejecting universalisms, feminist care ethicists generally refrain from broad assertions about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in care relations. Nevertheless, Tronto’s (2013) concept of ‘caring with’ offers a useful frame to consider what might constitute desirable and ethical rather than harmful qualities of care relations. ‘Caring with’ is not a one directional flow of care from ‘giver’ to ‘recipient’ but a mutual, collaborative process involving shared agency and responsibility for each other’s wellbeing. Caring with is characterised by attentiveness and responsiveness, noticing someone’s need, taking responsibility for addressing it, and responding to need in a way that is attentive and responsive to the particularity of their need, their wishes and the context of the relationship.

Caring with also involves reciprocity in caregiving. In Tronto’s (2013) conception, such reciprocity extends beyond the scale of any dyadic care relationship, rather it is a societal, political, and intergenerational responsibility. For Tronto, reciprocity involves society recognising, valuing, and redistributing caregiving labour equitably, thus addressing structural exploitation of caregivers. Individuals receiving care at one stage of life (e.g. infancy, illness, and old age) may provide care to others at other life stages, thus participating in a broader reciprocal network extending across time and space. However, reciprocity can also be a feature of dyadic relationships, where it is not simply a transactional, instrumental or symmetrical exchange; rather, it is primarily emotional and relational, and the care receiver can reciprocate in different ways, such as expressions of recognition and trust.

A central theme in care ethics is the question of whose needs one should notice (caring about), take responsibility for (caring for), and take action to address (caregiving) (Tronto, 2013). Geographers have considered the spatial aspects of this moral question, examining the extent to which geographical proximity and distance influence people’s sense of care and responsibility towards others. Barnett and Land (2007) argue that distance does not necessarily diminish the capacity or authenticity of care, and that caring relationships can and do operate effectively across distances; indeed, sometimes distance can be conducive to care, and physical distance does not necessarily imply emotional distance (see also Milligan and Wiles, 2010; Mitchell et al., 2025).

Relations of care are mediated by spaces and materialities (Power and Williams, 2020), and what geographers and others have termed ‘care infrastructures’ (Danholt and Langstrup, 2012: p. 517; Power et al., 2022). Care infrastructures appear in different forms and scales, from a pair of street-side book shelves (Alam and Houston, 2020) and small-scale mutual aid initiatives, food banks, drop-in centres, food cooperatives, and libraries (Power and Williams, 2020), to the urban built environment more broadly (Binet et al., 2023).

Care and power provide a normative lens through which the qualities and dynamics of interpersonal relationships can be critically analysed and explored. Taken together, an analysis of both power and care in relationships can be framed in terms of ‘care-full justice’ (Williams, 2017). But reducing interpersonal relationships to power and care is still reductive and flattening; in the following section I consider alternative ways to engage with the affective qualities of relationships.

Affective qualities

Affective relational qualities are the characteristics that shape how a dyad relationship is felt and experienced by its two participants. Psychology literature provides a rich and well-developed literature on the qualities that characterise ‘healthy’ interpersonal relationships. However, a geographical lens can help extend the psychological perspective and challenge some of its underlying assumptions and normative framings. While I use the term ‘affective qualities’, this section is grounded primarily in psychology and emotional geographies, which have developed a more direct engagement with interpersonal relationships than most geographical work on affect.

Using a spatial metaphor, many of the affective qualities of a dyad relationship can be broadly classified in terms of ‘closeness’. Closeness concerns the degree of interdependence in a relationship, emotional intimacy and attachment, trust, frequency and intensity of shared time and activities, and the level of investment of time and emotional or material resources into the relationship. As literature in psychology shows, feelings of closeness and intimacy can emerge from mutual self-disclosure between partners in a relationship, and a perception of responsiveness to each other’s needs and wishes (Laurenceau and Kleinman, 2018). Levels of intimacy or closeness in a relationship change over time, with some interactions experienced as intimate and others less so (Laurenceau and Kleinman, 2018: p. 642). Emotional closeness and physical geographical closeness are often connected, but neither one is conditional on the other, as studies of long-distance intimate relationships reveal (Goldsmith and Byers, 2020).

A temporal affective quality of relationships is commitment. Commitment concerns the extent to which parties in a relationship intend to maintain that relationship over time, even in the face of change and challenges. The commitment can arise from personal reasons, such as attachment; normative or institutional obligations to maintain a relationship (as in the case of marriage or parenting); and structural reasons such as financial barriers to ending a relationship. Literature in psychology suggests that close personal relationships characterised by high levels of commitment are more likely to be experienced as satisfying relationships, which in turn is a strong predictor of overall life satisfaction. On the flip side, high level of commitment can heighten distress in the case of relationship dissolution (Agnew and Vanderdrift, 2018). In geography, Brickell’s (2015) work mentioned above also highlights how commitment, when underpinned by structural barriers to leaving a partner, can leave women in violent relationships. Walsh’s (2009) study of British migrants in Dubai highlights how commitment can be sustained and even strengthened across distance. One participant described their experience of maintaining an exclusive relationship with a partner in the UK, illustrating that affective qualities are shaped, but not determined, by space.

Expected levels of commitment and closeness vary in different types of interpersonal relationships. For example, higher level of commitment and closeness are expected in a marriage, compared to a relationship between neighbours. Likewise, these expectations are shaped by cultural and social contexts, which are often overlooked in psychological literature (Goodwin and Pillay, 2006). There is potential for greater critical geographical engagement with these concepts, to challenge some of the underlying universalist assumptions about ‘healthy’ relationships.

Interpersonal relationships are a central theme in emotional geographies. At the heart of this subfield is a recognition that emotions matter and have tangible effects on people’s experiences of being-in-the-world (Davidson and Milligan, 2004: p. 524). Emotions are understood as relational, in the sense that they are not independent, rather experienced in relation to someone or something (Olson, 2016). Therefore, emotions both shape and are shaped by interpersonal dynamics, and these emotional processes are spatially and institutionally mediated. For example, Morrison et al.’s (2013: p. 512) observe that love and the act of ‘making love’ may feel different in the privacy of one’s bedroom than in a public park. Temporally, feelings of love change over time: ‘The love a child feels for a parent and vice versa is likely to vary over the lifecourse’ (Morrison et al., 2013: p. 512).

Relational institutions often articulate ’appropriate’ emotions for different kinds of relationships (Olson, 2016). For example, Gabb’s (2004) research with Lesbian mothers suggests that some express their emotions towards babies in terms of intense desire (a desire to ‘eat them up’ and feeling ‘utterly passionate’ about their babies), in ways that transgress traditional normative boundaries of parenting. Institutions seek to restrict who and how one can love (Olson, 2016). Institutions also govern how emotions and social roles are linked, or at time held separate. For example, Aitken’s (2000) research with heterosexual fathers in San Diego suggests that while they embrace the emotions of parenting, they are normatively excused from the care labour that, for women, comes hand-in-hand with such emotions.

In this section, I have proposed a tripartite framework for understanding the qualities of interpersonal relationships. First, relationships can be assessed in terms of power dynamics, with attention to the presence of exploitation, domination, or violence. Second, they can be examined through the lens of care, and ethics of ‘caring with’, involving mutuality, attentiveness, responsiveness, and reciprocity. Third, relationships can be approached in affective terms, encompassing qualities such as closeness and commitment and the emotional connection between participants. Taken together, these three broad perspectives offer a critical vocabulary and framework to describe and study the everyday dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Returning to Yu’s (2018) example, mentioned earlier, the story of elderly care workers in Shanghai and Beijing caught within a ‘prison of love’ that enables their exploitation as low-wage workers, illustrates that these three dimensions might sometimes conflict, highlighting the risk of reducing a relationship to any one of those dimensions.

From dyad to society

Geographical research has long attended to relations across multiple scales, from individuals and households to communities, cities, nations, and planetary systems. Yet within this multiscalar landscape, the dyad – the relationship between two people – has attracted comparatively little attention. In this section, I foreground the dyad as a crucial, yet frequently overlooked, scale of relational analysis. At the same time, understanding how dyadic interpersonal relations intersect and interact with wider scale relations in households, institutions, communities, and wider political formations is critical for grasping the political implications of interpersonal relationships. This inter-scalar movement is neither simple nor linear, and it is therefore analytically and ethically risky to draw a direct line between the power, care, and affective dynamics of a dyad relationship and broader societal or global politics. In this section I trace the complex ways in which dyad interpersonal dynamics both shape and are shaped by wider spatial and political processes without reducing one to the other.

Some might argue that dyad interpersonal relationships are purely personal matters, a matter for gossip rather than critical geographical analysis. Relational geographers, however, have long insisted that the personal and the political are deeply intertwined (Hall, 2019; Massey, 2005; Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Valentine, 2008). But even from within relational geography there might be some resistance to a sustained disciplinary focus on dyad interpersonal relationships. Geographers are often more inclined to examine wider scale ‘landscapes of care’ (Bowlby, 2012). The focus on dyads also runs counter to an effort in geography to ‘stretch’ the spatialities of care, such that we also care about and for others with whom we have no interpersonal relationship but are still interdependent in a myriad of other economic, political and ecological relations (Raghuram et al., 2009).

Yet, a wealth of geographical research demonstrates that dyad relationships have significant political and ethical implications. The qualities of relationships – whether they are free from domination, exploitation and violence, or embody the principles of ‘caring with’ – are a big part of what makes a society more or less just and caring. On its own, each dyadic interpersonal relationship is intimately tiny, but the sum of all relationships is not tiny at all. Yet, caution is needed when examining the interaction between dyadic and larger-scale relations. For instance, Robinson (2007) highlights the geopolitical and gendered inequalities shaping marriages between men from wealthy countries and migrant women from poorer ones. Such marriages seem to reflect geopolitical inequalities between the global north and south, as well as gender inequalities. However, at the scale of dyad relationships, Robinson critiques accounts that reduce these relationships to exploitation, instead drawing attention to their emotional complexity and the agency exercised by migrant women. As I have argued earlier, dyad relationships cannot be judged solely in terms of the evenness of power relations, or the level of reciprocity in care; within dyad relationships, there is also an affective dimension which has significant political implications, but does not easily ‘transfer’ across scales. Likewise, within an ethic of caring with, reciprocity is not necessarily performed within the dyad scale, rather on a wider societal, intergenerational scale (Tronto, 2013).

One way to think about the political implications of dyad relationships is to consider whether and how they challenge dominant identity politics. For example, where intimate relationships or friendships are established across lines of social difference – such as race, class, and disability – they can help challenge social divides and tendencies towards spatial-relational segregation (Holt, 2024). As Bunnell et al. (2012) point out, friendships are strongly correlated with social networks based on identity such as class, nationality, race, and sexuality (Bunnell et al., 2012: p. 491). This can limit the transformative political potential of friendships in two primary ways. Firstly, as a form of social capital (Bourdieu, 1986), exclusive networks of friendship of people in position of social privilege provide its members opportunities and access to resources, while excluding others. Secondly, when friendships or other relationships are formed between people who share similar class, gender, or other social identity, dominant ideologies, norms, and practices that perpetuate inequalities are left unchallenged and are often reinforced (Dyson, 2010; Hall, 2019).

However, Bunnell et al. (2012) emphasise that despite the correlation, friendships are not determined by class, race, gender or other affinity. Furthermore, other types of relationships in families, workplaces, or service settings routinely form across lines of class, gender, sexuality, race, age, and ability, and as such carry political potential similar to that discussed in literature on encounter across difference (Fincher et al., 2019; Wilson, 2017; Wilson and Darling, 2016). This includes the potential to reflect and reimagine preconceived notions of both self and the other, in ways that can reduce prejudice or lead to greater care and empathy across social differences (Valentine and Sadgrove, 2014). However, as Wilson (2017: p.461) cautions, framing ‘meaningful’ encounters only within these narrow parameters is also reductive, since the transformative potential of encounter is precisely in its unexpected nature.

Importantly, even when relationships are formed within rather than across identity groups, their political potential is not necessarily reactionary. Friendships between marginalised people can generate or sustain political protest and activism (Forster and White, 2025), just like practices of care within low-income families can help cope with austerity and welfare state retrenchment (Hall, 2019). Thus, extending Dyson’s (2010) observation in relation to friendships, the political potential of all types of relationships can be paradoxical, and they can ‘generate critique and novel practice and at other moments mirror and reinforce dominant structures’ (Dyson, 2010: p. 484).

Relationships are performed in relation to ‘relational institutions’: social scripts and norms for different kinds of interpersonal relationships, encoded in labels such as ‘kinship’, ‘friendship’, or even ‘colleagueship’. However, participants in a relationship have the agency to comply with, stretch, subvert or defy those expectations. For example, Thien (2016: p. 196) describes the frictions that emerged when a man and a woman spent time together alone in a car, although they were not an intimate couple, despite their community’s expectation that such proximity must be associated with a romantic connection. In challenging the relational institutions that seek to define their relationships, people also challenge wider political forces such as neoliberalism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity (Kaufman, 2021; Oswin and Olund, 2010).

Interpersonal relationships also shape political and economic processes in more direct ways. As Zeemering (2021) observes, there are no relationships between government and political ‘institutions’ as such, but only relationships between individuals acting within institutions. This insight also applies to the organisation of markets, firms, and economic networks (Murphy, 2006). Politics and economics are constituted through a wide range of interpersonal relations, including professional or political rivalries, collaborations and hierarchies, as well as friendships and even love.

Interpersonal relationships are political also because the ability to form satisfying interpersonal relationships is unequal and shaped by political processes. As argued in geographical scholarship on loneliness (Holton et al., 2023; Van Holstein et al., 2025), loneliness is an experience of being or feeling deprived of satisfying relationships, especially intimate relationships or friendships. A geographical perspective is critical to understand how relationships are formed and sustained and can help address what has been described as an epidemic of loneliness.

Conclusion

Geographers have learned to think about space relationally, but it is no less important to think about relations spatially. Interpersonal relationships are but one form and scale of relations, but deserve more focused geographical attention. The primary contribution of the paper is its explicit effort to consolidate engagement with interpersonal relationships across disparate subfields – encounter, intimacy, friendship, care, and emotion – under a more joined-up field of geographies of interpersonal relationships.

I have argued that relationships unfold as open-ended continuities of encounter and non-encounter. Acknowledging the concern about overextending the concept of encounter (Wilson, 2017), I have argued that this framing is useful for both encounter research and a broader geography of interpersonal relationships. This framing extends encounter literature’s sensitivity to situated, embodied and unexpected moments of connection and separation and their potential for rupture, to thinking about sustained relationships. The attention to the importance of non-encounter addresses a significant gap in existing literatures on both relationships and encounter.

Thinking about relationships as open-ended continuities of encounter and non-encounter, opens a new way to think about the spatiality of relationships. Each relationship produces, and is produced by, a unique spatiality that includes the places and rhythms of both encounter and non-encounter in a relationship. A relationship and its spatiality do not simply ‘mirror’ one another; rather, they often come into friction, and analysis of such frictions is a promising methodology for geographies of interpersonal relationships.

I have cautioned against reducing relationships solely to power, care or affective qualities. A nuanced understanding of relationships requires attention to the interplay between those three interconnected dimensions. I have also shown that the internal dynamics of relationships are always situated within wider relational institutions such as family, friendship, and colleagueship. These institutions produce and structure different ‘types’ of relationships, providing scripts for what relationships are expected to be like. A geographical perspective makes visible the ways these relational institutions are products of different places, times, and broader political contexts, and the ways their scripts are reproduced, stretched, or contested through everyday lived relationships.

While foregrounding the dyad as a crucial but often overlooked scale or unit of analysis for interpersonal relationships, I have also highlighted the multifaceted interaction between different scales of relational analysis – from dyad to society – as a complex but potentially fruitful challenge for geographies of interpersonal relationships. While relationality is sometimes perceived as a hopeful epistemology, interpersonal relationships can be both reactionary and transformative.

Rather than treating emotion, encounter, intimacy, care, family, and friendship as separate domains, I encourage attention to the shared processes through which diverse interpersonal relationships emerge, always in relation to wider social and spatial conditions. I hope that the questions, concepts and propositions developed here offer one way of tracing these common threads and of connecting literatures that have largely developed in parallel. In doing so, interpersonal relationships, their spatialities and their political implications may become a more central feature of the geographical imagination. Geography, in turn, may become more influential in interdisciplinary and public understandings of interpersonal relationships.