the.com/relationship
Two people slowly editing each other's personalities and calling it love.
means A connection between people (or things) defined by how they're bound together — emotionally, logically, or by blood — and the ongoing conduct that connection demands.
from Built from Latin 'relatio' — a carrying back, a report — itself from 'referre' (re- 'back' + ferre 'to carry'). The word first meant the act of relating or recounting one thing to another; only later did English stretch it to cover the tangled business of how people carry each other's baggage back and forth.
- word age
- relationship meant kinship ties until the 1940s
- romantic sense
- only became dominant meaning mid-20th century
- linguistic root
- shares root with relay and refer
- psych term
- earliest clinical use was about family structures, not couples