A friend of mine names his cars. I understand this completely. I do it too. Giving something a name is a small, ongoing way of saying it matters, that it deserves care rather than just use.

He’d gone a step further than I do, though. He’d given his car pronouns, they/them, in keeping with values he holds seriously. I got it wrong in conversation once, used the wrong pronoun without thinking, and it genuinely hurt him. I felt real sadness about that, not because I disagreed with what he was doing, but because something I actually believe in, treating the things in our lives as worth respect, had turned into a moment of hurt between us instead of the connection it should have been. We ran out of time before I could repair it, so I brought the whole thing to another friend, hoping to think through how to make it right.

She skipped past all of it. Not just the pronoun. The hurt, the friendship, the repair I was trying to find my way toward. What she landed on instead was how she felt about the underlying idea, that a person could have a relationship with a car at all. She talked about how foolish that struck her, at some length, before I managed to bring her back to what I’d actually come to talk about.

What Almost Got Lost

I’ve come to notice how small “relationship” has gotten in the civilized ear. Once, it could describe how you stood with anything, a place, an animal, a tool passed down through a family, the ground itself. Now it mostly means one narrow category: a bond between two people, ideally ones who’d agree to call it that themselves.

That narrowing is worth naming on its own. But something else happened in that conversation that I think matters more. In the act of insisting relationship can’t stretch that far, my friend stopped relating to me for a few minutes. The presence, the attention, the willingness to sit with what I was actually feeling, all of it paused while she defended where the word’s boundary should sit.

That’s the part I keep turning over. The very thing “relationship” is supposed to mean, showing up for what’s in front of you, was the thing missing while she argued about what the word should be allowed to cover.

What if staying with someone’s thread a little longer, before following the one piece that catches your own belief, is what tends to the relationship actually happening in the room?

This idea runs alongside Chapter 11 of The Lens That Changes Everything, on connection returned to its full size. If it’s the kind of thing that stays with you, Being Jonas Wilder brings it into the room, live.