Some people consider equality is important in a relationhip. While I consider fairness important, I am not as concerned with equality. Why?
I'm not sure I could identify equality. It often seems a case of apples and oranges. If I love to cook, and my partner has a easy "method" for washing dishes, is it an even exchange if I cook and partner washes?
And, as a mathematician, to me equality is abstract and impossible. Do my partners and I *all* have to make *exactly* $45,361/year, for example?
There's the whole question, of whether the newer participants in a group relationship can ever be "equal" to the members already in the relationship (who may have been involved for years before the latest person arrived). But that also applies, doesn't it, to children born at different times? Was I less loved by my parents than my sisters, who were much older than I?
But I know that equality is important; and I know that some people have high demands for equality in their relationships.
The original suggestion for this topic, actually, had to do with the asymmetries people in a relatinship may have around what they want from the relationship. Some people may want romance, some may want sex, some may want stability. Can people who want different things form a useful relationship?
Come share your ideas with us on the 20th!
A little side-note: I am on the verge of finishing reading The Farewell Symphony, by Edmund White (which I started reading -- oh! -- in 1997...). White is a well-known gay writer, describing gay America in the era after the Stonewall Riots but before the onset of AIDS. My sense is, he found the "grand promiscuity" of those times tremendously creative. Whereas I have always tied sex to affection, he never did (at least then). Could the two of us have formed a relationship? Probably not. It would have been too "asymmetric".