Connecting Isn't the Same as Relating: The Trap of Confusing Networks With Bonds

“Connecting” and “relating” sound almost like synonyms, but Zygmunt Bauman argues they aren’t: a relationship obligates, a connection doesn’t. In Liquid Love (2003), he explains why that shift in vocabulary, which looks like a minor detail, both reveals and reinforces a completely different way of bonding with others.

Bauman observes that people increasingly talk, helped and prompted by counselors and popularizers, about “connections,” about “connecting” and “being connected,” instead of talking about “relating” and “relationships.” Instead of couples, they prefer to talk about “networks.” The question he asks directly is this: what advantage comes from talking about connections instead of relationships?

The difference, explained step by step

Unlike words like “relationship,” “couple,” or “kinship,” which highlight mutual commitment and leave out, or at least make uncomfortable, its opposite (disengagement), the “network” represents something different by design. Bauman’s reasoning can be followed in three steps:

1. A relationship excludes its opposite. Being “in a relationship” implies, almost by definition, not being able to simultaneously be “out of it” without breaking it. Commitment and disengagement don’t hold the same status: one is the norm, the other the exception that needs explaining.
2. A network includes both states equally. Connecting and disconnecting are, within a network, two equally legitimate activities carrying the same weight. It makes no sense, Bauman notes, to ask which of the two constitutes “the essence” of a network, because neither is more essential than the other.
3. That symmetry changes what can be demanded. If connecting and disconnecting are worth the same, nobody can claim that another “should” stay connected, the way you can demand fidelity within a committed relationship.

Why an “undesirable connection” doesn’t exist

Bauman arrives at a distinction worth pausing on. An “undesirable but indissoluble” relationship is precisely what makes it risky: you can end up trapped in a bond you no longer want, with no easy way out. An “undesirable connection,” on the other hand, is a straight-up oxymoron under his framework: connections, by their very nature, dissolve long before becoming detestable. The very design of a network builds the exit into the system, not as an awkward exception that has to be negotiated.

An example of how this shows up in real life

Consider two different ways of answering the same question: “so what’s going on between you two?” Someone who’s “in a relationship” has to give an answer that implies commitment, even if informal: “we’re together,” “we’re seeing each other seriously.” Someone who prefers to describe the same bond as “we’re connected” or “we have a thing” leaves the door open for that connection to be cut tomorrow without anyone having to announce a formal breakup. It isn’t just a matter of timid vocabulary: it’s a way of preserving, through language, the same emergency exit Bauman describes throughout the rest of his analysis of liquid love.

The model that ends up taking over all the rest

Bauman draws on an image from economics to explain something even more unsettling: he compares what happens with virtual relationships, rebranded as “connections,” to Gresham’s law, according to which lower-quality currency tends to drive higher-quality currency out of circulation. His argument is that this lighter model, easier to set up and to cut, ends up becoming the reference point that also starts governing relationships that, in theory, aspired to something more lasting and committed. It’s no coincidence, he adds, that connections are, in his own words, “tailor-made” for an environment of shifting jobs and frequent moves: they demand far less underlying stability than a traditional relationship.

Something gained, something lost

Bauman sums up the result of this shift without falling into a simplistic verdict: he doesn’t claim that people who adopt the language of connections are unhappier than they were before, when that language didn’t yet exist, nor that they’re happier. “Something is gained, something is lost,” he writes. To see it clearly, it helps to separate both columns:

• What’s gained: less risk, less exposure, a greater sense of control over when to start and when to end a bond, and the ability to sustain many connections at once without the emotional overload of several committed relationships simultaneously.
• What’s lost: harder to name, precisely because the vocabulary available to describe it (that of “relationship” and “commitment”) is exactly what’s falling out of use. It includes, among other things, the certainty that someone will still be there even once the connection stops being comfortable.

A matter of vocabulary with real consequences

How someone names a bond (as “a thing,” as “being connected,” as “dating,” as “being together”) isn’t a minor detail, it’s a signal of what level of commitment they’re willing to acknowledge out loud. Assertive communication starts precisely from naming things with precision, including your own level of involvement in a bond, instead of leaving that question permanently open under the comfortable ambiguity of “being connected.”

Networks of friends, not just of partners

Bauman’s analysis isn’t limited to romance. The same network logic applies to friendship: having dozens or hundreds of contacts available to “connect” with at any moment doesn’t automatically equal sustaining the dense, committed bonds that defined friendship for centuries. Telling the two apart, without needing to give up either, is part of what the confidant friend profile explores, centered precisely on that dense, time-sustained kind of bond.

Conclusion: naming the bond is also deciding what to expect from it

Bauman’s distinction between relating and connecting isn’t a semantic exercise without consequences. The language a person chooses to describe a bond (with their partner, with their friends, with their network of contacts) reveals how much commitment they’re willing to take on and how much they expect from the other side. Neither word is, in itself, better: a well-sustained network can provide real companionship, and a poorly sustained relationship can be a cage. What Bauman ultimately asks is that we pay attention to the word being used, because it almost always gives away, better than any explicit declaration, how willing a person is to let that bond depend on something more than the convenience of the moment.