By Jennifer Vanasco

My friend Alex is bitter about relationships.

“Whatever you do,” she said last night, “is fucking fucked.”

She explained that at the moment she saw no winning. Relationships trapped you and made you personally smaller; or they took away all your energy; or they cut you off from all other sources of support; or they were wellsprings of pain and tension, regret and remonstration.

“Or, if they’re good, then either your partner dies and you’re left grieving and hopeless like Joan Didion, or you die and you’re left to face the fact in the final few minutes of you’re life that you’re leaving your love alone,” she said.

Admittedly, she was coming off a bad day.

Yesterday afternoon she saw her ex-lover, her soul mate, for the first time in a couple months. Their breakup, though long expected, still had whirled her life around and set her grieving.

Then in a rapid succession of phone calls over the next few hours, she learned that the marriage of one of her best friends was over; that another friend’s relationship was souring after a second try; that a third friend was being pulled unexpectedly toward a man when she had always considered herself a lesbian, and it was making her a little crazy.

“Fucking fucked,” she said again.

I can see her point.

Sometimes, relationships can seem ridiculous. And tumultuous. This is especially true, I think, if you’re just out of one, if you’re just starting one, or if you’re one of those people who is just happier being single.

I myself have been trying on “single” for a few years. The last time I lived with someone is now, almost unbelievably to me, four years ago.

During that time, I’ve dated wonderful women, some of whom could have certainly been a next partner. But I wasn’t ready. My previous two partnerships had been all-encompassing and energy draining; I worried about being strong enough to not lose myself a third time.

“Now, though,” I told Alex, “I think I’m actually ready for a long-term relationship. Because I’m not looking for a soulmate or someone to be everything to me. I’m just looking for a companion.”

I have a theory, I said to her. A good relationship, perhaps, is like good soil. It gives you the minimum you need to live: emotional safety, financial security, basic nurturing and caretaking, good and regular sex.

It saves you the energy you would need to look for those things if you didn’t have a partner, and it packs them tightly around your roots, so that you’re given a shot of companionship and succor every day.

And from that good, healthy soil, I said, you grow. You branch out into new interests; you entwine yourself in friends and extended family and community; you work on your career.

“Good relationships liberate you,” she said. “That’s what you’re saying.”

Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying. That’s what I think good relationships can be. To use another metaphor, they don’t have to be a fixer-upper, or a project, or a place of continually rearranged furniture.

They don’t have to be that hard or that much work. They don’t have to be, as lesbians say, “drama.”

They can simply be the home you leave in the morning and the warm place of solace you return to at night, with happy thoughts and touch-base phone calls in between.

I don’t mean that there isn’t any work in relationships. Of course there is. But it seems to me that more and more of my female friends, straight and gay, approach relationships with their heads down and their work gloves on, ready to fix a damaged partner, or root out the damage in themselves, or tweak and jimmy and putter until their relationship is finally their ideal model.

This is interesting, because few of us try to fix our friends or our friendships. We know when to take space from even our best friends; we know that one friend can’t be everything to us; we love our friends’ quirks and eccentricities and are likely to give them a large amount of leeway before we let ourselves get angry.

Why can’t our romantic partnerships be more like these friendships? Why do we invest in the idea that our partner must be perfectly suited to us, or must understand us completely every day?

Of course, I haven’t had a relationship like that. But I hope to. And so, I think, does Alex.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com; read her occasional blog and column archive at jennifervanasco.com.