<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # The tender noun is closure, and the transaction... > The tender noun is closure, and the transaction underneath it is exit-cost avoidance. Every relationship is a harvest, and the harvest is real: companionship, sex, housing, care, status, money, the labor of being remembered, the daily administration of another animal's moods. At some point one party's read of the field changes, the alternatives improve or the partner's value falls or the boredom exceeds the comfort, and the relationship becomes a thing to be exited. Exit has two prices, the loss of what the relationship still provides and the cost of the confrontation, the conversation, the tears, the questions, the weeks of the other animal's grief arriving in your notifications, and closure is simply the name civilization gives to the second price when it is paid. It is paid for one reason only, reputation: the leaver explains himself when the two of them share a troop that will hear how he left. Remove the shared troop, and the second price goes to zero. {{Closure is a tax the leaver pays to the coalition both parties belong to. Where there is no shared coalition there is no tax, and where there is no tax there is no closure.}} That is why ghosting migrated from the apps into the four-year cohabitation: the app-era relationship is a pair-bond formed between two animals from different troops, with no overlapping kin, no mutual friends who will ask, no church, no street, no witness, and a relationship with no witness has an exit price of exactly nothing for whichever party moves first. {{Your partner did not vanish because your pain did not matter. Your partner vanished because no one he answered to would ever hear about it.}} {{Silence is not the absence of an explanation. Silence is the price of your suffering, rounded to zero by an animal that could afford to.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “The tender noun is closure, and the transaction underneath it is exit-cost avoidance. Every relationship is a harvest, and the harvest is real: companionship, sex, housing, care, status, money, the labor of being remembered, the daily administration of another animal's moods. At some point one party's read of the field changes, the alternatives improve or the partner's value falls or the boredom exceeds the comfort, and the relationship becomes a thing to be exited. Exit has two prices, the loss of what the relationship still provides and the cost of the confrontation, the conversation, the tears, the questions, the weeks of the other animal's grief arriving in your notifications, and closure is simply the name civilization gives to the second price when it is paid. It is paid for one reason only, reputation: the leaver explains himself when the two of them share a troop that will hear how he left. Remove the shared troop, and the second price goes to zero. Closure is a tax the leaver pays to the coalition both parties belong to. Where there is no shared coalition there is no tax, and where there is no tax there is no closure. That is why ghosting migrated from the apps into the four-year cohabitation: the app-era relationship is a pair-bond formed between two animals from different troops, with no overlapping kin, no mutual friends who will ask, no church, no street, no witness, and a relationship with no witness has an exit price of exactly nothing for whichever party moves first. Your partner did not vanish because your pain did not matter. Your partner vanished because no one he answered to would ever hear about it. Silence is not the absence of an explanation. Silence is the price of your suffering, rounded to zero by an animal that could afford to.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-tender-noun-closure-zero-animal-afford ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->