Relationships as multiple choice questions

Second post of the day, you guessed it right. I am on vacation at home and even after sleeping like a log and meeting all relatives time doesn't pass. So here i am again browsing through the net and blogs. I found a brilliant post by flagstaff on relationships. He writes

"Is it just that in an age obsessed with menus, with choices, with the drop-down box, we have turned even love into a multiple choice question? "How do you feel about this person? Are you a) a friend b) a lover c) a brother or d) a father". What about none of the above? What about Other (please specify)? What about feelings that are open-ended?

Or is it that we have been so poisoned by reason, by our quest for explicability, that the apprehension of another human being in his or her specificity has become impossible for us, and that we can only love people (as we may only hate them) by converting them into abstractions, into the idea of the other rather than the other itself? That having to face up to the reality of who the other person is, to their infinite humanity, is more than we are capable of, so that just as we must ignore what is human about someone to hate him or her, we must also ignore the details of the person we care for, in order to love them? Is this why we give names to our feelings - because we cannot experience them unless they are made intelligible to us, like a child who cannot eat his dinner unless it is cut into bite sized pieces?"

Hmm, i myself always been grappling with many questions on relationships,what to expect? What to give?. Its not in this age that relationships are defined by names, its been there for ever. Because relationship is never absolute, it always relative. And the name that we give define the way we behave. She is a sister , i should behave this way, she is a girlfreind i should behave this way, he is father like i should behave this way. Its the name that defines our relationship notthe other way around.

But what a thought, open ended relationship. How would society be then?