12. What do relationships mean to you?

Note: This is not the actual question that the challenge has for day 12. I apparently did day 12 on day 6 and since I don’t actually like the real question for day 6, I replaced it with my own.
When I say that I’m in a relationship with someone, I tend to use it as shorthand for being in a romantic and sexual partnership with someone.
But the thing is, relationship is such a general one – it just means the state of how you relate with an individual person (Merriam-Webster says: the state of being related or interrelated/the relation connecting or binding participants in a relationship/a state of affairs existing between those having relations or dealings/a romantic or passionate attachment). So I have relationships with my housemates, the resident cat and dog, the neighbors across the street, my metamours, my boss, etc…. Yeah, I think that’s the reason we tend to narrow it down to the last definition.
So I don’t usually say that I’m in a “relationship” with someone (versus “seeing someone” or “going on dates with someone”) until we’ve made a solid commitment to moving forward together. It could be something as simple as a statement of intent or choosing of title terms (like boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever).