> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://intend-to-relate.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Intend to Relate Podcast: S1E1 - URL: https://intend-to-relate.ghost.io/the-intend-to-relate-podcast/ - Published: 2026-10-05T09:47:36.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-05T10:26:40.000Z - Author: Intend to Relate - Tags: Podcasts, The Intend to Relate Podcast ## [Season One, Episode One: My Intention Toward You](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3660MX4T64jAGCblA5tGhX?si=k6LNpybvTSOU2eET3SSAcA&ref=intend-to-relate.ghost.io) ### Building Intentional Relational Intelligence *What if some of the suffering in relationships does not come from loving too much, but from leaving too much unstated?* Intend to Relate begins with an invitation. Relationships are filled with assumptions about what another person wants, what a relationship means, what role someone occupies, what the future holds, and what one person owes another. Sometimes those understandings are genuinely shared. Sometimes they exist in only one person's head. That distinction matters. This opening episode introduces the basic proposition behind **Intend to Relate**: we can increase human freedom and creativity in relationships by becoming more capable of identifying what we want, expressing it honestly, discovering what another person actually intends, and deliberately choosing what—if anything—we will create together. The aim is not to prescribe one correct model of relationship. It is to develop **relational intelligence**: the growing ability to understand our desires, communicate them truthfully, recognize what others are actually offering, and choose well together. The source material defines that capacity as something developed through active relating and reflection, rather than merely through age or accumulated experience. Notebook - Briefing Doc Report A central move is simple: **Turn private wishes into explicit invitations.** Rather than silently assigning another adult a role and becoming disappointed when they fail to perform it, we can state what we actually want in a form the other person can answer. That answer may be yes. It may be no. It may be a counteroffer. What matters is that there is something real between the parties to respond to. The episode develops that idea through relational **rosters**, the distinction between foundational worth and an aim-specific **MVP**, changing relational **seasons**, and the movement from private assumptions toward explicitly named arrangements. Notebook - Briefing Doc Report It also introduces an ethical foundation for the wider project. The **Four Relational Duties** are: **Expression** — Make what you want clear enough to be answered. **Disclosure** — Tell the other person what their decision materially depends upon. **Inquiry** — Ask about what your own participation requires. **Assertion** — State your limits and act upon them. Those duties place responsibility on both sides of an encounter. You are responsible for asking about the conditions important to your participation. The other person is responsible for not exploiting your ignorance of information they know would materially affect your decision. Notebook - Briefing Doc Report The episode then introduces several recurring relational archetypes: the **Sheep**, **Wolf**, **Snake**, **Dove**, and **Sovereign**. The point is not merely to identify wolves and snakes across the table. It is to recognize pressure, concealment, vulnerability, and failures of discernment in ourselves as well. Notebook - Briefing Doc Report The larger invitation is therefore neither romantic idealism nor relationship bureaucracy. It is to become more capable of relating deliberately. To ask rather than assume. To disclose rather than manipulate. To assert rather than silently resent. And to create relationships whose meaning arises from what the people involved have actually chosen. --- ## Key Ideas ### Relational Intelligence The capacity to know what we want, communicate truthfully, recognize what another person is offering, and choose well together. ### Private Wishes → Explicit Invitations Wanting something does not make another person responsible for supplying it. A private desire can instead become a proposition another sovereign person is able to answer. ### Rosters and MVPs We carry mental models of the people in our lives and the places they occupy relative to particular aims: companion, playmate, co-parent, muse, and many others. Those imagined positions are useful for understanding ourselves, but they do not give us authority to appoint someone else to them. Notebook - Briefing Doc Report ### Seasons What we want can change. A new relational season invites review and renegotiation; it does not silently amend an existing understanding. Notebook - Briefing Doc Report ### The Four Relational Duties Expression. Disclosure. Inquiry. Assertion. Together they provide a basic ethics for relationships in which participation is intended to remain informed and freely chosen. --- # Show Notes & Chapters **00:00 — Invitation** The podcast-listener relationship, limited power exchange, retained judgment, and the invitation to explore the framework. **02:03 — Author's Intentions** Why the work exists, what it hopes to change, and what authority the author is—and is not—asking the listener to grant. **04:24 — Relational Archetypes** The author's dogs as "MVP babies," frozen rosters, relational responsibility, completion, and finite love. **07:00 — Human Relationships** Why adult humans cannot simply be assigned relational roles; converting private wishes into invitations; Jack and Jill; rosters, MVPs, seasons, and relational intelligence. **12:29 — Ethical Framework** Expression, disclosure, inquiry, and assertion; ethical and unethical instrumentalism; the Sheep, Wolf, Snake, Dove, and Sovereign. **15:20 — The Book's Challenge** The wider intellectual foundations, the God Roster question, the invitation to test the framework in lived relationships, and the return of judgment to the listener. ### Thinkers and traditions referenced Jesus — love and relational priority Friedrich Nietzsche — revaluation and inquiry into what we have truly loved Carl Jung — the shadow Joseph Campbell — departure, initiation, and return Plato — orienting ideals and patterns Alfred North Whitehead — becoming, process, and finite relationships Ludwig Wittgenstein — language and its limits --- # [Transcript](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-intend-to-relate-podcast/id6815002090?ref=intend-to-relate.ghost.io) ### 00:00 — Invitation You're listening to the Intend to Relate Podcast, published by Intend2Relate, LLC. Intend to Relate is interested in expanding human freedom and creativity in relationships. We would like to enter into a non-exclusive podcast-listener relationship involving a short-term limited power-exchange dynamic, where you consent to considering some ideas as we present them while retaining your judgment and critical thinking. We do not seek a deed to your mind in this relationship. We ask for your assent to go on a journey with us into some ideas and tools regarding relationships. If you assent, let's Intend to Relate. Before the book, an invitation. Intend to Relate is a project of relational innovation for a changing America: language, perspectives, and practical tools for understanding what already happens between us and imagining what else we might create. *Assention* is a forthcoming founding volume in a wider canon. We are offering a framework, not a requirement. Describing a relationship does not mean prescribing it to you. You may take one useful idea from this work and never write an agreement. Our declaration puts the purpose plainly: **We do not declare independence from one another. We declare independence so that we may choose one another freely.** There are tools for understanding aims, roles, seasons, and commitments; for asking, negotiating, creating, caring, and defending a boundary. There is room for ethical transactionalism, devotion, play, and love. Giving and receiving do not cancel meaning. There is room for spiritual inquiry too—a simple invitation to begin with light and presence. We want people to be sovereign and good, to recognize coercion and deception, including in ourselves. **Serpent wisdom, never serpent methods.** And when we give our word, to make it something another person can rely on—to honor what we undertake and speak honestly when circumstances change. The voice is direct: candor, backbone, and manners updated for a changing world. --- ### 02:03 — Author's Intentions What follows is **My Intention Toward You**. My pen name is L'republique Z'jip. On behalf of Intend to Relate, I would like to enter into a non-exclusive, platonic author-reader relationship with you. There: an intention, a proposed relationship, and a couple of terms. We have already begun with an invitation. Here is the short-term power exchange I'm proposing. You let me lead you through an argument. I choose the order, introduce the vocabulary, offer examples, and ask you to look at some familiar things differently. What I ask for is your consent to read or listen. You may assent to taking that journey with me without agreeing that my conclusions are yours. Your judgment stays with you. Question me. Disagree. Decide what you will take into your own life. You can put the book down. I'm asking for your attention, not the deed to your mind. I'm going to use some of the vocabulary before I have explained it. Let the words work for a little while. We will return to them—and to what I have just asked of you—before we are done. #### What this book is for There is more suffering in our relational lives than there needs to be. Some of it comes with loving: missing someone, wanting them home, waiting for a return, facing the fact that even a good relationship cannot give us all the time we would like. I'm not talking about all of that as though it were a drafting error. I mean the expectation nobody stated that became disappointment and frustration. The role assigned without asking that became a power game. The future implied and never meant, followed by the realization that somebody had been building toward it. The truth withheld until another person had built a life around its absence. We can do something about that. I want you to love more, want more, play more. Discover more of what is possible between people who can tell each other the truth. I want you to have room to ask for something you have never known how to ask for—and enough understanding to recognize it when someone offers it. The possibilities are mind-blowingly expansive. But look at the relationships around you, and the ones you are living. Are they what you hope relationships can be? Do you know what you hope for? --- ### 04:24 — Relational Archetypes This book is about relationships, relationship agreements, and rosters. There's quite a lot coming. Let me begin with a relationship that was simple enough to hold in my arms. My MVP babies. Their MVP human. Our agreement. The baby-child archetypal roster. My two pups were my babies. In the language of this book, they occupied the baby-child archetypal place in my life. As I understood our life together, I was their human. I was their home. I knew what I was taking on when I brought them home. Dogs can have all sorts of places in a life: hunting dogs, barn dogs, assistance dogs, police dogs. The place I was choosing for these two was **my boys**. The responsibility I was choosing for myself was to be their human. I would love them and take care of them. They would be my good boys, love me, and let me know what they needed. That was our agreement as I understood and lived it. They were quite good at letting me know. Rules were another matter. They were frequent practitioners of unethical instrumentalism: barking, begging, Jedi mind tricks, using their human to get stuff. Personal space was apparently a subject for somebody else's book. There was a lot of transactional love. Sometimes I would make them do something to get a treat. Sometimes I would give them a treat so they could express their love for me by going into the kitchen and lying down. There was plenty of exchange. There was no invoice for being loved. On my baby-child roster, they were my MVPs. Both of them. It was a frozen roster. No competition. They did not have to wake up each morning and outperform another dog to keep their place. I had chosen my boys. I had chosen to be their human. Then one suddenly got sick just before Christmas. The other shortly afterward. I did what I had agreed to do. I took care of my boys. And when I had to let them go, I held them in my arms as I had held them as puppies. I would have loved more time. But my undertaking was to care for them. It was not to make them remain for as long as I wanted them. Our relationship was completed and fulfilled. In their absence, I have gained something else: perspective on all that I gained in that relationship, and gratitude for it. An ex-girlfriend's family once told me that dogs were the closest we could get to God on Earth. I will leave their denomination out of it. I did not understand what they meant then. I understand something of it now. The love. The wanting you home. The joy of being your person's person. That was our relationship. --- ### 07:00 — Human Relationships Now carry the architecture with you and notice where the comparison has to change. My boys were dogs. They were not adults negotiating across the table from me, and they were never going to grow up into people. I chose their place in my life, taught them our routines, and accepted responsibility for their care. Their need for that care did not depend on their keeping every rule. A human baby does not negotiate the terms of being cared for either. A child grows toward a different capacity and independence. An adult arrives with a life and a will of their own. The roles may share a recognizable shape. The authority and responsibilities are not interchangeable. So a woman who has had one lovely date with a man cannot appoint him her boyfriend, turn up at his apartment unannounced, and bark until he lets her in. She can decide she likes him. She can decide she wants more. She can call and tell him so. "I liked being with you. I'd like to come over. Are you free?" Perhaps he is playing video games, smoking a little pot, drifting through his evening. She has a different proposition. "Put the controller down for an hour or two, and I'll bake you a pie"—or read scripture with him, or whatever she actually wants to offer. The sky is the limit on imagination. His answer still matters. He can like the proposition, counter it, or want his evening as it is. They might create a lovely evening. They have not thereby settled the boyfriend question. That is another conversation. Notice what happened. She did not have to become less interested. She did not have to wait for him to guess. **She turned a private wish into an invitation another person could answer.** #### How I intend to speak to you I write from a leader's or dominance tendency. I mean an inclination of personality and character, not a rank I have awarded myself. I am comfortable taking initiative, offering direction, and accepting responsibility when someone recognizes what I offer and asks me to lead. There is a difference between being asked to take a position and deciding that somebody else ought to submit to it. Later, we will look at that difference in the dominant-submissive context, including the submissive's initiative and request. Here, it concerns how I speak and what authority you choose to give those words. This book instructs. It will tell you to ask a question, write something down, examine a habit, or stop doing something you may be rather fond of. I will say what I think. You will not have to excavate my position from a heap of "perhaps you might consider." That directness is an offer of leadership, not a way around your judgment. I can tell you plainly what I think you should do. You can consider it plainly and decide otherwise. The old king, whom you will meet shortly, claims authority that nobody actually gave him. He can live in a label, a tradition, a private expectation, or a speaker convinced that sounding certain entitles him to obedience. I have no intention of giving him a new book to hide in. That is why I began with our proposed author-reader relationship. That is the limited power exchange I am offering. I lead the presentation. You remain responsible for what becomes your own. #### The model, running Jack and Jill are at breakfast. Jill assumes Sunday dinner will be with her family. Jack assumes Sunday is his to do as he pleases. Neither has asked the other. Each may feel wronged when the other fails to honor a plan that existed in only one head. Their willingness to be together has not answered the Sunday question. Consent is necessary. It does not by itself supply the meaning of every undertaking. What is missing here is **assent to an arrangement both can name**. "Are we going to your family's this Sunday?" Then an answer, perhaps a counteroffer, and something they actually choose. Add intention—a direction they mean to take together—and there is more shared meaning in the relationship. Two private Sundays can become one chosen plan. It need not be a document. It needs to be something both understand. Now widen the view. Jack holds a roster: a mental model of the people in his life and the place each occupies with respect to his aims. Playmate. Companion. Co-parent. Muse. These are relational ideals he may be reaching for, not jobs he can assign merely by wanting someone in them. Jill has her own life, her own aims, and her own answer. Jack's foundational worth—what this book connects to the **true MVP**—is not awarded by anyone on a competitive roster. Jill may become immensely valuable to him without becoming a person who decides whether his life matters. An **aim-specific MVP** is a different question. Who is actually right for the relationship he seeks? And is that a relationship they choose too? Seasons change. What Jack wanted at 26 may differ from what he wants at 38. He has to pay attention to that and speak about it, rather than leave Jill to discover a new arrangement through his behavior. A change of season is a reason for review and renegotiation—not an amendment the other person has already accepted. The growing capacity to understand what you want, say it truthfully, recognize what is being offered, and choose well together is **relational intelligence**. It develops through relating and examining what you learn. Years and partner counts do not do that work for you. --- ### 12:29 — Ethical Framework I want people to be sovereign, free, and good. Free love is not very free when somebody else is left paying for your dishonesty. Four duties run through this work. **Expression.** Make what you want clear enough to be answered. **Disclosure.** Tell the other person what their decision materially depends on. **Inquiry.** Ask about what your own participation requires. **Assertion.** Say your limits and act on them. You are responsible for asking about your particular requirements. I am responsible for not making your ignorance the instrument of my advantage. You will meet the sheep, the wolf, the snake, and the dove. The sheep is exposed. The wolf takes through pressure or force. The snake gets an apparent yes by deception. The dove means well and can get eaten for it. These figures are not only for identifying everybody else's conduct. The sovereign has to be willing to look inward too. Where am I exposed? Where have I pushed instead of asked? What have I concealed because the truth might change the answer? Where has my goodness lacked discernment? There is ethical instrumentalism. We want things from each other, and we have things to give. The honest exchange can be affectionate, playful, practical, profound. There is also the other kind. Conceal the objective, borrow the language of love, and collect the benefits of a relationship the other person never knowingly chose. I want people to be good to each other. That means more than learning to spot wolves and snakes. It means confronting those methods in ourselves and moving from coercion and deception toward honest, freely chosen exchange. #### Whose shoulders? Jesus, first and foremost. Mark 12:30–31. And Nietzsche, for revaluing values and asking the question that opens your own history to you: **What have you truly loved until now?** Jung for the shadow, and the work of discovering that the wolves and snakes were never only across the table. Campbell for departure, initiation, and return. Go out, learn, and bring something home into the way you live. From Plato, I take the thought of a pattern that can orient a life. From Whitehead, a language for sacredness that responds to becoming rather than demanding that life stand still. **A finite love honorably lived is not made unreal by ending.** That conviction runs through this book, and through what I have told you about my boys. Wittgenstein helps me ask what can be said and where speech reaches its limits. The further obligation I place here is mine: Do not hide behind those limits when you could tell somebody a truth they need to understand what you are asking of them. --- ### 15:20 — The Book's Challenge I am offering you a language, an architecture, a set of instruments, and an argument. You have to do the work. Ask. Listen. Choose. Build the relationships. Recognize the snakes. And experience the love you are here to live. A book can offer a way of looking. You have the life in which to try it. Read it slowly. Study it. Come back to what catches you. Some of this may seem strange before the pieces connect. Some may give a name to something you have understood for years. And carry this question with you: **Everybody has a God roster. Which one is your MVP?** By that, I am asking what you have allowed to become ultimate. God. Sex. Being chosen. A particular person whose answer you have allowed to decide whether your life matters. You do not need to become religious to examine the authority you have handed something. Before you ask another person to be everything, find out what everything means to you. Now, about the words I used before explaining them. You have already seen a roster become a commitment, an agreement lived through care, a private wish become an invitation, and two assumptions become a question. The rest of the book gives those things their fuller language and argument. Come back to this introduction afterward and see what you recognize. That is the relationship I am offering you. I will give you my attention in the work and tell you what I actually think. You decide whether to walk through it with me. I am not going to pretend to be somebody else to keep you here. I give zero fucks about chasing anything less than honest, freely given assent. I am not here to convert anybody. I am here to offer something worth considering. All my go toward what we can create together through loving, intentional, and free assentions. You've been listening to the Intend to Relate Podcast, published by Intend2Relate, LLC. Our short-term podcast-listener relationship is now complete. You retain your judgment, your critical thinking, and your freedom to accept, reject, revise, or carry forward any idea we have explored together. We do not ask you to surrender your mind to us. We hope only that something here has helped you see yourself, another person, or a relationship with greater clarity and possibility. Thank you for going on this journey with us. Until next time: **Be free, and be good to each other—intentionally.**