What are relationships anyway?

When we talk about relationships, we usually mean one thing: an intimate, sexual partnership. But in this opening episode of the new season, Clare and Aileen gently dismantle that assumption and widen the lens.

They explore the many kinds of relationships that shape our lives - friendships, family, work, place, community, nature and the relationship we have with ourselves - and why narrowing relationships to romance alone can leave people feeling diminished or less than.

The conversation moves through the hidden hierarchies of friendship (from childhood best friends to adult jealousy), the emotional weight of relationships we don’t choose, and the powerful patterns laid down in our families of origin that quietly replay across our lives. Clare and Aileen reflect on how early dynamics become relational blueprints, often operating beneath our awareness.

A central thread is the relationship with self, not as a slogan, but as a lived, moment-by-moment experience. They talk candidly about being out of the body, stuck in the past or future, and what it means to truly check in with yourself. Through theatre, therapy and lived experience, they explore relationship as something that can exist not only between people, but within us - heart and head, care and control, belonging and exclusion.

Thoughtful, curious and wide-ranging, this episode sets the tone for the season by asking a deceptively simple question: what actually makes something a relationship? and what becomes possible when we stop abandoning ourselves and each other.