Week 5: Object Specificity: Why Substitutes Stop Working

What it means for a relationship to become specific to one counterparty, and why that's the point past which "just meet someone else" stops helping

22 March 2027

Early on, most of what a relationship provides is fungible — someone to talk to, someone to do things with, categories a reasonable number of people could fill. Object specificity is the process by which those categories narrow to one name: the shared history, in-jokes, and calibrated understanding of a particular person become a large share of what’s actually being provided, and no substitute delivers it at the same price.

This is the variable that makes “there are plenty of fish in the sea” true early and false later. It isn’t false because the sea empties; it’s false because the thing that mattered stopped being generically available and started being specific to one counterparty. Recognising when a case has crossed that line is most of this week’s work, and most of the position paper due this week.

Outline#

• fungible versus specific provision, and the line between them
• why specificity, not attraction or dependency alone, explains why breakups hurt in proportion to history rather than to how the relationship started
• the position paper: classify a case using every variable introduced so far (framing, attraction, reliability, dependency, specificity)
• what “the model application” criterion in the marking scheme is actually checking for