There is much which can, and partially has already, been said about personal relationships from the standpoint of the norm of inclusivity and the norm of neutrality. Personal relationships must, then, be understood as denoting relationships with people one knows, particularly friendships, whether with relatives or nonrelatives, neighbors or nonneighbors. Being friends adds to personal relationships a dimension of more or less intensely liking each other and of more or less regularly being together or voluntarily doing things together. Friendship could be distinguished from love in that the intensity of liking, or of emotional dependence, is much higher in the case of love, but there is no need to do so: if people who like each other very much are 'friends', this includes 'lovers'. Whether one speaks of "a lover", "mate", "chum", "comrade", "friendly neighbor" or "beloved relative", they all are friends with whom one enjoys being together at certain times (often or always). This may or may not include sharing a household, having sexual or physical contacts with each other, and/or having one or more children in common.

The most drastic institutionalization of personal relationships in religious and religiogenic societies is the institution of wedlock. It is a standard contract drawn up by a religious organization or state in which exclusively two people at a time of exclusively different gender who are not close relatives, are theoretically joined together for life. Under the rules of such a contract, the two partners are traditionally seldom or never united on equal terms: the two sexes have different, that is, unequal and exclusive, rights and responsibilities. To those who have entered the institution, special advantages are often offered in the sphere of, for example, social and parental status, hereditary rights, taxation and accomodation, often regardless of whether the married people concerned look after minors or not. Since wedlock only covers one type of human relationships in which the parties are practically always unequal as well, and since it offers advantages from outside the relationship proper of which other personal relationships are deprived, it must be looked upon as an institution which in its traditional form has always violated sexual inclusivity and interpersonal equality.

Because of a preferential treatment of the relationship of those who are married on a religious or religiogenic basis, other personal relationships are, relatively speaking, made unfavorable. The first relationships to be prevented from developing optimally are, then, friendships of two or more people which do not comply with the prerequisites of the established marriage contract. A clear example is a racist or ethnocentrist country in which persons of a different race or ethnicity are not allowed to marry or even to have sexual contacts. But personal relationships are not only made unfavorable by illegalizing them or by depriving them of matrimonial equality, they can also be made unfavorable by more or less hidden prejudices and customs. Thus it may be legally possible to marry somebody of a different ethnic group, of a different social class or of a different political party, yet the social pressure not to get involved in such a relationship may be so strong that this is felt as a serious restraint. And prejudices are not only found in opinions; they are also found in expectations. The most notorious of these expectations are what 'people (parents, neighbors, friends or relatives) might think of it'. It is under such circumstances that factors such as ethnicity, class, ideological belief, gender, job, education, and so on, were, or still are, used to break off friendships or to harass human beings who love or like each other.

Relationships are equal, regardless of whether the persons involved belong, say, to the same race, family, gender, class, or age, or to a different race, family, gender, class or age, so long as these persons want the relationship and are mature enough to show decision in their refusals or consents. Granted that the people involved agree among themselves and respect the personal rights of others, no system of relationships of more than two human beings, for example, of one man and two women, or of one woman and two men, is inferior to relationships of only two human beings. Hence, a law which allows a man to be wedded to several women at once (or a custom which allows a man to have a 'mistress' in addition to his wife), and not a woman to be wedded to several men at once (or to have a 'mister' in addition to her husband), is nothing else than an illegitimate hybrid of sexual and matrimonial exclusivism.

Sexual relationships of which children are born definitely demand special attention. In fact a common offspring is the most concrete confirmation of a relationship between human or other sexual beings. Because children are not capable of providing for their own needs of safety, food and shelter, mature beings are required to care for them. However, such does not mean that children need exclusively or necessarily to be brought up by their biological parents, particularly not in a culture that no longer discriminates between so-called 'legitimate children', children born out of wedlock and step-children, and particularly not in a culture where the material 'ties of blood' are no mental 'ties of conduct', that is, reasons for exlusiveness or exclusion, anymore. But when there is no good alternative, the procreators have the first responsibility for the satisfaction of the children's needs. In the relationship of one man and one woman both are equally responsible; in general, all partners have this responsibility together, or may have this responsibility instead of (exclusively) the biological parent or parents. As soon as the child is no longer helpless and shows decision on its own, this responsibility terminates. Until this stage is reached the norm of well-being requires that a child shall not be left to its fate.

The institution of wedlock can be stripped of exclusivisms and impingements of the right to personhood by incorporating it into an inclusive system of personal contracts. Such a system is to be inclusive in that it shall not make the formalization of any kind of personal relationship impossible: any group of two or more persons (male, female, both or neither) has the right to enter into any personal contract, the conditions being determined by the partners of that contract themselves. Such an agreement may specify the terms on which two or more people decide to live together, the terms defining the social aspects of their sexuality towards each other and towards outsiders, the pecuniary and fiscal terms, and possibly also the terms regulating the responsibility for children entering into the relationship. The participants should also determine themselves for how long the contract will be valid and what will be the penalty (if any) for breaking it. The binding nature of a family contract may automatically come to an end, for instance, when the last child reaches the age of majority (as defined in advance).

Characteristic of an inclusive system of contracts is the personal consent of the people involved: every decision to which the contract applies directly has to be unanimous, inclusive of the decision to give a mandate to one or more particular persons. The situation in exclusivist countries where a man can only marry one woman, or can marry several women in different wedding ceremonies without being legally bound by the consent of his other wife or wives, is far different from the situation where a person can have a formalized relationship with one or more other persons who together voluntarily agree to enter into such a relationship. The prerequisite that the acceptance of new partners has the unanimous consent of all who are bound by the contract indicates that it formalizes a personal relationship and not just membership of a social group like an association or a union.

A contract is not simply an agreement between two or more persons (or parties) but a binding agreement. If it were merely a useful agreement, people could forget about it as soon as it would turn out not to be useful anymore. Similarly, if it solely served neutral-inclusivity, it would not be wrong in any way to leave the contract for what it is as soon as breaking the contract served neutral-inclusivity better. What makes a contract binding (in the normative sense) is what makes a promise or a threat binding in the first place, namely the principle of truth. It is this principle which demands that we keep our promises and observe our contractual duties. This does not mean that we actually must do, or refrain from doing, certain things in the future, because every promise or contract makes an im- or ex-plicit use of exceptive clauses. In general this is the condition that one shall do, or refrain from doing, something, unless the other person or persons concerned give permission to do or not to do this (because it is the other party's preference which counts in a promise). If such an exceptive clause were not somehow part of the promise or contract, one would still violate the principle of truth even tho one's partner(s) would not mind if one did not do what one had promised. Not doing what one has promised would, then, still be wrong from a truth-conditional point of view, whereas it is not actually wrong with the proviso that one can be relieved by someone else of one's promisory or contractual duty if there are good reasons for not doing what was promised. (Dependent on the weight attached to the proviso, it may remain prima facie wrong from the purely truth-conditional point of view nevertheless.)

To stick to one's promises and to observe what one has agreed upon in a personal relationship, whether by means of a contract or not, is what is called "faithfulness". Faithfulness is a truth-conditional normative concept and has no bearing on the content of a contract or on what has been promised. What has been promised may be wrong from the perspective of a neutral-inclusive subnorm, yet to keep one's promise is always right in terms of the principle of truth. Exclusivist moralists love confusing these things. Equating moral with normative in matters of sexuality they are obsessed with a negative, sexual conception of faithfulness in which partner relations must be, and remain, monogamous or exclusive under all circumstances (at least for the woman). For them faithful merely means not having or having had intercourse with anyone else, if not not having intercourse with anyone at all, for the relationship may be, or have become, devoid of any erotic significance. Such a negative conception of faithfulness is quite different from the positive one which demands of the people concerned that they keep their relationship going, also (and perhaps primarily) in the erotic respect (provided that it was meant to have an erotic component). Positive faithfulness does not possessively and jealously preclude relations or contacts with others, unless it has been promised not to get involved in such relations, or not to have such contacts. Thus faithfulness is not firmness in adherence to the doxastic values of supernaturalist, exclusivist or extremist ideologies; faithfulness is firmness in adherence to agreements with other people, whatever the contents of these agreements may be.