The Ontology of Partnership: Being, Status, and the I–Thou Relation in Modern Love

This treatise develops a systematic ontological framework for understanding intimate partnership as a structure of being rather than merely a psychological, sociological, or economic phenomenon. Drawing upon phenomenology, existentialism, dialogical philosophy, and personalism — including Heidegger, Sartre, Buber, Levinas, Berdyaev, and Mounier — the work introduces the concept of the Objective-Structural Content of the Person (OSCP): the irreducible ontological structure underlying personal identity, temporal depth, relational capacity, and selfhood. Across five interconnected parts, the treatise examines: the ontological foundations of personhood, the I–Thou structure of genuine partnership, mechanisms of relational collapse and objectification, the relation between status and ontological integrity, and the conditions required for authentic partnership recovery. The work argues that many relational pathologies commonly interpreted through psychology or sociology are more fundamentally ontological in nature: involving the erosion, displacement, or collapse of personal being itself. Concepts such as vicarious being, ontological domination, temporal autonomy, and status as manifestation are developed as part of a unified interpretive framework. Rather than offering therapeutic advice or moral prescriptions, the treatise seeks to describe the deep structural mechanisms governing recognition, intimacy, dependency, domination, and the preservation of selfhood within human partnership. This work forms part of the broader URCM / Interpretive Engineering research environment.