'Looking' recap, 'Looking for Sanctuary'

We do not define our relationships with others as much as they define us. They shape and reshape our emotions -- often providing us with little say over the matter -- and drive us forward even as they complicate our lives.

How we function in them, how we choose to convey them, and how we honor them or toss them aside or stay in them despite being pulled in different directions is also one way, for better or worse, in which we imprint our morals, our character and our place in the world on the minds of everyone else in our lives.

Whether we happen to be gay or straight doesn't change this, even if others' preconceived notions about how gay relationships differ from straight ones affect the impressions they form of us.

The second-to-last episode of the second season of "Looking" on HBO, titled "Looking for Sanctuary," asks us to consider all of this. And in doing so, it provides a compelling argument for the series' universality even as it solidifies its unique place in the modern television landscape, as a show aimed squarely at the social forces defining one of our generation's greatest civil rights struggles: achieving through policy what many of us already know to be true in essence, which is that gay people live and love and form bonds just like everyone else.

Love and commitment and marriage aren't perfect ideals in the straight world being threatened by the incursion of gay and lesbian couples. They are the manifestations of the complicated, emotional relationships that we form and that define us all as humans, and benchmarks against which we all should be allowed to strive.

When Patrick and Kevin said they love each other last episode, I predicted the theme of love and all its ramifications would carry the season through to its conclusion. Such is the weight of the word that its being raised at all means its presence will linger.

In "Looking for Sanctuary," we feel that weight strongly.

Patrick and Kevin are moving ahead in their relationship -- moving in together? -- and that means meeting the family. 

Patrick's sister -- who is friends with Kevin's ex-boyfriend Jon -- disapproves, and lets Kevin know that she believes his being gay gives him cover for the questionable nature of how his relationship began. (That is, with Kevin cheating on Jon with him.)

Patrick's mother -- who shows unexpected warmth toward Kevin and Patrick and for their try at love -- reveals she is considering leaving Patrick's father for another man who she has developed strong feelings for.

We see Agustin push Eddie to acknowledge their relationship as something more than friends, even as a run-in with Agustin's ex-boyfriend shows us that the connections of one's past don't disintegrate as new connections form.

Doris, meanwhile, seems to be reconsidering her friendship with Dom as a possible impediment to her finding real love with Malik.

Yes, "Looking" is a show about gay life and gay relationships and gay love. But, as is the case in real life, those relationships exist within the broader world, which is one where straight relationships are just as complicated.

This episode is powerful in that it puts gay and straight relationships together, for consideration and comparison, without any mechanism for categorizing them separately. It says, in no unclear terms, that gay relationships aren't any different, at a base level, than straight relationships, regardless of what Patrick's sister might think.

Patrick's mother, for one, seems to be starting to understand that for the first time, in part by understanding in her own life that love and relationships are not black and white.

It's not far-fetched to think there are viewers out there who have also come to understand gay relationships more, through watching "Looking."

That is a powerful possibility for a TV show that some have dismissed as being weightless or about too little.

It is not.