A phone number is not a relationship. You know this the moment you're standing in a grocery store aisle twelve days before a birthday, trying to remember whether your aunt switched to gluten-free last year or whether that was your cousin. You have her number. You do not have the answer.
The standard contacts app was designed for one thing: dialing. It was never meant to hold the texture of a relationship — the context, the history, the details that make someone feel genuinely seen.
What Gets Forgotten Without a System
Relationships have operational data that nobody tracks because there's never been a good place to put it. Gift history is the most obvious failure: you gave your brother-in-law a bottle of single malt for his birthday in 2023, your partner's parents got a ceramic set for Christmas, and your college roommate is still waiting for you to remember she moved to a different address two years ago.
The Gifts Given field is a log, not a wishlist. It's the thing you check before you buy anything, so you're not repeating yourself across years. The Gift Ideas field runs parallel — when someone mentions offhand in March that they've been wanting to try home fermentation, you have somewhere to put that before you forget it by December.
Diet Preferences is the field most contact systems ignore entirely. When you're hosting twelve people for a holiday dinner and three of them have dietary restrictions, you're either pulling from memory or you're texting everyone individually at 10 PM the night before. With this field filled in across your whole contact list, the pre-party prep takes five minutes instead of forty.
The Relationship Layer Nobody Else Captures
The How Met field is deceptively simple. You met Sarah at a work conference in 2019, introduced by a mutual contact who has since left that company. Six years later, when you're trying to remember the origin of that connection before a professional introduction, that sentence saves you from an embarrassing blank.
Significant Other 1, 2, and 3 handles the reality that human relationships don't fit into a spouse/no-spouse binary. Partners, long-term companions, close family adjacents — you can name them and track them without forcing the structure into categories that don't fit. Children gets its own field because knowing someone has a three-year-old changes how you schedule a call, what time you don't show up, and whether the Christmas gift is aimed at the adult or the household.
The Group field — Family, Friend, Work Contact — combined with Memento's filtering means you can pull up every family contact before a reunion, every work contact before a conference, without scrolling through an undifferentiated list of 400 names.
Shared in a Family Group
The design intent behind this template is collaborative: it's meant to live in a shared Memento group where multiple family members can contribute and read. One person adds the new address when someone moves. Another fills in diet restrictions after the last dinner party. The gift log gets updated after birthdays so nobody else doubles up.
That shared context is what makes the database worth maintaining. A contact list you update alone stays personal. A contact list the whole family maintains becomes institutional memory — the kind that means someone always knows what grandma actually wants for her birthday, even if the person who thought to ask isn't the one doing the shopping.