The word ‘relations’ stands for any number of different and sometimes barely compatible concepts in contemporary sociology. No attempt will be made in this brief contribution to tidy things up. Rather I will proffer a general interpretation, a kind of common denominator, then introduce and illustrate how I have sought to use the term in my own work on health-related stigma and health inequalities in the UK. In my writings the terms relations and structures are treated largely as synonyms. I end with a consideration of what I call the ‘jigsaw model’, a heuristic device to facilitate the sociological study of relations in the social worlds we inhabit.