To form or even to define a relation you need some sort of entity to have a relation with.

My wife would have probably gone postal (angry-mad) if I had tried to form an improper relationship with her. It turns out that I needed a concept of woman, girlfriend and man, boyfriend and then navigate the complexities involved to invoke a wedding to turn the dis-joint sets of {woman} and {man} to form the set of {married couple}. It also turns out that a ring can invoke a wedding on its own but in many cases, it also requires way more complexity.

You might start off with much a simpler case, with an entity called a number. How you define that thing is up to you.

I might hazard that maths is about entities and relationships. If you don't have have a notion of "thingie" you can't make it "relate" to another "thingie"

It's turtles all the way down and cows are spherical.