If I understand you correctly, then the answer is no, you do not
have to include them but you'd be making a big mistake if you omitted them.
Let us consider people. Specifically, relationships between people. There can be zero or one spouse, two parents and as many children as you like / can afford. Who would you code this? If the multiplicity can be greater than 1 it must be either an array or a collection of some sort. otherwise each role can be filled by a simple reference variable:
public class Person {
private Person spouse;
private Person mother;
private Person father;
private List<Person> children;
}
Note how the
role leads into the member variable
name. It doesn't have to, you could have
hatstand
instead of
children
; the variable would work just as well; but it isn't easy reading it to know what it does.