On Situationship
I have been thinking about situationships. Not because I am in one (-_-). Because I am not. And that is maybe the more interesting position to write from.
(the way you can only really see the shape of something when you are standing outside it)
Here is what I mean by situationship. You meet someone. You spend time together. There is a texture to it that feels like relationship. The late night calls. The way you know which side of the bed they sleep on. The inside jokes that would make no sense to anyone else. But there is no name for it. No label. No definition. You are not boyfriend and girlfriend. You are not husband and wife. You are not even “dating” in the old sense of the word, the one that implied direction, a vector pointing toward something. You are just… orbiting. Two bodies caught in each other’s gravity, neither close enough to collide nor far enough to escape.
(situationship: the ellipsis of modern romance)
And it is not new. Not really. Before marriage was about love, it was about property. Alliances. Bloodlines. The transfer of cattle or land or political favor. Love was something that happened on the side, if it happened at all, in the margins of a system designed for entirely different purposes. The troubadours of 12th-century France sang about courtly love, which was by definition unconsummated and often directed at someone who was already married to someone else. It was love as longing. Love as the thing you could not have.
(the original situationship was just called “adultery” and came with slightly higher stakes)
What changed was the 20th century. The sexual revolution of the 1960s cracked the seal. The Pill. The removal of consequence from the act. Suddenly sex and marriage were no longer the same sentence. You could have one without the other. And for a while, people called it “free love” and meant it as a political statement. A rejection of bourgeois morality. A liberation.
Then the 80s happened. AIDS. Fear. The pendulum swung back, but it did not swing all the way. What remained was a strange liminal space: sex was no longer reserved for marriage, but it was also not quite the carefree celebration the revolution had promised. It became something negotiated. Something you had to talk about.
(killing the romance with every conversation about boundaries)
By the time the apps arrived, the architecture was already in place. Tinder did not invent casual sex. It just made it as easy as ordering a pizza. Swipe, match, chat, meet, fuck, ghost. Repeat. The transaction became frictionless, and frictionlessness is the death of meaning. When you can have sex with someone new in the time it takes to watch an episode of a sitcom, what does sex even mean anymore? What does anything mean?
The genius of the app economy was that it monetized ambiguity. You are never quite sure where you stand with someone because the app benefits from keeping you in circulation. If you found what you were looking for, you would stop swiping. So the app is designed, algorithmically and psychologically, to make sure you never quite find it. There is always someone slightly more attractive three swipes away. Always the possibility that the next match will be better. Always the suspicion that settling is for suckers.
(the apps turned dating into a marketplace and you are the product)
That is the historical arc. From marriage as contract, to love as ideal, to sex as liberation, to sex as transaction, to whatever this is now. The situationship is not a bug in the system. It is the logical endpoint. When commitment has no institutional backing and no social pressure and no religious mandate, it becomes a choice. And choices are exhausting. So we default to the path of least resistance: not choosing. Drifting. Letting the ambiguity stretch out until someone finally gets hurt enough to ask “what are we?” and the whole fragile thing collapses.
(the question that kills the situationship is not “do you love me” but “what are we” because the first can be answered with a feeling and the second demands a definition)
I am not judging. I have done it too. We all have. There is a comfort in the undefined, a safety in the provisional. You cannot be rejected by someone you have not committed to. You cannot be abandoned by someone who was never really yours. The situationship is a hedge against vulnerability, a way of keeping one foot out the door while pretending you are fully in the room.
But here is the thing I keep coming back to. It does not work. The hedge does not protect you. You get hurt anyway. Not the clean hurt of a breakup, which at least has the dignity of finality. A different kind of hurt. The slow bleed of never quite knowing. The erosion of self-worth that comes from being someone’s “option.” The quiet humiliation of realizing you were the only one who thought there was something to lose.
(you do not survive a situationship. You just wait until it ends and call that surviving)
There is a reason the Greeks had so many words for love. Eros. Philia. Agape. Storge. They understood that love was not one thing but a constellation of things, each with its own shape and gravity and appropriate context. We have flattened the constellation into a single dim star and called it “seeing someone” and wondered why it does not illuminate anything.
The situationship is what happens when you try to have all the benefits of intimacy without any of the architecture that makes intimacy sustainable. It is a house with no foundation. It looks fine from the outside. It might even keep you dry for a while. But the first real storm will take it down.
And yet. Here we are. All of us. Building houses on sand and pretending we do not know what happens next. Because at least the sand is warm. At least it is something. At least it is not the cold empty field of being entirely alone.
(the loneliness you feel in a situationship is the loneliness of being with someone who can leave at any moment without ever having to break up with you)
I do not know how to end this one. There is no conclusion. The situationship is not a problem to be solved. It is a symptom. A reflection of a world that has made commitment feel like a trap and solitude feel like a failure, leaving us to drift in the space between, hoping someone will grab our hand but too scared to reach out first.
(maybe that is the real name for it. Not situationship. Fear with benefits.)
( maybe i just long to be loved without consequences, idk whatever that is)