There is a scene in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility where the hopelessly romantic Marianne Dashwood writes a letter to a man she isn’t related to, so everyone assumes they must be engaged. There isn’t much I envy about the dating traditions of the past, but I do love the simplicity of that. If you so much as write to a guy, you better be prepared to put a ring on it. No messing about. No difficult conversations about where this is going, or who wants what. Just boom! You wrote me a letter so now we’re engaged.
Am I romanticising the past? Yes, of course I am. I wouldn’t really want any of that back, it would be terrible, but after 10 years on the dating scene, I can’t help but crave a little more clarity.
If you are in a long-term, committed relationship, or if you have put a ring on it and can confidently say “I’m married”, I do envy you that certainty. For the rest of us still touting our wares on the dating market, things are often far from straightforward. Somewhere between being single and being in a relationship, a vast ocean of grey has emerged and I, for one, am all at sea with it.
Gone are the days where a dance (or a letter) signified you are now paired up. Today, you can be having regular sex with someone, going on dates, meeting their friends, and stealing their hoodies – and still not call this person your partner. Are we dating? Courting? Casual? Friends? Friends with benefits? Fuckbuddies? Lovers? It’s infuriating.
Welcome to the world of the “situationship”. If you aren’t familiar with the term, allow me to catch you up. It came to prominence thanks to a column by Carina Hsieh in 2017, who defined it as the “catch-all term for those relationships sitting at the intersection of ‘hooking up and ‘in a relationship.’ It’s a scary precipice, teeter-tottering between ‘more than hooking up and ‘very much dating,’ where a simple ‘what are we’ can throw the entire system out of balance.”
It is the period before you have both agreed that you are “officially” dating and change your Facebook statuses to reflect that. Once that is done, all the language around your relationship changes. Words like “boyfriend”, “girlfriend”, and “partner” enter the chat. You have your readymade “plus one,” and can now do really couply things like argue in Homebase or get a pet. The situationship is right before that happens.
Of course, there has always been a brief period of romantic shenanigans before a couple makes it official, even if that is only sending each other letters in the Regency Period. But what was once a quick layover on the way to Commitmentville can now wind up being the actual destination. And people can spend years here, waiting for the replacement bus service to arrive.
I have been in many such situationships, and I find them fascinating and irritating – but fascinating, nonetheless. In academic terms, a situationship is less of a romantic issue and more of a linguistic one. As the famed linguist Ferdinand de Saussure argued, language constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it. You can see this theory playing out in every situationship that has ever existed.
Quite clearly, two people are engaged in a romantic relationship. They are doing all the things that people in romantic relationships do but, without that “label”, it is not a “real” relationship. This means that none of the usual commitment boundaries or roles that contain a relationship are in force. Nothing is defined so there can be no violations. In one way, this can be very freeing, but in another, more obvious way, it can be utterly exhausting and infuriating.
At its worst, the situationship can become a nasty form of gaslighting. Denying the reality of a situation simply by refusing to call it what it is, is actually a pretty crappy thing to do to someone. I have had lovers tell me that we are “friends” while we are both lying naked on a hotel bed covered in patchouli oil. And I know that’s not true, because if I actually suggested doing this to my friends, they would call the police.
Without clear roles and boundaries in place, how do you bring such a mess to an end? In my experience, the other person starts shagging someone else and then looks at me baffled when I express some surprise about this, saying something like, “I thought you knew we weren’t serious?” Doesn’t matter that I have been staying at his house two nights a week or am using his Netflix password, he never said the magic word “abra-commitment”, so he can do what he likes.
It’s not that I am down on casual relationships. I actually really enjoy them, as long as I know that’s what I am dealing with. If everyone is up front about what they want, no one expects more, and everyone can just relax. It’s not easy to look someone in the face and say, I’m just here for the sex, but my god, it’s easier than no one knowing what the hell is going on.
What I dislike about the situationship is that is it famously defined by not having any definition at all. To my mind, that is a disaster. Boundaries are so important, even in casual relationships (and I’m including hookups in that) and if you aren’t putting any in place, how can you expect anyone to know what you want? If all you want is shagging and the occasional date, you have to communicate that. Maybe don’t put it in exactly those words, but you can absolutely say: “Kate, I love the fun we have together, but I am not in a place to give any more and am not looking for a committed relationship, now please stop stealing my boxer shorts.” Or whatever your own spin on that is. Refusing to “put a label on it” is a cop-out that only creates space for confusion and disappointment. Likewise, if you want more than shagging and the occasional date, you have to own that instead of pretending you’re fine just “going with the flow”.
People, and I am including myself as a people, usually end up in a situationship because of bad communication. One half of this duo often ends up catching feelings for the other, but fears vocalising that in case asking for more means ending up with nothing at all. So, they settle for the scraps and hang around in the hope their crush will suddenly realise how wonderful they and declare their undying love. Take it from someone who has done the fieldwork, this probably isn’t going to happen. I have wasted years like this, not really sure what’s going on, telling my friends it’s a “thing”, but never able to actually bring the pillock to a family event.
If two people are equally into one another, they usually end up in an actual relationship pretty quickly. So, if you are doing wife stuff for fuckbuddy prices, I am sorry, but you need to have the conversation. If it’s not a relationship, you should not do the relationship things. You don’t have to pick them up from the airport, or clean up after them. I know it’s scary, but not communicating what you need is only setting yourself up for heartbreak. Likewise, if you are regularly sleeping with someone and are just wandering around, thinking to yourself about how much fun this all is, and how you get all the good stuff about a relationship, but with none of the hassle, you might be in danger of being a bit of shit. You too need to check in with that person and make sure they are on the same page as you. If they are, fabulous! You crack on.
Ironically, the situationship has started to emerge as an actual relationship status. In the six years since the phrase “situationship” was coined to mean an ill-defined relationship, it has morphed into a definition all of its own. According to research published earlier this year, 40 per cent of the 10,000 respondents think a situationship should be considered an official relationship status. It seems that Gen Z (under 26s) are the biggest fan of the situationship, with 43.1 per cent thinking the situationship is “probably a testament to the pragmatic approach the current generation takes to most of their needs”.
One research paper on students at Ugandan universities found that the situationship was now a “core category” of relationships amongst university students. According to a 2019 paper, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “Today’s emerging adults (EAs), identified as 18-to-29-year olds, appear to have less structured and scripted relationship development… Many EAs characterise their relationships as unstable and oscillate between sporadic romantic encounters and committed relationships.”
Why this should be the case is a point of debate, but it seems that younger generations just aren’t “commitment ready” in the way previous generations have been. Ultimately, they don’t have to be! We don’t have to get married before having kids anymore or partner up because women can’t earn their own money. We have far more options available, and this has created a new generation of commitment-phobes, but we still crave contact, affection, and love.
The situationship may be commonplace, but that doesn’t mean they are positive experiences. Just look it up on TikTok and you will see that this set-up is hardly making people happy. I truly hope that “situationship” does become a category all of its own, because that would limit a lot of the damage having no definition can do. If you have no clue as to what your role or responsibilities are to the person you are bumping uglies with on the regular, you cannot guard yourself or them from a lot of pain. Just because things are causal, does not mean you don’t have to have tricky conversations about that.
And finally, how can you tell if you are in a situationship? If you have ever used, or heard the phrase “why do we need a label? Can’t we just have fun?” Please consider this a red flag and take appropriate action to address it. Have the damn conversation, both with them and with yourself.
Are you happy with the current state of play? Do you want this to drag on for months or years more? If not, you know what you have to do. Maybe you could put it in a letter? That seemed to work for Jane Austen.
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