What even is a situationship?
I can't figure out if I'm the vicim or the perpetrator of a situationship. What does it even mean?
I have an admission. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situationship.
I’ve been in long term relationships. I’ve been in short term relationships. I’ve been ‘seeing people’ with it never progressing to a relationship. I’ve gone on dates without it evolving into ‘seeing someone’. Am I missing out on an experience known to be full of pain, but also necessary for spiritual development? Or am I lucky?
According to the good people of Reddit, a ‘situationship’ means:
- “the sweetest, warmest, most inviting trap you’ll ever get caught in”
- “they have no intention of committing long term”
- “acting like you’re in a relationship but not committed and normally fucking other people/possibly dating other people”
- “a casual dating type deal where one or both people are just kinda killing time until till they find something better.”
The last definition hit me. Maybe I have been in a situtationship and I just didn’t know it. It is entirely possible that I thought I was dating someone and they were dragging me on for the ride.
It just dawned on me. It was 2021. I was seeing this girl who was lovely, but I just couldn’t put my finger on that was missing. It was during the pandemic, so she was the only person I could bring to my house as long as we told the government we were partners. We watched the L Word and ate takeout food. I may have strung her along because I thought she would make a good partner, but I couldn’t reconcile that with the fact that I just wasn’t that into her. Fast forward after the break up - my ex roommate became best friends with her and I never saw either of them again. Maybe THAT was a situationship.
Or maybe I was in a situationship when I was dating a teacher in 2022. We planned to go up the coast and see her parents, so I thought we were serious. When we were on a date at the zoo she said: “My parents might call you my girlfriend. Sorry if that’s weird.” So I plucked up the courage to ask: “Actually, could I call you that?” The answer was no. Apparently asking her at the zoo wasn’t romantic enough. A month later she came over in my lunch break and showed me a Spotify playlist that spelt out the words “do you want to be my girlfriend?” After all the talk of romance, she gave me a gesture that would have taken her five minutes while sitting in her car. Spoiler alert: it lasted one month. She criticised everything from my parking to how often I let my dog in the house (apparently I had to leave him outside more to be independent).
I could have been in a situationship with a girl I was seeing in 2023. Everything seemed surface level, and we never really got that vulnerable. I was trying ti figure out how to escalate things. But then she slept over, told me she had a ‘daddy kink’ and started going on about a guy she slept with exactly 5 weeks ago.
Are situationships really that different from people taking their time and figuring out if they want to commit? How can we classify what is a situationship when we can’t agree on the criteria? Does only one person in the arrangement know its a situationship?
Something that gets to me about online dating is how many people state on their profiles that they are wanting ‘Short term, open to long.” It’s as if they’re asking for a situationship. Is the ‘short term’ really a probation period to a long term contract? Or is it a preference for something casual? I’ve never been able to figure it out.
Maybe you can only clock a situationship after the fact. I don’t think anyone really stays in this kind of relationship while knowing its true nature. Hopefully the expectations of a situationship remain mysterious to me for the foreseeable future.
