Death by Situationship

The "situationship" romantic dynamic is a marker of our tediously unerotic time.

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

The contemporary dating world of young people is not defined by relationships or dates or hookups or sex. It is defined by the “situationship.”

In the March 2nd, 2024 episode of Saturday Night Live starring Sydney Sweeney, one skit involves a police department hiring two new interns who manage to solve several dead-end cases in seconds through their online sleuthing skills. “We’re 22 year old girls in situationships… we can find out literally anything about anyone with no information,” Sweeney’s character says. While they’re useful in the context of the skit, the point remains that these young women are depressingly phone-brained, tangled in romantic limbos that require obsessive digital maneuvering. The guys they’re seeing are probably seeing other people, or else they always have to worry about that, but they aren’t allowed to express any real concern — never mind define the relationship as exclusive — lest they come off as uncool or overbearing. And of course, these young women are intended to be representative of their demographic as a whole.

“Situationship” is a relatively new portmanteau. Per Google Trends, it first emerged online in 2014 but was relatively unpopular until last year, when it more than tripled in popularity. In its basic definition, the situationship is a romantic or sexual relationship that is undefined and noncommittal. But there is much more to it. There is something about it that makes it a situation rather than a hookup or otherwise simple casual relationship without expectations. It is a situation because there is still desire involved, there is yearning, there is an unsteadiness that transforms in into a problem that feels pressing to solve. And yet, more often than not, the participants simply languish until the connection dissolves.

A survey from eHarmony in fall 2023 found that 75 percent of singles reported heartbreak from a situationship, with that figure rising to 82 percent for Gen Z. The majority of the single population has experienced deep turmoil from a relationship that had nothing more than a trend for a name. The situationship is then, in most cases, bad for all parties. Those who relish in the lack of commitment are likely perpetuating their own romantic shortcomings, while those who want something more solid suffer under the hope it will one day come. But what works about the situationship, or rather, why it’s so popular at the moment, is its convenience. It offers a “have your cake and eat it to” scenario of a semblance of connection without the responsibility of devotion or the burden of intimacy. It allows for the pleasure of “casual” sex without the social consequences and insecurity of true promiscuity.

It’s understandable to want that — in a time when people are having less sex than ever, it should be good that some people are having any at all. But the situationship is ultimately bad for our sexual culture. It produces sex that does not make us feel good about ourselves. It does not foster the eroticism our culture needs. Perhaps one reason why people are having less sex in the first place is doing so avoids emotional toll of these flimsy relationships. Situationships often require us to suppress our true feelings, to be repeatedly disappointed. They may often even make us feel used. The situationship’s predecessor, hookup culture, had these same faults, too. You weren’t in a situationship with someone, you were just “hooking up.” The situationship has put a thin veneer of connection and familiarity over what is essentially the same practice, yet it appears to be even less sexually motivated. That is what separates it from hooking up. As the SNL skit suggests, the situationship is deeply intertwined with our digital lives — it’s more about having someone to text constantly and stalk on social media than it is having a partner. It is an indulgence into both the passivity and neuroticism of the era, where not only is romance deprioritized, but so is sex.

I’d argue that actual casual sex, as with one night stands, would even be a better alternative than this drawn-out stagnation of situationships. Were there less stigma and pressure to define sex according to these quasi-relationships, those who want to enjoy sex for sex’s sake could feel empowered to do so without the emotional hangups. Many women in particular, though, likely continue to fear the social consequences (not to mention the biological ones, but that’s another problem) of this type of hookup. And so, falling into a “friends with benefits”-esque situationship appears to be the appropriate alternative: sex without the labels, and sex without the perceived debauchery. Unfortunately, that can only work well for so long. For most of us, emotions will form, whether we want them to or not. Sex and repeated time together will release chemicals that mentally bond us to our partners, no matter how modern and carefree we fashion ourselves to be. Some might be able to look past that, but others won’t.

Yet the cultural expectation of the situationship remains that we fashion ourselves as cool and blasé about it all. Or, increasingly, I am witnessing people treat situationships exactly like relationships and yet refusing to call them by that name. Search “situationship” on Twitter/X and there are countless tweets of people talking about arguing with their situationship, breaking up with a situationship, feeling romantically devastated by their situationship. They all might as well be talking about current or former girlfriends and boyfriends with how seriously they approach the subject, yet the nebulous boundaries of the situationship allow it all to be kept at a mental arms-length.

I’d suspect there’s some pressure here for me to differentiate between how this impacts the genders, who has it worse, who is at fault, et cetera. I don’t think anyone in particular is to blame, but it does seem to be women who are more likely to express their discontentment with the dynamic. As I’ve previously discussed, women carry the brunt of sexual risk. This does not mean, though, that situationships aren’t bad for men, or that men are the ones causing these problems. There are plenty of women perpetuating situationships. Regardless, as with so much of our sexual culture, the problem is universal. Leaning into the gender war is not the fix.

The question is why exactly much of our generation is so avoidant of relationships and in turn, true intimacy. It feels like a problem I can diagnose, but perhaps not cure. In my recent New York Times opinion essay (please read, share, etc) on the decline of dating apps, I wrote that we may have been wrong to think they were ever “good” to begin with. One major consequence of the apps is that they have lent to the false sense that our dating pool is a bottomless well. A better partner is a swipe away. That isn’t really true, though. Human connection is not something algorithmically quantifiable. Even so, this has warped our perception of what our romantic lives can look like. It’s safer to be in a situationship and keep your options open to that hypothetical next person than it is to commit. Not to once again be the old man yelling at the clouds, but our phones do have something to do with this. Yes, there have long been people who date around, lead people on, can’t hold down a partner. That’s like the main theme of Seinfeld. Still, social media and the internet, made all the more immediate through the phones, has made this behavior the norm. And, most likely, it’s on our phones where most situationships ultimately play out.

These dynamics would probably be fine if people were actually having sex and enjoying themselves. They aren’t. The situationship’s biggest crime is that it is fundamentally unsexy. It’s a sign of our mass immaturity, our inability to feel things honestly and wholeheartedly. Situationship culture is one of mass self-deception. Call it anything else — a romance, an affair, a relationship, a marriage, a fling, a crush, a torturous entanglement. But God, at least say it with your chest.