It’s Complicated: The Implosion Of The Situationship

Not even a few seconds later, a text comes through.

“Hey, any big plans this weekend?”

You catch yourself blushing and smiling at the screen before you can even reply. And it’s in that very moment you realize you are so in for it. 

The butterflies. The banter. It’s exciting. Exhilarating almost. Like maybe, just maybe, this could be the start of something special.

And so a situationship is born. In the blurred lines and electric-charged, undefined space between casual dating and a real relationship. 

Cut to your first date: He holds all the doors for you, the drinks and conversation flow, and the laughter is plentiful. He even hands the waiter his card before the bill comes. It wouldn't be long before you’re completely swept away in the what-ifs of what could be. “Maybe this is my husband,” you even think to yourself, optimistically.

In the weeks that follow you talk almost every single day, he likes all your pictures and tells you about the cool places he wants to take you and the things he wants to do together. Some days you even wake up to cute good morning texts. Everything is amazing. Better than amazing.

You don’t want to jinx it, but by this point you’re practically bursting at the seams to tell your friends about him. And when you finally do, that one strict friend cautions you exactly how you knew she would. 

“Just go slow.” She pleads. But you brush it off. “I know, I know. But I really think this is different. I mean, he’s basically my boyfriend.”

The way you’re soaking it all up feels almost gluttonous. The attention. The validation. The compliments that dance right on the line between innocent eagerness and maybe, just maybe, a little bit too much, too soon. But you justify it…because God, does it feel good. Why on earth would anyone want to put the brakes on this?

But soon after a handful of semi-formal dates, where it seems like you’re both on the same page about where this is going, solid plans begin to drift into vague, half-hearted "maybe we can hang out" texts that never end up happening.

Most of us fall into these sorts of relationship purgatories without ever actually intending to.

Your nervous system stays on high alert waiting for its next dopamine hit, and your brain begins working overtime to justify it.

“I’m sure everything’s fine, we’re just settling into a more normal rhythm,” you tell yourself.

And so you begin to accept low-effort, last-minute plans. You agree to ordering in at one of your places and watching a few episodes of something instead of letting him take you out. Maybe you even sleep together. Because you’re dating, right? And the feelings are mutual…right?

Then his texts become shorter. His replies take longer. You catch yourself refreshing your views to see if he’s watched your story yet, and you hate yourself for letting a stupid little heart dictate your whole entire mood. 

“Maybe he’s just busy,” you think to yourself. Or, “Maybe I gave off weird energy.”  

You’re tempted to ask him if everything’s okay with you two, but you don’t want to be that girl, so instead you begin replaying every single interaction and micro-expression in your head. Driving yourself crazy looking for clues. Your brain swinging back and forth between catastrophic worst-case scenarios and logical rationalizations.

“Did he meet someone else?” “Is he still on the apps?”

You go to check his followers, but stop yourself. You don’t even want to know.

Then, in the midst of wallowing in your own pathetic sorrows, he calls. 

“Hey you!” His voice is upbeat, like nothing’s wrong at all.

“Was this all in my head?” you think to yourself as he proceeds to tell you a funny story about his day.

And once again, all is right in the world. 

This experience, while utterly humiliating to admit out loud, is actually pretty common. And it isn’t exclusive to women, men do it too. Those well-versed in attachment styles may argue that situationships perfectly describe the dance of the Anxious and the Avoidant. While there may be some validity to that, even the most secure, self-assured people can spiral and question themselves when the reality of their current situation no longer matches the version in their head…especially if they feel like they’ve contributed to this less-than-ideal dynamic.

At first glance, the definition of a situationship seems straightforward. It’s anything but. Because it lingers in the gray area. The undefined. The mixed signals. No labels…no pressure…no strings. In the “let’s just have fun and see where things go.”  

It’s a confusing, vapid waste of time. But most of us fall into these sorts of relationship purgatories without ever actually intending to.

When we see other girls in situationships we think, “that could never be me.” But the reality is, even the ones who grew up on books like The Rules, who go into each interaction with an open mind but are just guarded enough, who have clear boundaries and standards and a laundry list of wonderful qualities they hope their future husband will possess, can and do find themselves in exactly the opposite of what they initially set out to find.

They tell themselves they’ll let the man lead. That they won’t accept dates without at least a few days notice. They won’t answer super late-night texts or exchange sexy pictures. And they definitely won’t sleep with a guy outside of a committed relationship. 

But then they do.

So where’s the disconnect? How does the self-respecting woman who knows her value, who wants the real thing and has her head on straight, end up sick to her stomach and on high alert, ripping her hair out waiting for a response from a guy she hardly knows.

“It’s not because she doesn’t have standards, women have just been conditioned to feel guilty for expressing them. But dating with intention doesn’t have to mean an interrogation, it just means asking thoughtful questions and signaling self-awareness.” Alison M. Cheperdak, J.D., best-selling author and founder of Elevate Etiquette, insists.

While the “what-if” is intoxicating, the “what-is” requires more than many of us are willing to give.

The first few weeks of getting to know someone, when it’s all light and carefree, it’s easy to daydream about a possible future, and maybe even talk about it together. After all, it’s fun to play house…until it’s not. Without any agreed-upon relational label or trajectory, it remains no more than a fantasy. And just as quickly as feelings arrive, they often fade. That moment usually arrives when it all starts to get just a little bit too real for one of the people involved.

We know that eventually, in every relationship, the chemistry settles. Oxytocin and dopamine fade and reality re-enters. The things that once felt endearing, that you saw through rose-colored glasses in the beginning, begin to irk you. The person who could do no wrong suddenly becomes human.

What once had potential for a real, lasting relationship, suddenly seems like a chore to be checked off a list. Now it feels like something you have to do, rather than something you want to do. And instead of leaning in, many of us instinctively pull back. Because while the “what-if” is intoxicating, the “what-is” requires more than many of us are willing to give: choosing one person and, in doing so, letting go of other options without knowing for certain how it will turn out with this one.

What comes to follow is an all-too-familiar restlessness. A nagging urge to chase that same high again.

So we go looking for it.

Swiping. Smut. Following new people. Snapchat QuickAdds. Whatever offers us a quick hit of validation, novelty, or a feeling that mimics the initial spark. It’s addicting.

And while it’s hard to pinpoint the single biggest driver of the rise in situationships among young people, professor Andrea Meltzer points to individuals’ perception of availability as a big reason for the trend.

“We know from relationship science that regardless of how happy people are in their relationships, the relative comparison of what people are getting out of their relationships, versus what people think they could get outside of that partnership, predicts the extent to which they are committed,” Meltzer said.

We live in a world that constantly reminds us there might just be someone better one swipe away. And very few people are willing to stop searching long enough to find out.

A recent podcast interview on The Skinny Confidential’s Him and Her Podcast with Bumble’s CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, touched on this exact tension. She acknowledged that platforms like hers have contributed to a larger problem that wasn’t always there: the illusion of endless options.

“Social media has completely desensitized and disconnected us. We are living through these alternate realities of what's real. We were meant to be a dating app, but [somewhere along the way] it turned into just this, like, swipe, swipe app where you just swipe into the abyss.” said Herd.

It’s trained us to treat people like soulless hot-or-not profiles, and relationships like trials that never seem to reach a verdict. We continue passively browsing for what else is out there instead of building with who’s right in front of us. And over time, it’s created a bleak dating landscape where commitment feels optional and failed talking stages become the default.

It’s created a bleak dating landscape where commitment feels optional and failed talking stages become the default.

We've even normalized things like rosters: keeping multiple people in rotation for entertainment as a form of self-protection. But in doing so, we prevent ourselves from ever fully investing in one connection. It begs the question: How can anything real ever truly grow if we’re never willing to go all in?

Popular public figures like the Call Her Daddy podcast host, Alex Cooper, has encouraged two entire generations of women to go out and enjoy casual sex as a normal part of being young and single.

Cooper eventually went on to trade hookup culture for monogamy and marriage, but still encourages her listeners to engage in casual sex and dating "for fun." While it's great that it all worked out for her and that she managed to find love along the way, we would be remiss not to shine a light on the ripple effect of her influence and others like her, as many women who’ve followed in her footsteps have not been so fortunate. 

Can a normal girl like you and I wind up in a loving, lasting relationship—or even married to—the guy we slept with right away? Of course. It happens. But as they famously said in “He’s Just Not That Into You,” that is the exception, not the rule. And it would be wise for us to assume we are not the exception.

Waiting to have sex isn’t about playing games or manipulating someone into committing to you. It protects our hearts and our bodies from being spiritually and chemically bound to someone who hasn’t yet earned it. 

On Call Her Daddy’s recent controversial podcast episode, “Foreplay, Fetishes, & Face Lifts,” guest and comedian Nikki Glaser went as far as to say she “kinda like[s] it” when her boyfriend, TV producer Chris Convy, hooks up with other women. 

I’m sorry, what?

Some suggest this is a kink or a classic example of hypergamy, while others say there may be something deeper there. Could it be that we’ve reached a point where we can no longer count on people being faithful and committed to one another? Is this merely a way to brace for what feels like inevitable disappointment? Have wandering eyes and cheating become so normalized that we believe the only way we can even enter into a relationship at all is if we turn a blind eye to, or embrace, bad behavior?

It’s in that imbalance where insecurity, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion inevitably take root.

In situationships—and in many open-ended, loosely agreed-upon dynamics—it seems the less invested person gets to enjoy all the perks of something casual and undefined, while the other sticks around, desperately holding onto the possibility of it becoming more. Choosing to ignore certain red flags or forcing themselves to renegotiate their dealbreakers as a way to hold on to hope that they can orchestrate a happily-ever-after amidst the murky waters that are modern dating.

It’s in that imbalance where insecurity, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion inevitably take root.

Some have attempted to sell us this kind of autonomy in a “relationship” as empowering, but for most of us, it slowly chips away at our sense of self. It has the potential to end in heartbreak, of course, but it’s also completely dehumanizing. So why would we, as a society, encourage it?

The widespread acceptance of situationships not only perpetuates hookup culture, it reflects a deeper cultural belief that more freedom will lead to more happiness, but it often does the opposite. It teaches us to avoid vulnerability. To delay hard conversations. And to stay just detached enough that we never have to risk getting wrapped up in something that requires more from us.

This mentality has resulted in a generation that is more digitally intertwined than ever, yet never more relationally starved. But the same longing for connection that is filling church pews again is showing up in dating, too. And thankfully, the data is starting to reflect it.

Hinge’s 2025 Gen-Z D.A.T.E. Report, which surveyed over 30,000 daters, found that 84% of us are actively seeking deeper emotional intimacy. And yet, Zoomers are significantly more hesitant than Millennials to initiate those conversations early on.

This tells us that we want depth. We just don’t want to face the discomfort that comes along with creating it.

Similarly, Match Group’s Human Connection Study from 2026 found that 80% of Gen Z believes they will find lasting love, higher than any generation before us. But only 55% feel ready for it right now.

There is happiness—true happiness—in being chosen, and in choosing someone back.

So we all sort of linger there. Hopeful in theory, hesitant in practice. Spinning our wheels and failing to ever truly launch.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom.

More now than ever, people are growing tired of the time wasters. Less willing to tolerate ambiguity. More open to dialogue, even if it risks rejection or having to let someone go that they really care about.

Traditional relationship structures offer something that situationship culture does not: a sense of security. Because love is just as much an action as it is a feeling, and there is happiness—true happiness—in being chosen, and in choosing someone back.

If you’ve found yourself lingering in the in-between, replaying conversations and wondering why things with that guy haven’t quite gotten there, carve out a little time today to ask yourself the most telling data point there is: Who do you become in their presence? Because you’re allowed to not be okay with whatever this is. You’re allowed to want more. And the right person won’t make you feel silly for desiring commitment.

They'll enthusiastically meet you there.