Situationships, eye-contactships, and all the other ships we let sail away

They say a situationship is a situationship for one person and nothing for the other. I say it’s a curse, and I always seem to be on the desperately in-love side, but never on the other.

The bad news is that situationships can break your heart just like any other relationship, even though they technically never existed. These relationships turn us into private investigators, and somehow we still get nothing in return; information is never enough when we’re living in denial. But as Wendy Williams put it: «Denial is a river in Egypt,» and that’s all I have to say.

When we’re inside these kinds of relationships, even though we’re perfectly rational beings everywhere else, we turn into lunatics who believe that if we wait long enough, or accept low-effort long enough, the person we adore will finally love us with all their heart.

That they will result in no good becomes painfully easy to see for everyone else, but for us. Everyone has to go through one (or multiple) to finally learn the lesson.

But wait, I want to defend hopeless romantics for a second. Look, the situationship discourse tends to ridicule the person who falls in love, but what about the one who clearly sees that the other person is vulnerable and keeps feeding their hopes?

Let’s not forget it takes two people to create a situationship. I’ve been in many relationships where I noticed the other person had more feelings for me than I did for them, and I’d always talk about it immediately and exit the relationship if I realized the other person was too in love to say no but actually wanted more.

I say there is responsibility on the low-commitment side of the situationship, and that we’re focusing too much on the ‘delusional’ aspect of the romantic one and very little on the manipulative behaviours of the one getting all the attention and none of the responsibilities.

In this modern era, we read the person who doesn’t feel anything as more mature, chic, and put-together; but do we really consider not forming attachments to people we hook up with as a goal? Isn’t that a little problematic?

I know there isn’t anything wrong with wanting intimacy with no commitment, but too many people focus on the ‘saying it’ part and think they’re covered by just talking about it, even when their actions reflect the opposite, and it’s completely normal for the other person to think love is flourishing when you’re inviting them to dinner with your family.

So next time you want to call your friend who is in a situationship ‘delusional’, let’s actually check the dynamics going on between them and try to help! Nobody deserves to wait to be loved; it’s frankly better to be alone than to live hanging on false hope, even if it doesn’t feel like it at first.

And if it’s you who’s going through a situationship, I wish you the best, and that all the love you gave returns to you multiplied. In the meantime, enjoy this meme list.