The Situationship Is Dying and I Am Not Mourning

I used to give ambiguity a nicer name than it deserved. Mystery. Chemistry that needed room. Two adults who were too evolved for labels. I can still hear myself saying it in a kitchen at midnight, wine in one hand, phone in the other, translating a three word text into a novel because the alternative was admitting he had not chosen me.

If you have done that, you already know the temperature of this piece. I am not writing it at men. I am writing it at us, the women who are bright enough to spot a pattern and still generous enough to keep granting extensions.

A situationship is not a relationship with the volume turned down. It is a holding pattern that only one person is finding comfortable. You get the access of intimacy without the structure that makes intimacy safe. You get sex, or almost sex, or the late night voice note that feels like sex. You get enough warmth to stay. You do not get the sentence that would let your nervous system stand down.

I notice micro shifts. I always have. A reply that used to come with a question and now arrives as a full stop. A Tuesday that used to hold a plan and now holds a maybe. The body turning half an inch away on a sofa that used to feel like a place. Anxious secure is the tidy label for it. What it feels like is this: I am paying attention, and I am slightly ashamed of how much attention I am paying, and then I laugh at myself, and then I pay attention anyway.

The shame is the part I want to talk about first, because it is the part that keeps women stuck. We have been trained to treat wanting definition as neediness. Wanting a name for the thing you are already doing with your body and your Thursday nights is framed as an overreach. Meanwhile the person who benefits from the unnamed arrangement gets to look easygoing. He is not easygoing. He is uncommitted. Those are different outfits.

I am a hopeless romantic who also did an MSc in psychology, which means I can romanticise a walk across a park at two in the morning and still name intermittent reinforcement when I see it. Variable reward is not chemistry. It is a schedule. The text that arrives after silence hits harder than the text that arrives when it should. Your brain writes a story about specialness. What happened is simpler. You were starved and then fed. Of course it felt like fate.

I used to protect that story. I thought if I named the pattern I would kill the magic. What I killed, when I finally named it, was the extra work. The decoding. The draft messages deleted at 1:14 a.m. The forensic reading of punctuation. The private committee meeting I held with myself about whether “busy week” meant busy week or I am keeping you on a hook I do not want to look at.

Women are so fluent in that committee. We run it while packing a bag, while sitting in a meeting, while laughing at a friend’s story and tracking a tick under the table. The mental load of a situationship is not just planning. It is interpretation. You become the translator of a language the other person refuses to learn. That is not intimacy. That is unpaid analysis.

I keep thinking about a particular stretch in my mid twenties. Not a villain. A charming man who liked my mouth and my jokes and the fact that I did not “do drama.” What he meant by drama was the moment a woman asks what this is. We had the sex. We had the Sunday mornings. We had the conversation about his father that made me feel chosen. We did not have a sentence I could repeat to my friends without hedging. When I finally asked, he looked faintly wounded, as if I had broken a spell by noticing it was a spell.

I left. Not because I am above wanting someone. Because I wanted someone who could want me in daylight.

Daylight is the test I use now. If an arrangement can only survive in low light, in late hours, in the gap between other plans, it is not shy. It is contained. Contained desire is still desire. It is not the same as being picked.

The culture sold us mystery as sophistication. Soft lighting, unanswered questions, the man who is hard to reach and therefore valuable. It is a lovely aesthetic. It is a rotten model for attachment. Consistency is not boring. Consistency is how a nervous system decides it can put the weapons down. If your body only comes alive when you are slightly abandoned, that is information about your history. It is not a brief for the next six months of your life.

I say that with affection. I have that history. I can feel the old tug when a message sits unopened. I can count tiles in a bathroom and pretend I am just noticing the grout. Then I name it. Naming is not the same as drowning. Naming is how I get back to myself.

What has changed, and this is why I am not mourning, is that more women I know have stopped calling the tug romantic. They are tired. Not bitter in the way people accuse us of being when we develop standards. Tired in the practical sense. Tired of doing the emotional coursework for two. Tired of suggesting the conversation, bringing the language, offering the book, translating his silence into a syllabus. Love should widen a life. It should not appoint you operations manager of another adult’s feelings.

I want definition after two dates. That sentence used to sound abrupt even in my own head. It does not any more. Two dates is enough to know whether someone can look at you and tell the truth. You do not need a five year plan over the second drink. You need a person who does not flinch when you say you liked them. You need someone who can hear “what are we doing” without treating it as an ambush.

Definition, for me, is not a public announcement. I do not need a caption. I need a shared reality. Are we seeing other people. Are we building toward something. Are you going to disappear for four days and call it a workload. Are you going to touch me like I matter and then speak like I am optional. Those are not heavy questions. They are the minimum viable honesty.

People hide behind process. They say they do not want to rush. Rushing is marrying a stranger in a weekend. Asking whether the person you are sleeping with is actually available is not rushing. It is hygiene.

I think about probability more than is socially attractive. The odds of someone who will not name you in month two becoming steady in month eight are not the odds we tell ourselves they are. People show you their ceiling early. If the ceiling is “let us see,” you already have the data. You can stay anyway. Adults get to stay. Just do not rewrite the dataset because the sex was good and he remembered your sister’s name once.

And the sex. We should talk about the sex, because situationships often survive on it. The body is sincere. Heat is sincere. I like heat. I like hotel lighting and a person who watches my face. I like asking for what I want. None of that requires a shared mortgage. Casual can be clean when both people are telling the same story.

The problem is the split story. One of you is having a fling with feelings attached. The other is having a relationship with an exit door painted to look like a wall. You go home full of oxytocin and start building. He goes home and keeps his options in a drawer. Aftercare in those arrangements is usually collapsing, not talking, because talking would expose the split. If he cannot stay in the room for the conversation after, he was never in the room for you. He was in the room for the part that asked less of him.

I am not interested in treating men as a species of puzzle. Plenty of women run the same play. Ambiguity is not gendered. The reason I am writing to women is that we are the ones who have been congratulated for enduring it with grace. Grace is a beautiful quality. It is a terrible strategy when someone is using your grace as cover.

There is a version of this essay that turns cruel. I do not want that version. I do not hate the people who kept me in half light. Some of them were scared. Some of them liked me and liked their freedom more. Some of them had an avoidant pattern so familiar they could have taught the seminar. Fear is an explanation. It is not a lease on my time.

When I left the charming man in my mid twenties I went home to Essex for a Sunday lunch that turned into an argument about politics and then someone put a record on. That is the texture I trust. People who can disagree and still pass the gravy. People who do not need the lighting to be flattering in order to stay. My family is not a romcom. They are consistent. Consistency looks ordinary until you have spent half a year starving for it.

University taught me the other version of ordinary magic. Late library, walk across Wivenhoe Park because neither of us wanted the conversation to stop. That is not a situationship. That is two people refusing to pretend they are less interested than they are. I can still feel the cold and the possibility. I want that energy in adult dating. Not the performance of being unbothered. The willingness to be seen wanting.

The cool girl mask exhausted me. I wore it well. I could do the laugh, the “I am fine either way,” the generous reading of crumbs. It made me smaller. It also made me sexually present in a way that looked confident and felt like a disappearing act. You can be filthy and still ask what this is. Those are not opposite skills. I will say I missed you and mean it. I will also say I am not available for a role with no title and all of the labour.

If you are in one now, you already have the evidence. You do not need a dramatic incident. The incident is the pattern. The delayed plans. The way your friends have stopped asking his name. The way you rehearse the question and then swallow it because you do not want to be “a lot.” Being a lot, in this context, often just means having a spine.

I ask good questions. I remember what you told me three conversations ago. I expect the same quality of attention back. That is not a test designed to fail people. It is a standard. If a man can discuss his job, his gym, his mates, and his childhood dog with fluency, he can discuss whether he is in this. The sudden inarticulacy around commitment is rarely a language problem. It is a priority problem.

There is a cultural mood right now that I like, even when it gets flattened into slogans. Women taking breaks. Women refusing to coach. Women wanting partners instead of projects. I understand the joke of it. I also understand the grief under the joke. Many of us still want the thing. I do. I want intellectual play and physical chemistry that means something. I want loyalty. I want a person who tells me the good story first. I want aftercare that includes talking. I want to be chosen, not just desired.

Wanting that does not make me behind the times. It makes me accurate.

So what do you do with the accurate wanting when the person in front of you is offering a fog.

You stop decorating the fog.

You stop writing their interiority for them. You stop awarding points for potential. You ask the question in ordinary language. “I like you. I want to know if we are doing this on purpose.” Then you let the silence be data. If they punish you for asking, that is the answer wearing a sulk. If they soften and meet you, that is also data. If they produce a speech about timing that contains no timeline, you already know the genre.

I do not do ultimatums as theatre. I do thresholds. A threshold sounds like this. I can do undefined for another fortnight while we work it out. I cannot do undefined as a lifestyle. The difference matters. Theatre is a trap designed to make you the unreasonable one. A threshold is you telling the truth about your own capacity.

And if they cannot meet it, you leave before your self respect starts bargaining. Bargaining is where we get inventive. Maybe if I am easier. Maybe if I have sex like it does not touch me. Maybe if I never mention the future. That version of you is very attractive to people who do not want to be responsible for you. She is not a better version. She is a disappearing one.

I still believe in romance. I believe in the three hour conversation that was supposed to be drinks. I believe in the picnic that went quiet in the grass. I believe in hotel rooms with decent lighting and the particular electricity of someone who has actually listened. None of that requires a fog. In fact the fog dulls it. Clarity makes heat cleaner. You can be more adventurous when you are not also doing detective work.

Friends will tell you to play it cooler. Some of them mean well. Some of them are still in the fog and need company. I love my friends. I do not take dating advice from anyone who looks exhausted by a man they will not name. Exhaustion is contagious. So is standard setting.

The Essex part of me, the refined part, not the cartoon, is direct when it matters. Warm first. Sharp second. I will compliment a stranger’s jacket. I will also say, without raising my voice, that I am not a secret and I am not a draft. Where I grew up, people can be blunt and still kind. I kept that. I threw away the idea that being from there meant I should accept being underestimated, in seminar rooms or in bed.

Underestimation shows up in situationships as a soft insult. You are good enough to touch and not good enough to claim. People will dress that up as complexity. It is not complex. It is a ranking.

I rank too. I rank consistency above sparkle. I rank a Tuesday plan above a grand speech. I rank the person who texts when they said they would above the person who writes well after they have gone missing. That ranking has cost me some heat. It has saved me years.

If you want a practical close, here it is, though I dislike the tone of tips. Stop answering maybe with yes. Stop offering your body as a deposit on a conversation that never comes. Stop treating your own anxiety as the problem when the arrangement is unstructured on purpose. Take the walk. Have the sex if the story is shared. Leave when the stories diverge.

Then go and be in rooms that do not require translation. Dance until your feet hurt. Eat chips in a taxi queue. Sit on a seafront with cold air on your face and remember that your life already has texture. A partner should enter that texture, not become the whole weather system.

I am not mourning the death of the situationship. I am relieved. Mystery was never the point. Being met was the point. If someone wants me, they can say it in a complete sentence. I can say it back. That is not a lack of romance. That is romance with the lights on.