If casual sex arrangements were a sugary cocktail and serious relationships were a hearty main course, situationships – AKA the space between ‘friends with benefits’ and ‘monogamous relationship’ – would be a moreish pre-dinner snack.
Think of anything that gives you the comfort of a proper dinner, without a sliver of the nutritional content. Say, chunky buttered slices of bread! Chocolate-covered pretzels! Or those twiggy stick thingy-ma-bobs! (An important disclaimer so nobody gets lost in the metaphor – We all good? Still with me? – situationship snacks are moderation foods, the stuff you find at the very top of those ‘healthy-eating pyramid’ posters on the walls of school canteens, or mentioned in studies on colon cancer.)
Now, the key to nibbling your way through a situationship is mindfulness. You must put down the bread/pretzels/twiggy sticks before they hurt your stomach and ruin your life. This is Very Important because if you’re not careful you’ll grow convinced that you can stop thinking about dinner altogether because you’re happy as a clam right here, elbow-deep in this bag of ambiguous salty meat poles, wondering if they’re still sleeping with other people.
You see, the twiggy sticks take you on cute picnic dates and deliver your favourite chocolate bars to your work, but they also refuse to introduce you to their friends or family. They talk about their future with the inference that you’ll be in it, but simultaneously give off the impression that yes, they’re absolutely still sleeping with other people.
But it’s too late. It’s been eight weeks, and it dawns on you that you want the twiggy sticks to be your main course. You want them to be yours, just as you realise there are no more twiggy sticks left. You are in love with the impossibly bad twiggy sticks but they have vanished, never to be seen again until they pop up on your Instagram feed with their arms dangling around that pretty girl from your cousin’s media studies class.
Yeah, that’s a situationship.
For a long time, the grey situationship blob was my thing. I found that dating someone for two-to-four months was the sweet spot – that way, you could break through the awkward barrier of ‘our teeth sometimes clang when we kiss’ without finding yourselves smack bang in Boredomville, on a monotonous loop of mediocre documentaries and white-bread sex. One month of dating and you end up with spine-tingling embarrassment every time you see them on a night out. Five months and one of you has absolutely caught feelings. But two to four? You’re in the clear. You did that situationship thing right, my friend. Bravo. Twiggy sticks for all.
Sometimes I got it right. Other times, I got it catastrophically wrong.
Let’s see, shall we?
There was the guy who only paid for $5 top-ups of petrol at a time because he’d always blown all his money the night before on cigarettes and ecstasy pills. We dated for a few months when I was eighteen. If I saw him today I’d feel sentimental and think of the early days – the movie dates, all that frozen yogurt. Then I’d be bowled over by a tsunami of The Ick.
There was the professional athlete I dated on and off for a few months, whose ego was so impressive that conversations about socks weren’t safe from the name-dropping of C-grade celebrities. If I saw him today I’d feel pretty good, considering I ended things and therefore have the upper hand forevermore. Ha.
Then. Oh, reader, then. Then there was the dude who perennially smelled of carrot, celery and chicken thigh because that’s what he insisted on eating for breakfast (!!!) every morning. Here comes the real clincher, though: I fell in love with him, like a bona fide gold-star idiot. It still makes me ashamed to admit it, all these years later. Thinking back, the main reason was that I liked his floppy hair quite a bit. And his taste in music. Also, memes. Boy did he know his way around a good meme. You see, he was impossibly charming over text – smart, dry and funny all at once. We dated for five months before he suddenly stopped replying to my messages and calls. A few weeks later he was Facebook Official with a girl he met at a music festival. I cried a lot over him. It took months to not freeze every time I saw a floppy-haired guy buying chicken thighs at the supermarket. It took even longer to restore my sense of confidence, to stop wondering why he picked her over me – to feel like myself again. If I saw him today, despite all the years that insulate me from that experience, and all the impenetrable love I have for my boyfriend, I would still feel pangs of hollowness. Not because I hold any shred of affection for him, but because he showed me just how romantic rejection can feel like your ribcage is a microwave, slowly melting the organs behind your bones.
Chicken Thigh Guy showed me that having the perks of a conventional relationship (Cute dates! Not-terrible sex! Goodnight text messages!) while not having the boundaries of one (Please don’t smush your genitals with other people!) can lead to disaster.
Situationships brim with goosebumpy excitement and face-numbing doubt. They can make you feel alive and broken in equal measure. Shiny and special one second, totally forgettable the next.
Their name popping up on your phone screen makes you feel wanted, like you’re seen, like you matter. You begin to recognise the contours of their couch, their bed, their body, without ever knowing if those spaces are filled by someone else when you’re not around. You lie between their sheets and hear about their childhood, of moments that shaped their existence before you ever stepped into it. If you slip, you’ll start to think of this person as your person when they belong to nobody, especially not to you.
You live life in the nows – the next hour, the next dinner date, the next afternoon spent in bed watching a Louis Theroux documentary – but never the next week or month.
You’ll feel them pull away gently – just a little – at first. It’s so imperceptible that the most rational and reasonable part of you dismisses it as nothing; as forgetfulness, a busy work schedule, sickness. The commotion of life. Sure, they only work ten hours a week at General Pants, but maybe lots of people are buying flared jeans right now! And moody jumpers! And festival backpacks!
The panic rises when you realise you’ve broken the only rule you ever made with yourself: Don’t get feelings. It’s too late. The feelings are there, and they turn tender whenever a text goes without a reply or a day passes without communication. Within a week, the Rational You can no longer calm the Emotional You – the foundation of what this is has shifted beneath your feet without you even realising, and that movie they told you they so desperately wanted to see with you? They’ve just seen it with someone else.
You can’t raise the alarm, of course, because they’re not your partner and they owe you nothing. Don’t be needy, now. Nobody likes a needy girl, haven’t you heard? Maybe they just wanted a bit of space, you tell yourself. Maybe things really have been so helplessly hectic that they couldn’t find twenty-five seconds in their busy day to send you a message asking about yours. The dates you once went on are replaced by suggestions of last-minute hook-ups. There are no messages outside those sent in a typo-laden flurry between Friday at 10 pm and Sunday at 4 am.
And then there’s nothing at all.
Sometimes, you’ll be lucky to receive a text explaining why they lost interest. Mostly, all you’ll have is space – a sudden absence, a silence – and you’ll be tasked with filling in all the blanks. Was it me? Was there something missing? Have I been replaced?
You will read through old messages that insisted you mattered. You will also pore over social media accounts that suggest the total opposite is true. Because if you mattered, why were you kept a secret? If you mattered, why did they grow bored so swiftly? If you mattered, why don’t they care?
And that’s where the brutal truth lies: you were a parenthesis in that chapter of their life. You made them a protagonist in yours, of course. To you, they were the person around whom everything else moved. You thought about them when you went to sleep and when you woke, when your boss gave you orders to do that stocktake count, or your housemate asked you to cling-wrap the leftovers from dinner. You imagined what it would be like to do things for real, to stop playing pretend and actually make your relationship something concrete and tangible. All that energy, just to end up as nothing more than a parenthesis: easily ignored, forgotten, deleted.
There are no photos of you together on social media. No mutual friends who can vouch for the electric current that flowed between you. There is no proof of what you had other than the streams of blue and grey bubbles on your phone, the only evidence of what was once there and now isn’t.
You’ve lost someone who wasn’t quite a friend, but wasn’t quite a boyfriend. And how the hell do you explain that loss to the people around you?
Friends and family won’t understand the cataclysmic shift. Situationships aren’t typically concrete enough to be recognised by those who aren’t inside them. Maybe the person you fell in love with never met any of your favourite people. Maybe they didn’t try to see you out in the real world at all. Maybe they never imprinted themselves on your life, just the parts of you that you don’t quite understand yet.
You’ll watch romantic comedies that will warn you away from this kind of love, movies that scream, ‘He’s just not that into you!’ and tell you to get a haircut, or a cat, or both. You’ll finally understand why Taylor Swift wrote all those songs about Jake Gyllenhaal when they dated for all of five minutes. You’ll grow to understand Taylor Swift circa 2012 a lot, actually. You’ll play ‘All Too Well’ on repeat. You’ll read blog posts that tell you this ache in your chest is a blessing, that bigger and better things are coming, that they’re only around the corner. Only you don’t want ‘bigger’ or ‘better’. You just want what you had. You just want them to want you.
The world might not recognise what happened to you in a situationship, but you should. You might still think about them for years to come, not because you still want them – you’ll soon learn that you deserve so much better than what they gave you – but because they showed you just how great things can be. They showed you just how fucking painful they can be, too. That pain might linger for a long time and that’s okay. You’re not the first person to fall for a twiggy-stick jerk who didn’t appreciate just how wonderful and funny and bright you are.
One day, the right person will come along and they will be your safe harbour. And without this experience, you mightn’t have learned how to spot them.
So for now, just think: if love can be that fizzy and bubbly with a person who won’t commit to you, imagine how effervescent it will be with someone who gently cradles your heart in their hands, and offers you theirs in return.
You’ve only had a taste of what is coming.
And trust me: the main course? It’s even more wonderful than you can imagine.