Recently I found myself in a club bathroom comforting and listening to a girl recount a relationship that, seemingly at first glance, would have put her back in an asylum when mania could be cited for such a reason. She was shattered, broken beyond repair and I could tell that even when the tequila was out of her system and she awoke sober the next morning, she would be nursing this loss for a very long time. As I sat by her side, pondering to what sort of monster she had run into in the scary darkness of dating alley that had committed such terrible tortures on her heart, I concluded that it must have been a first love, one of those ones that you never truly get over until the next person comes along. My presumptions were stopped short however, when she revealed the mightiest of all plot twists: they had never even been in a relationship. She had fallen victim to the ambiguous, puzzling, hybrid horror situationship and in that moment, as I sat on the bathroom floor surrounded by other equally as drunk and broken girls who took a share in her pain, I understood her hurt.
Relationships come with the promise of mutuality and security. You don’t need to frequently ask the loaded (and loathed) question of ‘What are we?’ every month or so, (which seems to have more weight in society today than the big ‘Do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded whatever’). The honeymoon phase has been and gone, and you are no longer mentally in the beach destination of your dreams, accompanied by this individual. You have settled down comfortably with someone you can confidently label as your partner at the dinner table when your grandparents ask you for the umpteenth time if you are seeing anyone.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the romance equator there is a place that is visited every so often by those who are yearning to seek something that doesn’t require labels or emotional attachment in the slightest. It’s like a puzzling mathematical answer that is correct, but isn’t accompanied by all the working out demanded by your maths teacher. It’s a cheat code for the non-committers and a hazard for the ones looking for something real, enticed in by the ugly disguise of the malevolent situationship.
How are you meant to tell people about the ‘once in a lifetime’ holiday you had been banging on about for the past six months when the plane never actually ended up taking off? There were no lazy beach days where you gobbled up books under the jubilant sun; just the Gatwick airport departures runway with a screaming child sat behind you. It’s the ‘what could have been’ potential and scenarios that individuals deeply struggle with after the fallout of a situationship, and there is no need to ask why. You haven’t got to know this person well enough to discover their flaws as you haven’t made enough bad memories with them to reflect on and use as a safety blanket when in the getting-over stage. Essentially, you have created a fantasy in your mind. You’re gaslighting yourself into believing it wasn’t a real relationship and you are undeserving of the intense emotions you are now struggling with.
The rules and regulations of the five stages of grief: anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance need to be updated for the victims of a situationship’s sake. As you regret ever agreeing to be more than friends, yet less than lovers, you question whether this really is the end, as a track record of seeing them over and over again looms behind you. An imbalance of feelings, attraction and expectation dominates a situationship, and when mourning a relationship, just being able to acknowledge that it was a relationship helps more than people realise. In situationships, on top of getting over all the highs, you have to acknowledge the fact that you felt so strongly for someone you never even got to call your own. This is why the five stages of grief can’t be used as comforters for those who have found themselves wound up in a situationship settling for something that they didn’t expect to have such a lasting effect on them. Anger? This is only directed at yourself for ever letting someone only have half of you in the first place, bargaining? The only bargaining you deal with is convincing yourself that if you stay around for long enough they will eventually be so captivated by your entire being that they demand your hand in marriage. Anger and grief? They go hand in hand and tend to come and go, just look at Taylor Swift’s All Too Well for evidence of that. The only acceptance you may find in the whole situation is acknowledging that everything your situationship threw at you prepared you for the real deal, and that there are so many more chances for you to be experienced in HD by others who will be with you and love you fully.
Dating in society today is an intensely imprinting and indelible affair. Many retreat into the safety of situationships to avoid the commitment and reality of being with someone in this way. Perhaps you’ve been hurt in the past and vowed to never let anyone get to know you in this way ever again and that’s why you now go through life falling in and out of situationships. Maybe you have even found someone who is looking for the same no-strings-attached experience and it just works for both of you. Whatever your past dealings with situationships are, there is no denying that they still come with the same emotional and physical consequences of a ‘serious’ and ‘valid’ relationship. These consequences may look like daily meetings with therapists as you reel off all the memories you made with this person (despite never actually officially being with them) or it may look like endless conversations with your friends in club bathrooms as you drunkenly and tearfully recount how you got carried away by someone who wasn’t ready to commit. After all- every situation is different.
Dating in society today is an intensely imprinting and indelible affair.
My presumptions were stopped short however, when she revealed the mightiest of all plot twists: they had never even been in a relationship.