The IRS Won’t Recognize My Situationship

“What are we?”

The dreaded question that no one likes to ask. It’s always a difficult conversation. Partly because it requires some level of vulnerability, and partly because I don’t think there’s one correct answer. Just to preface this whole piece, I’ve been in multiple situationships that resist definition, so I know. I understand. I get the pain and also the intrigue.

Growing up, relationships seemed deceptively simple to me. Someone was your crush, your partner, or your ex. At least, that was the script I was taught. Even if real life was messier than that, there was always supposed to be a clear answer to what someone was in your life. Then I got to college, and suddenly every person I knew was involved in something that required an explanation. College creates a uniquely fertile environment for this kind of romantic insanity. You’re in constant proximity to the person, often with a level of freedom and independence you’ve never experienced before. Nobody is dating, but nobody is not dating either, except for the people who are dating. College is the time when people are figuring themselves out and, boy, oh boy, people are figuring themselves out. 

According to government documents, there are only four relationship statuses that matter: single, married, divorced, and widowed. That’s it. No situationship. No talking stage. No “we’ve been texting every day for hours and going on dates and doing relationship-y things for four months, but neither of us has acknowledged what's happening.” The IRS unfortunately refuses to recognize ambiguity as a filing status.

Urban Dictionary defines a situationship as: “when one or two motherf— take part in a relationship, but out of fear of making things serious or messy, do not label it, leading to said relationship, ironically, becoming more serious and messier.” Google says, “a situationship is a romantic or sexual connection that lacks formal labels, clear boundaries, or a mutual commitment to the future.” To Wikipedia, it “refers to an ambiguous romantic and/or sexual relationship in which both parties have feelings for one another, but said feelings are not clearly defined: a mid-point between dating and not dating.” 

My definition is this: A situationship is a meaningful relationship that refuses to acknowledge its own meaning. It contains affection, intimacy, expectations, jealousy, and sometimes even commitment, but lacks a shared language for understanding what any of those things are supposed to mean. It is a relationship defined less by what it is than by what nobody is willing to call it. 

Once you spend enough time around situationships, you start looking for objective criteria. Surely there must be some test. A checklist. So I started taking inventory. Do we text every day? Have we established some form of emotional dependence on one another? Do we spend an amount of time together that would concern an outside observer? Have we accidentally become each other's first call when something good or bad happens? Have we exchanged gifts, shared secrets, made future plans, or watched an entire television series together? If the answer to most of these questions is yes, then surely we're dating. Right?

Of course, there is one final question: Have we ever discussed what we actually are? Absolutely not. That would ruin the entire experiment. A situationship survives on a careful balance of intimacy and plausible deniability. Too much exclusivity and it starts to look like dating. Too little attachment and there is no situationship left to speak of. The result is a relationship that somehow manages to be both deeply significant and impossible to define. Situationships are Schrödinger's relationship, if you will: simultaneously serious and casual until someone finally opens the box and asks.

The problem isn’t that the relationship lacks substance. If anything, it’s that the substance is overwhelming. The problem is that none of it means anything publicly. There is no agreed-upon category that tells either of us what obligations, expectations, or promises come attached to what we’re doing. We have all the intimacy of a relationship and not an actual relationship.

I don’t think labels exactly are the issue. Plenty of relationships don’t fit neatly into a category. The problem is that “we don’t need a label” has, in some cases, become shorthand for “we don’t need a conversation.” Those are not the same thing. You can reject a label and still clearly communicate about expectations, boundaries, and feelings. You can also avoid a label because you’re genuinely figuring things out. But sometimes “I don't like labels” is just a way of saying, “I would like all the benefits of your emotional investment without any accountability.”

When you’re in a situationship, there’s no shared understanding of what the relationship actually is. If someone ghosts you, hooks up with someone else, or slowly stops making time for you, you can be devastated and still feel like you have no right to complain. After all, what rule did they break? Nobody agreed on any rules in the first place. That’s part of the appeal and part of the problem. The ambiguity protects everyone from accountability. It lets both people enjoy the intimacy of a relationship while preserving the ability to say, if things go badly, that it was never really a relationship at all.

Usually when people ask “what are we?” they aren’t looking for a vocabulary word. They’re asking for information. Do you like me? Is this going anywhere? Am I wasting my time? The tension at the center of every situationship is that those questions matter, yet the relationship itself often lacks a mechanism for answering them. That’s what makes labels important. Not because everyone needs to fit neatly into a category, but because categories communicate meaning.

Labels exist to indicate something larger than themselves. “Friend,” “girlfriend,” “partner,” and “spouse” are not just words. They tell us something about the norms of the relationship, the expectations attached to it, and the significance the people involved assign to one another. You don’t ask someone if they’re dating because you’re curious about vocabulary. You ask because the classification helps you understand the nature and authenticity of the connection.

The weird thing is that now we have more language than ever. Not even just for dating, but for emotions generally. We can identify attachment styles, love languages, communication patterns, trauma responses, boundaries, red flags, and green flags. We can say, “we’re in an emotionally unavailable avoidant-anxious attachment low-commitment situationship with some occasional microcheating and friends-with-benefits tendencies.” But somehow many of us still can’t say “I like you,” “I don’t like you,” or “what exactly are we doing here?”

We often describe our generation as emotionally intelligent. We talk openly about mental health. We can explain our feelings using terms that would’ve sounded like therapy jargon 10 years ago. Yet when faced with a simple conversation that might make us vulnerable, many of us would rather invent a new category than give a direct answer.

I’ve participated in enough situationships to know they don’t happen by accident. Nobody wakes up one morning and accidentally spends four months texting someone every day while carefully avoiding any conversation about where the relationship is going. These categories exist because they serve a purpose. They let us stay close to someone while avoiding the risk that comes with clarity. If nobody defines anything, nobody can technically get rejected. And I hate rejection. I know you do too.

At the same time, ambiguity offers something strangely comforting. It allows intimacy without commitment. You can become deeply important to someone while never having to ask whether they want to be with you. The relationship never gets named, which means it never has to formally begin, and therefore can never be formally ended. You get all the possibilities of a relationship without the terrifying finality of an answer.

Maybe all these labels exist because we’re trying to describe experiences that traditional categories don’t fully capture. That’s probably true. But the more vocabulary we create, the easier it becomes to avoid the underlying question. Do you actually like each other?

Because if answering that question requires a glossary, maybe we’re not communicating as clearly as we think we are.