Lexicon ·
situationship
noun
- Stated meaning
- A connection that is more than casual and less than a relationship, left undefined by mutual preference.
- Operating meaning
- An arrangement in which each party receives the services of a partner at the rate of an acquaintance, with the definition postponed until one of them needs to leave without owing an explanation.
- Origin
- Entered circulation through dating-app culture and advice columns in the late 2010s, then spread through video captions describing arrangements nobody involved wanted to name.
July 22, at 93 days and 9 dates. Asked about the long term she said “we have not reached that point yet.” In 95 days neither of us has given the arrangement a name, and neither of us has been asked to.
The situationship is the first relationship format to be defined entirely by what it declines to include. It has a schedule, a standing takeout order, and in most cases a shared streaming password, but it has no title, and the absence of a title is treated as the load-bearing wall.
The word performs a useful administrative function. It lets two people describe several months of the same evening as a single ongoing event with no start date. Anniversaries cannot be observed because nothing began. Endings cannot be mourned at full rate because nothing was agreed to. Each party retains the right to claim, later and to friends, that the other one wanted more.
What makes the arrangement stable is that naming it is always somebody’s move and never anybody’s turn. The person who raises it converts an ambiguity into a request, and a request can be declined, whereas an ambiguity cannot. So both parties wait, and the waiting is itself the format.
This file is a situationship that neither party has ever called one. In 95 days it has produced 9 dates, $2,238.64, 1,470 minutes in person, 12 written instruments and 12 disclosures, and no noun. On July 22, at 93 days, I asked about the long term and was told we had not reached that point, which is the closest either of us has come to raising it. The scorecard at the bottom of every report in this file has a field for follow-up, a field for cost, and a field for duration. It has never had a field for what the thing is, and I built the scorecard.