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
- Recorded on a relationship-advice blog in 2010, then spread through social media in the late 2010s as a name for arrangements nobody involved wanted to name.
- Synonyms
- almost relationship
- Antonyms
- relationship
July 22, at 93 days and 9 dates. Asked about the long term she said “we have not reached that point yet.” On July 1 I had told her I was off the market and had cancelled the apps, and was answered “ok.” In 95 days that is the only position either party has stated, and one party stated it.
The situationship is the first relationship format to be defined entirely by what it declines to include. It may have a schedule, a standing takeout order, and 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.
The move can also be made and simply not returned, which is cheaper still for whoever did not make it. A declaration is not a request. It cannot be declined, which means it cannot be agreed to, and the only thing available to the person receiving one is acknowledgement. Acknowledgement costs 2 characters and commits the party typing it to nothing. The ambiguity survives intact and one party has spent his alternatives inside it.
This file is a situationship that one party has tried to close and the other has not answered. 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 1 I told her I had taken myself off the market and cancelled the apps, and the reply was ok. On July 22, at 93 days, I asked about the long term and was told we had not reached that point. I volunteered the first and prompted the second, and neither produced a position from the other side. 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 21 days after saying out loud what I wanted the thing to be.