Warning: The following article includes descriptions of miscarriage, emotional abuse, financial abuse and harassment that some readers may find distressing.
The word “situationship” was coined by journalist Carina Hsieh in 2017 and has embedded itself within the cultural lexicon, along with the likes of “ghosting”, “catfishing”, “orbiting”, and more.
Lying in that undefined, uncertain space between a casual hookup and a relationship, a situationship means there’s sex involved and time spent together, and perhaps even emotional intimacy, but with a refusal on one or both party’s side to commit.
And whether it lasts two weeks or five years, anyone who has ever dabbled in a situationship knows that some end well, while others, frankly, don’t. The end of a months-long situationship can split your world open with more viciousness than a long-term relationship breakdown. But a certain amount of lucidity can come after a breakup, whether it’s self-love, learning to develop your sense of boundaries, or even teaching you what you want or don’t want next. Refinery29 talks to eight women — who preferred we didn’t share their last names — on what their messiest situationship taught them, in life, and in love.
Anette, 27
“I met her on Tinder about a month after a very painful breakup from my first big love and big relationship. She then came to visit me in London a few weeks later and it was great vibes. She said she liked London a lot and wanted to move here, so I said she could stay at mine until she found a place. Bear in mind, at this point, I knew nothing about this person.”
How long did your situationship last for? “Five months.”
Worst moment? “When I realised that she was a narcissistic pathological liar who stole my cash and emotionally blackmailed me into taking out an expensive phone contract for her in my name.”
How did it end and how long did it take you to get over it? “It ended when I confronted her about the missing money and some other things that I didn’t like about our toxic situationship. She took it very badly, started packing her stuff and left. I asked for the keys to my place back and never saw her again. She then accused me of making her homeless even though I knew that she had somewhere to go. Took me a good year to get over this and I’m still working on healing some of the trauma she caused me.”
What lesson did it teach you? “A rebound is fine, but get to know people well before you jump into things with them. Be careful post-breakup: Often our thinking and decision making isn’t the most reasonable in this time. Focus on you instead and set very strict boundaries.”
Amy, 29
“We first met at a wedding and immediately clicked, staying up until 4 a.m. laughing our heads off. We saw each other for three months or so initially, but I wasn’t in the right place to start anything and sort of just let it drift. A while later when I’d moved abroad to Italy and was having a terrible time, I remembered how well we had gotten on and got back in touch with him. This turned into four-hour phone calls, video calls and messaging back and forward. We saw each other for the first time in a couple of years when I got back to the UK that summer and he came to stay at my family home.”
How long did your situationship last for? “A couple of years with a big hiatus.”
How did it end and how long did it take you to get over it? “Maybe it was a lot in a short space of time, but it seemed nice. What was puzzling was that he didn’t seem to want to leave my house, but once he did it was very difficult to get hold of him again. I saw him a couple more times before I left to go back to Italy. I tried to be upfront and ask what had changed, and he said that he’d freaked out because he’d met my family. I said it didn’t need to mean anything big, at the back of my mind thinking that laughing until we cried together, having compatible interests and great sexual chemistry, would mean that he surely would want to be with me.
“Of course, by the time I was back in Italy, it was easier for him to put off the difficult conversation. When it eventually happened, he didn’t say that he didn’t want to be with me in so many words, but there was my noncommittal answer, as noncommittal as the relationship itself. After I put the phone down, there was homesickness, there was heartbreak, but there was also the shame of believing that it was something much bigger than it ever was. It was a few months before I met someone else, which was incidentally another situationship on a smaller scale... And then another one…”
What did it teach you? “I realised that I was projecting a lot onto this person: I saw our situationship as my salvation from homesickness and a life raft to cling to as I struggled to embed myself in my new country. It was a hard wake-up call, but instead of pining for what could have been at home, I was forced to be more present and throw myself into life in Italy. As I mentioned above, I had a couple of rebound situationships following this big daddy, where I was still waiting around for a couple of people who, it’s obvious with hindsight, were not interested. I weirdly met two guys in a short space of time, both of whom paid for half my train ticket to go and see them on the other side of the country, who then wanted nothing afterwards. I actually started thinking I was cursed.
“I think I’ve learned now that you can ask the other person if you’re on the same page, and if they’re avoidant about it then you have your answer. When the shoe has been on the other foot since this experience, I’ve taken a deep breath and sent the scary message that says, ‘You’re lovely, but I’d rather not take this any further.’ If I feel I’m being strung along then I tend to tell the guy to stop messaging unless he actually wants something real. I used to think it was really hard to do that, but really you have nothing to lose.”
Abigail, 31
“We met at the restaurant we both worked at and started hanging out and casually seeing each other. It escalated to seeing each other almost every day and sleeping at each other’s places most nights (mainly his house though, because he thought my mum’s place wasn’t cool enough). I joined him on family holidays and other family outings and activities. I got really close to his mum and had a great relationship with her. He refused to call me his girlfriend, ever. I confronted him about this many times, but he’d always manage to convince me that it wasn’t a bad thing or that it didn’t mean he didn’t care about me. I was young and in love with him so I just went with it, very much at my own expense.”
How long did your situationship last for? “Four to five years.”
Worst moment? “Where to begin? He used to borrow money from me to buy fancy clothes, and if I would ask for it back he would make me feel bad for it, and act as if I was being super annoying. Another time, we went for dinner at a restaurant where he looked at me and said “You could have been a model if you were a bit skinnier.” He also met a girl he really liked and told me about it as if we were just buddies — this was definitely the boiling point.”
How did it end and how long did it take you to get over it? “When he started seeing this other girl, he acted as if it wasn’t strange to tell me all about it and I told him I wasn’t about to stand by the sidelines while he fell in love with someone else and gave her what I had been wanting for almost five years. He truly didn’t understand, and that gave me a big moment of clarity where I told him everything: how I felt, and how badly he had been treating me for such a long time. It did not resonate with him so I told him I never wanted to see him again, and we never did… Until he and his new girlfriend came to the restaurant I was working at and I refused to seat him.”
What did it teach you? “It took me a really long time to heal from this experience. I was so young and was made to feel very worthless for a long time. I started working very hard on the relationship I had with myself. My main takeaway was that me loving me is the most important thing in my life and I’m very thankful for those years where I got to establish that. I’m now engaged to the love of my life. On our first date I told him that I will always love myself more than anybody else and that I would put my relationship with myself over anything else. I told him if he wanted to be in my life he would have to be of added value to it. He has been amazing for three and a half years and only encourages me to love myself more and more.”
Mia, 32
“We met on Hinge and it was a very straight out the gate, super-flirty situation. The penny dropped when I realised he was giving big relationship energy, while being very non-committal (it was causing arguments).”
How long did your situationship last for? “On and off, about a year and half.”
Worst moment? “Some really nasty things were said about me as a person and my ‘inability’ to keep a relationship, which I thought was rich considering he never wanted one in the first place and evaded the question whenever asked!”
How did it end and how long did it take you to get over it? “It ended on pretty decent terms. When he started being honest, we were able to actually talk about it. It took me about six months to get over it, largely because I had to get real with myself about what I was allowing and what I really wanted.”
What did it teach you? “It taught me about how important it is to determine whether I like them as opposed to focusing on being liked. It meant that I went into new relationship attempts with boundaries and as a result I’m now in a happy relationship that I don’t think I would’ve been able to navigate without being harshly humbled by the situationship.”
Sophie, 27
“I’d moved to a new country, and I met the situationship at a party because we both used to work for the same company. I had just stopped seeing a guy I was dating on and off for quite some time because he had gotten a girlfriend, and another guy I liked had also just gotten a girlfriend. I was starting to feel like there was something wrong with me. He walked in, and my jaw dropped thinking he was the most attractive man I’d ever seen in my life. There were vibes from the beginning and we sort of hit it off. After the party I followed him on Instagram and slid into his DMs and it started from there. I was young and naive. I thought because he ticked a lot of my boxes and because he was super attractive and we had a lot in common, that it should be obvious that we were meant to be.”
How long did your situationship last for? “Two years.”
Worst moment? “He got me pregnant. I had to nag him into meeting me in person and before I told him, he told me he had news too, and it was that he had met someone. I told him I was pregnant, and from there it unravelled quickly and drastically. I ended up miscarrying and while he was at mine ‘caring’ for me, he was still texting this girl at the same time. I realised that if someone really cared about me and respected me or appreciated me and wanted me to be in their life, they wouldn’t treat me this way.”
How did it end and how long did it take you to get over it? “Now, in hindsight I could see what a terrible person he was. It took me two years to get over it where I took time out to heal my self-esteem and self-worth and reflect on the situation. I realised it wasn’t about who I was as a person and more about who he was as a person.”
What did it teach you? “It taught me that I need to realise my worth and recognise when someone isn’t acknowledging who I am as a person or valuing me. And that I needed to have boundaries in place and that I don’t need to cut off all my options and focus on someone who isn’t focusing on me in the same way. Also, that if someone loves you, their actions and their words will match. You won’t doubt if someone likes you or cares about you, it will just be known. I learned how to stand up for myself, and not be a people pleaser or a doormat and communicate openly and tell people how I feel. If you accept crumbs when you want the whole loaf, you’ll always be hungry.”
Lily, 30
“I met him a while ago through a guy I used to date. We always had fun together but I’d only ever see him at festivals, and then during COVID-19 he slid into my DMs and we were messaging back and forth during the whole pandemic. After lockdown we ended up going on a date, but then he went away on holiday and I didn’t hear from him for two weeks, and I found out he’d been dating two other girls at the same time. Somehow I fell back into the trap and we started dating again. It started as a situationship because it was never anything serious, and he is not the kind of person I’d want to settle down with, but it was fun and it solved a need at the time.”
How long did your situationship last for? “Two years, on and off.”
Worst moment? “He had a phobia of hair (down there) and even if I had a millimetre of hair, he would shudder saying all the girls he had been with had laser hair removal. He offered to pay for the laser for me and I went along with it. But the moment I had my first appointment, I felt disgusted thinking, ‘This isn’t me. How have I let a man pay for me to get laser hair removal?’ I didn’t go to any more appointments, and shortly after, it ended. He would always make constant little digs about my character and body but it would always come with a layer of jokiness. When I think back, it was fucking horrendous.”
How did it end and how long did it take you to get over it? “It finally ended when I told him this was bullshit. We had lots of fun together but it was never emotional and whenever I tried to get serious he was like, ‘Ugh’. All my friends were totally disapproving of him and I just felt embarrassed by him. I had to block him on every single platform — WhatsApp, Instagram, iMessage, Telegram, Facebook — so he sent me 69p on Monzo, with the message saying ‘Unblock me x’. He also sent flowers and cards to my house, and wouldn’t leave me alone. I cried when it ended but it did not take me long to get over it.”
What did it teach you? “It made me realise that I’ve come a lot further than I thought in terms of respect for myself. I learned that I don’t need a man to validate who I am. He hated that I had hair down there, or that I’d talk about poo. I was like fuck you, this is who I am. I learned I’m putting myself first and that’s a great thing. I’m not missing out by being alone. It also made me realise fun is very important to me in a relationship but it can’t be at the expense of emotional support, that’s never going to be the key to a long-lasting relationship.”
Dana, 35
“At the beginning, he was the brother of my ex-partner’s best friend and our friendship was very platonic. When my partner and I broke up after nearly nine years together, we ended up kissing on my first night out post breakup. That then turned into an on-again-off-again situationship during which I was in a very challenging mental space after my previous relationship, which had left me with a lot of self-esteem and trust issues. He would push and pull, would never talk about anything to do with emotion or feelings, was prone to completely checking out and brutally going cold on me. It was a bit like dating the tin man, and me inexplicably being completely infatuated with him. Our mutual friends were absolutely baffled, it started to affect our friendships because of the drama it brought to every group event. He would get new girlfriends and I tried to date other people, but I was always there whenever he called, like a lap dog. When he’d discard me, I would fall into a depression. I literally had a breakdown over it.”
How long did your situationship last for? “About three years.”
Worst moment? “When I ended up in A&E one night after he ended things for the millionth time. By that point the situation had eroded my mental health to quite a dire point. I was, however, at my desk by 9 a.m. — it was something that was very much experienced as privately as possible.”
How did it end and how long did it take you to get over it? “Believe it or not, we still reunited a couple of times over the year that followed. But after something awful happened within our friendship group, I cut him out and haven’t spoken to him in years. My life went in a completely different direction afterwards. And I now have zero feelings towards him. In fact I am baffled and feel quite sad for myself that I even felt it was worthy of my sanity.”
What did it teach you? “A line my best friend has often repeated to me that really stuck: ‘I do not want someone who does not want me.’ I had a lot of therapy, and I’d say it took a couple of years to completely move on, and that time was invaluable to me. I learned a huge amount about myself, learned to have compassion for myself, and learned that my value was not determined by whether somebody wanted me. That I deserved a hell of a lot more. I now have a wonderful partner who, a few years ago, I would have pushed away because I found healthy, reciprocal relationships strange and icky, because my self-esteem was so low. But, most importantly, before I met my current partner I spent a lot of time learning to love myself and to be alone. It sounds clichéd, but learning to thrive completely on my own has been the most important thing to me. Because I know, no matter what, I am fine just as I am. A great relationship is now just a cherry on top. Oh, and I take zero shit.”
Hallie, 28
“We met at a party. I was so disillusioned with dating apps at that point that I thought that even meeting him in real life meant we could have something special.”
How long did your situationship last for? “Four years, on and off.”
Worst moment? “We had a long conversation about how he wasn’t ready for a relationship, where he gave these thoughtful answers about how he had to work on himself and he didn’t have the capacity to truly be with me. I ate up his lies and one week later I saw a picture of him and a girl, his hand placed on her upper thigh. He was grinning in a way he never grinned with me. We actually didn’t have any pictures together. I did some snooping and found out that was his girlfriend. The truth, all along, was that I was the other woman. He was using me.”
How did it end and how long did it take you to get over it? “It took me years. I was so broken that I made a Twitter account just warning people about toxic relationships. I was so consumed with despair that I quit my job and almost became completely agoraphobic. I was crippled by anxiety and I became obsessed with the girl he chose over me.”
What did it teach you? “It taught me what a relationship shouldn’t be. I blamed myself when I should have blamed him and the dynamic that he created between us. I decided to shed the shame of my own heartbreak, and publicly (on the internet) discuss the humiliating cycles I found myself engaging in. I think it’s crucial to warn people and encourage them to end toxic relationships while also compassionately encouraging them to examine their own unresolved issues and recognise the societal conditioning that has them craving approval, and teach them how to truly love themselves.”
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