The Situationship

May 1, 2025

 I loved COVID. Let me clarify: I didn’t love the pandemic, the sickness, the lives lost. I didn’t love the fear that clung to every corner of the world. But the lockdown? I loved the lockdown. For someone who had spent years wading through half-hearted connections, moments of fleeting affection, and the endless scrolling through people I’d never truly see, the stillness of those months felt like a reprieve. In the midst of a collapsing world, there was something undeniably intimate about the isolation.

I’d sneak out in the dead of night, slipping past the fragile barriers that separated us, finding my way to him. We’d text all day, every day. When I think back to my past lovers, I can’t help but marvel at how quickly time erodes meaning. The conversations we had, the touch of a hand, the way someone looked at you—it's all a blur of images and sounds that now feel like a dream. But with him, in 2020, I am transported back to the peculiar shade of dark purple on his walls, the warmth of our laughter, the strange but comforting rhythm of our time together.

He was both a friend and a teacher, the kind of person you meet once in a lifetime, someone whose presence makes you feel like you are learning without knowing it. Our nights bled into mornings as we cuddled until sleep almost overtook us, watching movies or making TikToks in the dim light of his room. It was absurd. I think back now and wonder, what the hell were we doing? Was that just some fleeting thing, a moment that seemed significant because we were locked in this strange, liminal space of time? It wasn't a casual fling, not by any stretch.

Looking back now, I realize how much I loved him. I knew, somewhere deep down, that he was seeing other people. It hurt. I acted like it didn’t, but it did. I, too, found others, but no one came close to him. That’s what situationships are, I suppose: a dance of wanting but never committing. They are the paradox of connection—being entwined, yet never fully tethered.

Gen Z is a generation that has rewritten the rules of love and affection. We are the most committed non-committal generation to ever exist. We don’t date, we situate. We create spaces in which love is both undefined and infinite. The situationship—this glorious, messy middle ground—exists in that space between love and lust, attachment and detachment. It confuses your friends, it intrigues your therapist, and it lives inside you like the most intoxicating drug you never quite want to kick.

A situationship is the best and worst of everything. It’s that heady, euphoric rush of feeling something you can’t name, yet can’t let go of. It’s the relationship that feels too significant to be just a fling, yet too ambiguous to be something lasting. It makes you question the point of every other day before it came into your life. You question what your life was before them. And you wonder, maybe even hope, it’s something that can transcend the inevitable end.

And then, as all situationships do, it ends. The slow, agonizing drift of distance, the invisible pull that creates a void too deep to fill with words. Over a year later, I tried to create space. I didn’t handle it well, and he ended it—ghosted me, as if we hadn’t spent every weekend for a year tangled up in one another’s lives. It was a quiet, almost brutal absence. For months, I wasn’t okay. And yet, eventually, you forget. Until you don’t.

Then, out of nowhere, our paths crossed again, and it felt like a strange kind of return. We slept together, no texts afterward, no calls. It was as if nothing had changed—and yet, everything had. He wasn’t someone I could just call and hook up with. Not like that. Not anymore.

Somehow, I ended up in his college town, pulled back into a weekend that was a dream of what was, of what could’ve been. But it wasn’t the same. I left without a word, and two months later, at a game night, after two edibles, he pulled me aside for a conversation. He said things I had wanted to hear for years. And in that moment, I think I lost my voice. I couldn’t speak; I could only listen, stunned into silence. My mind raced, my heart swelled, but nothing came out. Maybe it was the edibles, maybe it was him, maybe it was both.

I asked him to grab coffee the next day. He didn’t call. He didn’t text. I left feeling like I was seventeen again, lost in the confusion of something I couldn’t quite name.

Situationships are complicated. They’re unspoken, unfinished, and everything in between. They are the unacknowledged love song that plays in the background of your life. We love Drake because his whole discography is a roadmap of situationships, each song a new chapter in the endless dance between connection and disconnection. There’s a tenderness to it, a recognition that this isn’t love as we once knew it, but something equally beautiful, though harder to define.

It’s the hope that in three years, you’ll run into them at the grocery store, as if the universe might give you one more chance. It’s about the paradox of living in the now while also tethered to the possibility of what could be. And, most importantly, it’s about the beauty of knowing that your standards aren’t low—they’ve just shifted to something that only makes sense to the two of you.

In the end, a situationship is Slime You Out by Drake. It’s messy, intoxicating, and doesn’t have a happy ending. But it has a truth. And sometimes, that’s all we really need.