Situationships: Is Commitment Becoming Optional?

I walked into the dining hall last November and saw Marcus sitting with his arm around someone new. My roommate leaned over and whispered that he had told three different people he was not looking for anything serious, yet he spent most weekends with at least one of them. I felt a strange mix of recognition and disbelief because I had spent the previous six months in something similar with a guy from my chemistry lab. We texted every night, studied together twice a week, and once drove an hour to get burgers at two in the morning, but when my friend asked if we were dating, I genuinely could not answer.

That confusion, I would come to understand, defines the situationship: a relationship with all the emotional investment of commitment but none of the clarity. In a culture where labels feel restrictive and independence seems safer than vulnerability, many college students are choosing undefined connections over traditional commitments, and this shift raises an urgent question about whether we are protecting ourselves or simply avoiding the risk that real intimacy requires.

I first heard the term situationship during my sophomore year, though I had been living it since freshman orientation. My high school relationships had clear beginnings, the kind where someone asked someone else out and both people understood what came next. College felt different from the first week. People hooked up at parties, then grabbed breakfast together, then stopped talking for a month, then started the cycle again. The term itself captures this ambiguity: more than friendship, less than a relationship, and entirely resistant to definition. What made my own situationship with the chemistry lab guy so confusing was that we acted like a couple in private but never acknowledged it in public. He never called me his girlfriend, and I never pressed him to, partly because I feared his answer and partly because I told myself I did not want the pressure either.

The appeal of situationships lies in their flexibility and the illusion of control they offer. In my junior year, I started seeing someone from my sociology class, and we both agreed from the beginning that we were not looking for anything serious. That agreement felt liberating at first. I could focus on my classes and my internship applications without worrying about date nights or meeting his parents. We spent time together when it suited both of us, and there was no guilt if a week passed without contact. I appreciated that freedom, especially during midterms when I barely had time to sleep, let alone maintain a relationship. Yet beneath that freedom was a constant low-level anxiety. I never knew if he was seeing other people, and I could not ask without sounding like I wanted more. The lack of commitment that seemed like protection in theory felt like uncertainty in practice, and I found myself checking my phone more often than I did during my one official relationship freshman year.

What situationships avoid, more than anything, is the vulnerability that commitment demands. My roommate once told me she preferred her situationship because it meant she could leave anytime without feeling like she had failed. That comment stuck with me because it revealed what I had been doing too: treating emotional distance as a form of self-preservation. Commitment requires admitting you care about someone enough to let them hurt you, and in a culture that often equates independence with strength, that admission feels almost reckless. I noticed this most clearly during winter break of my junior year, when the sociology guy and I kept texting even though we were in different states. I wanted to tell him I missed him, but those words felt too heavy for what we had agreed we were. Instead, I sent jokes and memes, keeping everything light. The cost of avoiding vulnerability, I realized, was that I also avoided genuine connection. I was protecting myself from rejection, but I was also protecting myself from being fully known.

Some of my friends argue that situationships are simply a more honest version of dating, one that acknowledges how hard it is to know what you want at twenty years old. My best friend from freshman year has been in a situationship for over a year, and she insists it works for her because neither she nor the other person is ready for something serious. She points out that traditional relationships often involve unspoken expectations and pressure to follow a certain timeline, and she prefers the honesty of saying upfront that she cannot promise anything long term. I respect that perspective, and I think it reflects a real tension in how we navigate relationships now. We are more cautious than previous generations, more aware of how relationships can limit our choices or derail our plans. At the same time, I wonder if we are using that caution as an excuse to avoid discomfort. The question is not whether commitment is optional, but whether we are choosing flexibility or just choosing fear.

I am still figuring out what I want from relationships, but I know now that situationships cost me more than they protected me. The guy from sociology and I stopped talking halfway through the spring semester, not because anything went wrong but because nothing ever went right enough to matter. There was no closure, no conversation, just a slow fade that left me feeling oddly hollow. I realized that I had spent months investing in something that was never allowed to grow, and that investment felt wasted in a way my freshman relationship, messy as it ended, never did. I am not arguing that everyone needs to pursue commitment or that situationships are inherently wrong. What I am saying is that avoiding labels does not mean avoiding hurt, and refusing to define something does not make it less real. Commitment is not becoming optional so much as we are becoming more afraid of it, and I am trying to learn that the vulnerability required to say what I want is not a weakness but a different kind of courage.

Did you like this example?

284

12