ELIZABETH LEE // DAILY NEXUS
Night 1: You’re sharing the most intimate night imaginable with a previous stranger: secrets are stained on your carpet, you’re exchanging quick breaths and holding prolonged eye contact and nothing has ever felt more romantic – this one might actually work.
Night 2: All of your friends have been made well aware of your new so-called “love of your life,” you stay up all night daydreaming about what flowers you will have at your beachside wedding.
Night 3: It is now 7:01 p.m. and you find that you have been glued to the couch for the past three hours texting them back; your heart is singing and no one could wipe the smile from your face even if they tried.
Night 76: Your journal has run out of pages to write on and your brain is exhausted from hypothesizing all of the different possibilities of your future together. You might resort to ChatGPT to solve the unsolvable question: what are we?
And so it goes.
Or maybe that’s just how it goes for me.
A tale as old as time (or at least as old as COVID-19), the situationship epidemic thwarts love, peace and safety and instead antagonizes everyone’s unhealthy attachment styles.
As a woman who lives with seven other women also navigating their own relationships, it’s not uncommon to find us piled into someone’s bed, knee-deep in questions about whether we’re being “too much” or not: “should I send him this text? What if he takes it the wrong way? Is it too early to ask what he wants out of this?”
I’m unsure when the stigmatization for loving intensely came so strongly into our psyche’s, as I believe it is critically disrupting our perception of love. Upon my daily doom-scrolls on social media, I find countless videos urging women to “let guys chase you,” and to give prospective partners “the cold shoulder” in an effort to attract them into a potential relationship.
Far be it for me to tell you how to love, but I would rather be known for loving messily and loudly; I will never be too much for the right person.
I have been shushed, shunned, ghosted, laughed at, and any other unorthodox response you could imagine for simply expressing emotions. When did it become so embarrassing to express how I feel, and why must the men I choose to date (or rather not date) reinforce that concept?
Each time I end up in an unlabeled relationship with a man, I find myself void of a voice to ask for what I consider to be the basic necessities: trust, love, serenity. Instead, he avoids commitment like I avoid conflict, benefiting his cause: the freedom to flirt or fuck anyone new that walks into his life while simultaneously holding me at arm’s length.
All I want to do during these unrestless times is call him, but I settle for something more absorbable and less invasive: this is symbiosis.
All I think about doing is limiting my humanity in relation to him, I try so hard to be perfect I forget to be good: this is mutualism.
All I end up doing is pacing outside his door and stuffing remonstrances under my ribcage while I tense up at his dismissing words: this is parasitism.
In an attempt to control the uncontrollable and make sense of the boundless criterion that has my mind wandering and my heart racing, I attempt the use of “situationship.”
What’s going on with you and that new guy, Kira?
I don’t really know. I think I’m in… a… situationship?
My uneasiness for my own situation precedes me — the word itself sits awkward in my mouth, like I took too ambitious of a bite of food, and I’m trying to force a label on something that my man of interest is so clearly dodging.
The men I’ve encountered know no such thing of a “situationship” when I’ve asked for a label. “We’re just hanging out,” they’ll slyly respond, to which I take as them soaking in the girlfriend benefits and leaving me to hang dry whenever they please. They don’t owe me anything: no text back, no promise of another night spent together; just me, at their beck and call, trying to make our connection (or lack thereof) into something it’s not.
Thoughtlessly discarded, the cycle continues: I am now spiraling in my twin XL bed that used to hold two instead of one, wondering what I could’ve said or done that led to my rejection. Streamings of The Notebook, Normal People, and He’s Just Not That Into You to follow shortly.
We’ve normalized forcing ourselves to downplay our aspirations for a deep and genuine love that we’ve come to terms with accepting less commitment, less passion and less attention all for the sake of someone warm to sleep next to.
The loneliest place to be is wide awake, three feet away from someone under a shared comforter, praying that they will turn into you and wrap their arms around your frame. Those late night moments of praying to some unconceivable God, asking to be minimally loved, should not be a pervasive feeling.
The loneliest place to be is wide awake, three feet away from someone under a shared comforter, praying that they will turn into you and wrap their arms around your frame. Those late night moments of praying to some unconceivable God, asking to be minimally loved, should not be a pervasive feeling.
The dating pool becomes muddier the more we look at each other as disposable items, something to try and discard. Well, I am not a sweater you’ve picked up at the Urban Flea Market to be looked at and placed back down on the clothing rack. I am an entanglement of every soul that has ever crossed my path. I urge that everyone who wishes to seek depth in the people they talk to try to do so, for we will become better for it.
The friction your heart must go through to accept that you cannot love, live or believe in anything casual does initially burn, but it becomes a richer world for loving in full saturation.
Why yes, loving wholeheartedly is scarier than accepting breadcrumbs: I would take the hit of ultimately being rejected after confessing my feelings one thousand times over compared to the constant small rejections coupled with uneasiness that inevitably comes with a situationship.
We must stop being so scared of what is on the other side of love, for it is nothing more than your childhood home, your best friend’s voice or your bed waiting for you at the end of the day. We must stop cowering out of things our soul is begging us to do in the name of not getting embarrassed; I must be embarrassed every second of every day, the way that I love.
The only thing that situationships have taught me is that there is no such thing as a situationship: the situation is you trying to label something inherently unlabeled. My nights of pleading with boys to get off dating apps are long gone, and I do not wish for anyone to lay emotionally feeble in bed, praying to be embraced.
I will love completely, or not at all. I will not meet you at the corner of emotionally unavailable, for that is not my path.
Kira Logan had to burn her hand on the stove to tell others that it’s hot.
A version of this article appeared on p. 8 of the April 17, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.
