Another sign of the descent of Western culture into the abyss. Since the beginning of time - men and women have wanted to be in committed relationships with each other. Less and less this is true. People don't want responsibility and obligations. Just fun and an easy time.
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Long gone are the days when seeing a film or sharing a milkshake was all it took to solidify a couple as definitively together. Instead, modern dating has evolved into a delicate – at times complicated – series of ‘baby steps’ for young people.
Research has shown that Gen Z’s attitudes towards dating have evolved from the generations before them; they take an especially pragmatic approach to love and relationships, and subsequently aren’t prioritizing establishing committed relationships the same way their older peers once did.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re not expressing interest in romance and intimacy entirely; rather, they’re finding new ways to satisfy those wants and needs that fit better into their lives. This shift has given rise to the idea of the ‘situationship’ – a term that describes the grey area between friendship and a relationship.
A situationship gives name to a hard-to-define stage of dating that experts say has skyrocketed in popularity among Gen Z. “Right now, this solves some kind of need for intimacy, companionship – whatever it is – but this does not have necessarily a long-term time horizon,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, US, whose research centers on sexuality and situationships, specifically. People are increasingly embracing the relationship classification: the term has hit an all-time high in Google search traffic this year, after starting to gain notable traction late in 2020. There’s a worldwide interest in situationships, across ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations, adds Armstrong.
The creation – and continued rise – of this term, especially among young daters, reveals a lot about how Gen Zers are re-framing what love and sex means, in a way that looks different than the generations before them.
No need to be ‘going somewhere’
A situationship is an informal arrangement typically between two people that has components of both emotional and physical connection, yet operates outside the conventional idea of being in an exclusive, committed relationship. In some cases, situationships are constrained by time and the idea that a casual arrangement is the best fit for the current situation. This could be the case for two final-year university students, for instance, who might not want to progress into a committed partnership, considering new jobs could take them to new cities after graduating.
Armstrong argues situationships are popular because they challenge the ‘relationship escalator’: the idea that intimate partnerships are meant to have a linear structure with the goal of hitting conventional relationship milestones, such as co-habitation, engagement and marriage. The concept of the situationship goes against “this notion that being with someone where it’s not going anywhere is ‘wasting time’”, she says – a sentiment she notes Gen Z is increasingly embracing. Rather, people in these arrangements willingly opt into the grey area of an undefined relationship. According to Armstrong, they believe “the situationship, for whatever reason, works for right now. And for right now, I'm not going to worry about having a thing that is ‘going somewhere’”.
Some research chimes with this. In interviews with 150 undergraduate students during the 2020 to 2021 academic year, Lisa Wade, associate professor of sociology at Tulane University, US, observed that Gen Z are more reluctant to define the relationship, or even admit to wanting a relationship to progress. She says her research has shown that “holding one's cards close to one's chest is not unique to today’s young people”, but Gen Z are especially unwilling to share their feelings with each other.
On social media, TikTokers and Tweeters – Gen Zers, especially – widely share stories of situationships. On TikTok, videos tagged #situationship have been viewed more than 839 million times, and videos under #situationships and #situationship have also racked up millions of views. References also abound in pop culture: the term appears in popular dating shows such as Love Island UK and in songs, such as Situationship by millennial Swedish singer Snoh Aalegra.
