In modern dating culture, situationships have become nearly impossible to escape. Much like surge pricing or “just checking in” emails, they are everywhere. Most people have probably been in one themselves while insisting to friends they were merely “keeping things casual”.The term began circulating online in the late noughties and early 2010s, particularly within Black dating culture and on Internet forums, before entering mainstream vocabulary around 2019. Suddenly, the situationship became the official term for relationships that contained all the intimacy of commitment without any of the structural clarity.Tinder’s 2022Year in Swipe report recorded a 49% increase in users adding the term “situationship” to their profiles, signalling how quickly emotionally undefined relationships had moved from internet slang to a recognised dating category.A communications professional in New Delhi recalls how she entered one during the lockdown in 2020, which formally ended only in 2023. They texted constantly, spoke every day, had date nights twice a week and spent enough time together that her friends assumed they were already a couple. “At one point,” she says, “we were discussing each other’s parents’ blood pressure medication.”The problem was that every time she attempted to define the relationship, the man would gently move the goalpost. The first time she brought up commitment, he responded with the classic situationship line: “Why don’t we get to know each other better? There’s no need to rush.” She agreed. A few months later, the conversation returned, then dissolved again. “I knew I was being breadcrumbed,” she says now. “But at the time, I convinced myself patience was maturity.” For the uninitated, breadcrumbing is when someone gives you just enough attention to keep you hooked, but they never fully commitEver since ending things, she says, she has “padded herself up” emotionally. She journals, listens obsessively to American psychotherapist Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? podcast and has read enough relationship psychology books to diagnose attachment styles at dinner parties. “Theoretically, I know exactly what unhealthy dynamics look like,” she says. “But when you’re actually inside it, none of that knowledge helps.”Slipping up