By the fifth month, Dana knew his work schedule, his sister’s name and which side of the bed he slept on. She did not know what she was to him. She knew that he answered her texts within the hour, and that he had once driven across town on a Sunday night when her car would not start. He had never introduced her to anyone as anything, and she had not asked him to. Asking seemed like the kind of question that could end it, so she did not ask. Her friends call it a situationship.
People use the word for a relationship that has the closeness of one without any of the agreements, and they tend to mean different things by it. For some it is the stretch before something starts. For others it is where they have been for a year. What Dana wants to know is whether the trust between her and this man is growing, or whether the weeks are only passing. A good number of readers may be asking the same thing.
What Is a Situationship, and Why Is It So Hard to Name?
Nothing has gone wrong, and that is part of what makes it hard to name. He texts back. He shows up. Nobody has been lied to, and nobody has been promised anything. There is no obvious reason to ask what this is, and Dana has not asked.
The Gottman Institute has not studied situationships specifically. But over more than four decades of research into what makes relationships succeed or fail, Drs. John and Julie Gottman have identified mechanisms that appear across the partnerships they have observed, and some of them may be relevant here. One is the Sound Relationship House, their model of a healthy relationship as a house with seven levels, held up by two weight-bearing walls: trust and commitment. Another is how two people respond to each other in small moments. Those mechanisms offer a lens for looking at Dana and the man whose schedule she knows, whether or not either of them would call it a relationship.
Can Trust Grow in a Situationship When Nothing Has Been Defined?
In the Sound Relationship House, trust and commitment are the walls that support everything else. Trust is knowing that your partner acts and thinks in ways that serve your interests and benefits, not only their own: my partner has my back and is there for me. Commitment is something different. It is demonstrating, through words and actions, that you are in the relationship, for better or for worse.
Those are two walls, and Dana’s evidence may be stronger for one than for the other. When she texts, he answers within the hour. When her car would not start, he came. Dr. Gottman calls a bid “the fundamental unit of emotional communication,” and Turning Towards a bid is how it is met. In the Love Lab, couples who were still happily married six years later had turned towards each other’s bids 86 percent of the time. Couples who had broken up or stayed together unhappily had done it 33 percent of the time.
The first level of the house is Love Maps, which means knowing the little things about your partner’s life. Dana has been building hers for five months: his schedule, his sister’s name, which side of the bed he sleeps on. It is worth asking whether he has been building one of her.
What Does Time Alone Not Tell You?
Five months is long enough to learn a great deal about a person. It is not the same as knowing where you stand with them. Falling in love, which the Institute calls limerence, comes first, and it is intense. In the three phases of love, trust is built in the second phase and commitment in the third. Time passes through all three, but it may not carry two people from one to the next on its own.
Two researchers, Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades, describe two ways a relationship can move to its next step. Sliding means taking the step because it seems like the next step, with nobody quite choosing it. Deciding means choosing. The report “Before I Do,” from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, surveyed more than 1,000 American couples. Couples who made deliberate choices at each transition tended to fare better than couples who slid through them. The report looked at couples moving toward marriage, not at situationships. But the Gottman Institute article that describes it makes the point that commitment matters whether a couple is dating, living together or married.
Why Do People Stay in a Situationship?
A 2025 study in Sexuality & Culture by Langlais and colleagues began with interviews of ten people aged 18 to 30. All were in a situationship or had recently left one. The researchers then surveyed 89 college students about 109 situationship experiences. They noted that many participants seemed to see a situationship as a possible route to a traditional relationship. Emotional investment, talking about the future and being prioritized by the partner were each linked with higher satisfaction and stronger commitment. The study was a snapshot of mostly female, college-aged participants. It cannot show how situationships change over time, which is the question Dana is asking.
Commitment, in the Gottmans’ definition, is shown through words and actions that say you are in the relationship. In five months he has shown up. He has not said what he is showing up for.
How Do You Ask “What Are We?” Without It Sounding Like an Ultimatum?
The Gottmans call the way a conversation begins its start-up, and they distinguish two kinds. A harsh start-up opens with “you” and a criticism. A Softened Start-Up opens with how you feel about the situation. It has three parts: I feel an emotion, about a specific behavior, and I need something positive.
Dana’s harsh version would be: “You never tell me what we are.” A softened version might be: “I feel nervous bringing this up, because I like what we have. I notice we have never talked about where it is going, and I need to know whether you see it going anywhere.”
That does not guarantee an answer Dana wants. It may make the question easier for him to hear as a question and not as a charge.
What If the Answer Is Not What You Hoped?
He might say yes. He might say he does not want a relationship, or that he likes it the way it is, or that he is not sure. Each of these would tell Dana where commitment stands, which five months of texts answered within the hour had not. It may also be hard to hear. The 2025 study is a reminder that people stay in situationships for many reasons, including the hope that it will change.
On Sunday night, Dana opens her messages and types the first line: I like what we have. She reads it twice. She does not send it. Instead she sends a photo of the sky outside her window, and watches for the three dots.
Small Acts of Love
