Generation Z has adopted “situationship” as a new form of dating purgatory. “What are we doing?” seems to be the question everyone is asking.
A situationship is hard to characterize by nature, according to Brittney Miles, assistant professor in LAS. To Miles, somewhere amid the boundaries of a talking stage, hookup and “friends with benefits” lies the situationship.
While a talking stage — the stage of communicating regularly before going on a date — is directional, a situationship is much more unclear; rather, what isn’t said is key.
This is part of it, Miles said, but it’s important to note the word’s origin in African American Vernacular English. After going viral on TikTok, the term seems to have taken on various meanings, sometimes for the sake of the melodrama of it all, according to Miles.
“I think they’re like, ‘That’s a cute word; I’m going to use that word without ever thinking about what it means or what it looks like and whether or not even the thing I was in or experiencing will even be defined in that way,’” Miles said.
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In the original definition, Miles said complicated life factors cause situationships. For example, living elsewhere in college, single mothers, ex-wives and career obligations can make commitment difficult.
It is impossible to analyze the rise of casual dating without observing the gradual shift away from marriage as the ultimate goal. Marriage rates in the United States have steadily declined since the 1970s, dramatically dropping in recent years, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research.
“I think young people (are) seeing the deep impact of major social issues,” Miles said. “Like it’s a hellscape … and it’s hard to get jobs right now. And I’m supposed to lock in and solidify some notion when I barely know what I’m doing?”
Young people today will get married later in life, reported The Hill. Instead of building a life with a spouse, they focus on their education and careers first.
As the nuclear family decreases in popularity and homeownership becomes nearly impossible, it’s no wonder informality appeals more to young people than marital stability amid all this anxiety for the future.
“They’re not waiting to leap into the arms of their spouse where they then get a starter home and have the entire nuclear family at the age of 20; it’s a different dynamic,” Miles said. “Marriage as a goal becomes less and less feasible, less and less interesting, especially when younger populations can’t even afford a house most of the time in this changing economy.”
Yet, casual dating is not exactly a sign of Western civilization and morals crumbling before our eyes, as some may suggest. Young people have been challenging the linear escalation from “going steady” to engagement and marriage, Miles said.
According to Miles, they are “seeking intimacy and relationships and companionship without the burdens and stressors that we typically associate with the constant consideration that comes from more formal relationships.”
It is a more significant phenomenon for young women, Miles said, as they are now more likely to advocate pleasure for themselves in sexual encounters to shrink the famed orgasm gap, a statistical disparity in sexual pleasure between men and women.
Additionally, federally collected statistics show women outperform men in college graduation rates, a Forbes article reported. Women becoming more financially independent supports the trend of self-sufficiency over marriage as the top priority among young people.
“I want to give young people some credit,” Miles said. “I think that they are still having the audacity to imagine alternative relationship structures … I think that is exciting and fresh and reflects a kind of audacity to be yourself.”
In the 1990s, shows like “Seinfeld” and “Sex and the City” demonstrated a new era of dating: a nonsensical, self-absorbed culture where irrational actors can be as tethered or untethered to one another as they like. Casual sex, how often one should make a phone call and how to end a relationship were and still are up for debate. It set a precedent for the current changes in collectively agreed-upon terms.
Shows and movies from years past referred to simply asking a girl out on a date as “asking her out.” Now, when searching “he asked me out” on TikTok, the search reveals videos of young girls becoming girlfriends. One video from user @janiyagabriellee, garnering 2.4 million likes, recorded the moment her boyfriend officially asked her out, “UNLIKE OTHER BOYS IN THIS GENERATION.”
For many young people, the “dating” label has become the committal bogeyman stage of a relationship, synonymous with being “official.”
“It’s a big deal to go on a date with somebody, especially when everything gets pushed into more informal dynamics such as just socializing,” Miles said. “Like, ‘Oh, we’re just hanging out’ … The hanging out takes place of the date.”
According to Miles, this is due to the economic and situational constraints of being in college. Uncertainty in life after graduation makes the likelihood of staying together after college less and less promising.
With the popularization of the term and radical shifts in dating for Gen Z, many resent the rise of situationships, often emphasizing unfair and gendered dynamics that lead to massive emotional fallout.
In December 2023, a TikTok from the podcast Between Us Girlies showed speakers agreeing that “A ‘situationship’ is a situation to one person and nothing to the other.” The video garnered over 461,000 likes and 2.9 million views.
“When something is nothing to somebody, they don’t feel a pressure to end it because they don’t care about you,” said one speaker.
Another video from user @trashonista on TikTok claimed the term was only formed by women “to justify and normalize the way that men dehumanize us in sexual and intimate romantic relationships so that we don’t have to feel as powerless as we truly are to their casual acts of cruelty … to better understand the degradation men enact on us in these relationships.” The video garnered 1.4 million views and over 277,000 likes.
Still, ambiguous relationships are nothing new, Miles said. According to Miles, one singular cause of the rise of situationships cannot be identified: changing gender dynamics, technology and the economy are all factors.
“I think that liminal space, that pocket of in-betweenness being named, is new … But ambiguity in relationships is, I think, a constant because people are complicated,” Miles said. “I’ve seen a lot of people try to pinpoint the cause of (the rise of situationships), so I think it’s really good to say that it’s just a lot of things happening all at once.”
