sit·u·a·tion·ship /ˌsɪtʃuˈeɪʃənʃɪp/ noun. A romantic or sexual relationship that is not considered to be formal or established.

sit·u·a·tion·ship /ˌsɪtʃuˈeɪʃənʃɪp/ noun, revised. See: lover, but scared.

You’ve been sleeping with this woman for two years. She comes over every other Sunday. You know her mother’s name and her mother’s dog’s name and that the dog has a thyroid condition that requires a pill wrapped in cheese every morning. You know the cheese brand. You know it has to be Havarti because the dog won’t eat cheddar.

You know this because she told you at 1 a.m., her leg thrown over yours, when neither of you could sleep. These small details are part of a shared intimacy, one you only have with someone you love, or at least someone you care deeply about. Or someone you’re paying $200 an hour to listen to you, and you are not her therapist.

You call this a situationship.

Sir. You know the dog’s cheese. You know what her neck smells like at 3 a.m.. That is not a situation. That is a whole relationship with a thyroid subplot. You are in a relationship and you are calling it something that sounds like it was assigned to you by the DMV. Still, there are countless “couples” like you, unwilling to call it what it is, clinging on to this situationship label to feel like there is no label. The word is wrong. The word has been wrong for a while.

Situationship went mainstream around 2017, intended to describe something temporary. That limbo between texting and commitment where nobody knows what’s happening and both of you are pretending not to care. I guess the term came about because everyone thought this stage of the relationship ought to have a name, except it already had one. This used to be called friends with benefits. That was a perfectly good phrase. It had the word friends in it. It had the word benefits. Both of those sound like things you’d want. Somehow we replaced it with a word that sounds like a building permit.

But it’s 2026 and situationship has bled beyond its original parameters. People are now using the word to describe something that has lasted longer than most leases. Half of Americans under 35 say they’ve been in a situationship. I’d bet that some of them have been in the same one since the word was invented. Ninety-two percent of Americans say there’s a stigma attached to being in one. That is almost every single person. The people using the word don’t even like it. Whoever pushed this into the mainstream, I would like a word with them. A real word. One that already existed and worked fine.

And that’s what we’re really here to talk about—that your situationship actually has a real label, one you’re just ignoring. If your situationship has outlived the word situationship, you don’t have a situationship. You have a lover. If you know details about her life and preferences, like how she likes her coffee or what kind of cheese her mother’s dog requires, she is your lover. You just won’t call her that.

Here are a few things you have with a lover, lest any of them ring a bell: A restaurant that is yours and you would be furious if she went there with someone else even though technically she could because technically this is nothing. A side of her bed. A knowledge of how she likes to be touched, and not the first-time version where you’re both still figuring it out. The version you only learn from months of paying attention. You know what makes her go quiet. You know what makes her loud. You built that together and you’re calling it a situation.

Some people don’t want a capital-R Relationship right now. They want a person on their terms. Fine. Not every relationship has to be monogamous. Not every relationship has to end in a lease or a marriage or a kid. But none of that means you need to diminish what you have with a word that 92 percent of people are embarrassed to use. You can have something undefined, impossibly intimate, and still call it something that doesn’t make both of you feel bad about it.

The word situationship takes the woman who stayed in your bed until noon on a Tuesday after telling you about her mother’s dog’s thyroid the night before and turns her into a temporary condition. Like a rash. Like jury duty. And it shrinks you, too. It keeps you performing casual when you’re not all that casual. The word doesn’t protect you. It just keeps you from enjoying the thing you’ve been enjoying for two years.

We already had words for this. Lover. Companion. Girlfriend, if it wasn’t short. Those words required you to stand in the fact of what was happening between you and another person.

Situationship requires nothing. Nobody has ever moaned the word situationship in bed and made anyone want to stay. Nobody has ever introduced someone at a dinner party as “my situationship” because it’s awful. Lover admits desire. Partner is terrifying because it admits dependence. Situationship admits nothing. 

I’m not asking you to get married. I’m not asking you to adopt a dog with shared custody and a thyroid condition. I’m asking you to look at the woman you’ve been sleeping next to for two years and use a word that doesn’t make you hate yourself. It doesn’t have to become something. It already is something. You just named it.

Call her your lover. See what happens.