The term has become a cultural shorthand for a modern dynamic that possesses the physical and emotional closeness of a relationship without any of the formal agreements, labels, or mutual understandings. Yet, people who find themselves in these arrangements often mean entirely different things by the label. For some, it represents a temporary runway—the stretch of time before something more official finally begins. For others, it becomes a permanent holding pattern where they remain stuck for a year or longer. What Dana wanted to know, as the calendar rolled past the half-year mark, was whether the trust between her and this man was genuinely growing or whether the weeks were simply passing by in a vacuum of ambiguity. Her dilemma is one shared by a growing number of adults navigating modern romance.
What Is a Situationship, and Why Is It So Hard to Name?
One of the most confounding elements of a situationship is that nothing has explicitly gone wrong. He texts back promptly. He shows up when needed. No one has been lied to, and no promises have been broken because no promises were ever made. In Dana’s case, there was no obvious catalyst or crisis that forced her to pull back and ask what they were building toward, so she simply remained silent.
While relationship researchers at the Gottman Institute have not studied situationships as a distinct clinical category, more than four decades of research into the mechanics of relationship success and failure offer a relevant lens through which to examine these modern dynamics. Drs. John and Julie Gottman have identified core relationship mechanisms across thousands of partnerships, several of which apply directly to Dana’s situation. One is their foundational model known as the Sound Relationship House, which views a healthy partnership as a structure held up by two essential weight-bearing walls: trust and commitment. Another is the micro-moments of daily interaction—specifically, how two people respond to each other’s small bids for connection. These concepts offer a framework for evaluating interactions when formal labels are entirely absent.
Can Trust Grow in a Situationship When Nothing Has Been Defined?
Within the architecture of the Sound Relationship House, trust and commitment serve as the structural supports for everything else. Trust, in psychological terms, is the deep-seated knowledge that a partner thinks and acts in ways that serve mutual interests rather than just their own—the underlying reassurance that someone truly has your back. Commitment, conversely, is demonstrated through deliberate words and actions that signify a partnership will endure through changing circumstances.
In a situationship, the evidence supporting these two pillars often appears unbalanced. Dana had plenty of evidence for reliability: responsive text messaging, emergency roadside assistance, and physical presence. In relationship science, these interactions are classified as bids. Dr. John Gottman famously defined a bid as the fundamental unit of emotional communication, and "turning towards" a partner’s bid is how those emotional overtures are met. Longitudinal studies from the Gottman Love Lab found that couples who remained happily married years later turned toward each other’s bids 86 percent of the time, while couples who ultimately broke up or remained unhappy did so only 33 percent of the time.
Dana had also successfully mapped out the first level of the relationship house, known as Love Maps—the mental repository of a partner’s world, from family names to sleep habits. After five months, her Love Map was detailed, though the underlying question remained whether a reciprocal map was being built for her.
What Does Time Alone Not Tell You?
Five months provides ample opportunity to learn a great deal about an individual’s habits, preferences, and temperament. However, accumulating time together is not the same as gaining clarity about where you stand in someone’s life. The early phase of intense romantic infatuation, which the Gottman Institute refers to as limerence, often creates an intoxicating fog of emotional intensity. According to the institute’s framework on the phases of love, trust is constructed during the second phase, and commitment crystallizes in the third. While time inevitably passes through all three phases, the mere accumulation of weeks does not automatically carry two people from one stage to the next.
Relationship researchers Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades have long studied the distinct ways partnerships transition to subsequent stages. They differentiate between "sliding" and "deciding." Sliding involves taking the next logical step simply because it feels frictionless and automatic, without either person explicitly choosing the direction. Deciding, on the other hand, involves conscious, deliberate choice.
A comprehensive report titled "Before I Do," published by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, surveyed more than 1,000 American couples and found that those who made deliberate choices at major relationship transitions generally fared better than those who passively slid through them. While that specific research focused on couples moving toward marriage, the underlying principle—that active commitment matters regardless of whether a couple is dating, cohabitating, or married—remains widely applicable across relationship stages.
Recent academic research has also sought to understand why people willingly remain in undefined arrangements. A 2025 study published in the journal Sexuality & Culture by researcher Langlais and colleagues explored these dynamics through initial qualitative interviews and subsequent surveys of college students experiencing situationships. The study noted that many participants viewed an undefined dynamic as a potential pathway toward a traditional, committed relationship. Higher levels of emotional investment, explicit conversations about the future, and a sense of being prioritized by one’s partner were consistently linked with higher relationship satisfaction and stronger commitment. However, the study offered only a cross-sectional snapshot, leaving open the question of how these dynamics evolve over long stretches of time.
For Dana, the discrepancy remained stark. Over five months, her partner had consistently shown up through actions, but he had never articulated what, precisely, he was showing up for.
How Do You Ask ‘What Are We?’ Without It Sounding Like an Ultimatum?
When the ambiguity becomes too heavy to ignore, the manner in which a conversation is initiated often dictates its trajectory. The Gottmans refer to the opening moments of a difficult discussion as the "start-up," distinguishing between harsh and softened approaches. A harsh start-up typically begins with the word "you" paired with an immediate criticism or accusation. A softened start-up, by contrast, focuses on personal emotional reality without casting blame, structured around three specific elements: stating an emotion, identifying a specific behavior, and expressing a positive need.
For Dana, a harsh conversational start-up would sound like an accusation: "You never tell me what we are." A softened alternative might reframe the dialogue entirely: "I feel nervous bringing this up because I genuinely like what we have. I notice we have never talked about where this is heading, and I need to understand whether you see a future for us."
While a softened approach does not guarantee an answer that aligns with a partner’s hopes, it fundamentally changes how the question is received, transforming a potential confrontation into an invitation for honest dialogue.
What If the Answer Is Not What You Hoped?
Facing the unknown involves confronting the possibility of an unwanted answer. Her partner might state clearly that he does not want a traditional relationship, that he prefers the dynamic exactly as it is, or that he simply does not know. Any of these outcomes would provide the definitive clarity regarding commitment that five months of prompt text messages had failed to yield.
Hearing an unwelcome truth is invariably difficult, which explains why many individuals linger in undefined arrangements, sustained by the quiet hope that circumstances will eventually shift on their own. On a Sunday evening, as the glow of her phone illuminated the dark room, Dana opened a messaging window and drafted a simple opening line: I like what we have. She read the words twice, erased them, and instead sent a photograph of the quiet city sky outside her window, waiting in the dim light for the three familiar dots to appear.
