I’ve been quoted in both the Wall Street Journal and Women’s Health about situationships, and I’ve been on countless radio broadcasts talking about situationships, so apparently, I’m an expert on this topic, but somehow I’ve never done an episode with a situationship focus. That changes right now. Today you’ll learn why you can’t leave, what your brain and your attachment history have to do with it, and what you need to start doing differently.
12-minute read
What Is a Situationship, and Why Does It Hurt So Much?
You can’t leave a situationship easily because your brain has formed a real attachment bond, and attachment bonds don’t care whether there was a label. That’s the short answer, and now here’s the longer one.
A situationship is a romantic relationship that has emotional connection and physical intimacy but lacks commitment and a clear label. The term was first used in 2017, but this experience has been around forever. What’s new is that researchers are finally studying it, and what they’re finding is pretty validating.
In a 2024 study published in Sexuality and Culture, family scientist Mickey Langlais and his colleagues found that when it comes to affection, communication, and physical intimacy, situationships don’t actually differ from committed relationships. The only thing missing is commitment. So your brain isn’t confused, it’s accurately reading a real bond. The problem isn’t your perception, it’s the gap between what you’re experiencing emotionally and what’s actually being offered.
So, it’s no wonder you can’t just walk away! You’re not being dramatic or needy. You’re responding to a real attachment, in a situation designed to keep you just uncertain enough to stay.
Why Does the Uncertainty Make You More Hooked, Not Less?
This is the part most people don’t know, and it’s probably the most important thing I’m going to say today.
Your brain’s reward system doesn’t respond most powerfully to consistent love. It responds most powerfully to unpredictable love. This is called intermittent reinforcement, a concept originally developed by B.F. Skinner in the 1950s, and it works the same way whether you’re a rat in a lab or someone anxiously waiting for a text back from a person who runs hot and cold.
Here’s what’s happening neurologically. Dopamine, your brain’s primary motivation chemical, actually flows more readily when rewards are unpredictable than when they’re consistent. When they’re warm and present, your brain releases dopamine. When they pull back, your brain starts anticipating the next hit. And when they finally come around again? The relief triggers an even bigger surge. That moment when they finally text, or say something that feels like almost a commitment? That’s a genuine neurochemical event. You’re not overreacting to nothing.
Think about a slot machine. If every pull of the handle paid out, you’d get bored fast. But if it paid randomly, sometimes nothing, sometimes a little, sometimes a jackpot, you can’t walk away. That’s not a character flaw, that’s exactly how your brain is designed.
The hot and cold, the closeness followed by distance, the good weeks and the confusing weeks, the research shows that all of that deepens your attachment rather than weakening it. This is one of the main reasons people stay in abusive relationships! Your brain gets conditioned to keep trying, keep hoping, keep waiting for the next reward. And the longer it’s gone on, the stronger that conditioning becomes. This is also why the person you’re least sure about is often the one you think about the most. It’s not a sign they’re the right person for you. It’s a sign your dopamine system is very, very busy.
What Does Your Attachment History Have to Do with It?
I’ve talked about attachment theory quite a bit, but let me give you the quick version here because it’s directly relevant. Attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby, says that the patterns we learned about love, closeness, and availability in our earliest relationships become the template our brain uses to interpret every romantic relationship we have as an adult.
If you grew up with caregivers who were inconsistently available, sometimes warm and connected, sometimes emotionally distant or checked out, your nervous system may have learned that love and uncertainty go together. That closeness means bracing for withdrawal. That you have to keep working, stay patient, and keep proving yourself to be chosen.
Sound familiar? Because that’s the exact emotional texture of a situationship.
Research on anxious attachment, which I’ve covered previously, shows that if you have an anxious attachment style, you’re especially vulnerable to intermittent reinforcement because the push-pull dynamic matches what your nervous system already recognizes as love. Stability can feel suspicious, and consistency can feel boring or even a little threatening. But someone who keeps you slightly on edge, slightly uncertain? That registers as familiar. And familiar feels like home, even when home wasn’t actually safe.
And here’s something I want to name directly: if this is a pattern for you, if you find yourself in one ambiguous relationship after another, that’s worth exploring with a therapist. Not because something is broken in you, but because these patterns run deep, and having support to unpack them is one of the most effective things you can do. A good therapist can help you see what’s driving it in a way that’s really hard to do on your own. If you can’t access therapy for some reason, I’m going to highly suggest you get today’s Therapy-to-Go Bundle, which I’ll talk about more at the end.
Why Is It So Hard to Just Ask for What You Want?
You probably know what you want. Commitment. Clarity. To stop feeling like you’re auditioning for a role that never officially gets cast. So why haven’t you said so?
There’s the obvious fear: what if you bring it up and they say no? At least right now, you have something. This is loss aversion at work, your brain calculating that definitely losing this person feels worse than staying in ambiguity. Except ambiguity is its own kind of loss. It’s just slower and quieter.
There’s also the hope that it’ll naturally evolve on its own. You tell yourself you’re being patient. But Langlais’s research found that situationships rarely move into committed relationships without something actively changing. The default trajectory of a situationship is stagnation, not deepening.
But underneath both of those things, there are usually two deeper fears driving the whole thing. And until you name them, they’ll keep running the show.
The first is fear of being alone (I did a whole episode about this not that long ago). Not just fear of losing this person specifically, but fear of what comes after. The empty evenings, the dinners by yourself, the weekends stretching out in front of you with nothing exciting planned, the feeling that everyone else has figured this out and you’re somehow behind. For a lot of people, a situationship, as painful as it is, still feels like company. Still feels like someone is there. And the thought of having genuinely nothing feels worse than having almost something. That fear is real, and it’s worth naming honestly, because it’s probably doing more to keep you in this than the actual person is.
The second is self-worth. And this one is harder to sit with. Let’s be direct about it: someone who genuinely believes they deserve to be fully chosen doesn’t stay indefinitely in a situation where they’re not being chosen. So what are you telling yourself underneath all of this? What do you believe you deserve?
For a lot of people in situationships, there’s a quiet belief that asking for a real commitment is asking for too much. That wanting to be someone’s actual partner is somehow presumptuous. That you should be grateful for what you have rather than asking for what you actually need. That belief didn’t come from nowhere. It usually has roots in how you were treated growing up, past relationships where you were rejected or left, or years of having your needs minimized or dismissed. And your sense of self-worth is the thing that will ultimately determine whether you can hold out for something real.
In the Therapy-to-Go Bundle for this episode, we go much deeper on both of these. But here are two things you can start doing right now.
Tip 1: Challenge the story you’re telling yourself about being alone.
When the fear of being alone shows up, don’t just feel it, examine it. Ask yourself: what do I actually believe will happen if I’m on my own for a while? Most people, when they slow down enough to really look at that question, find a catastrophic story that doesn’t hold up. Being alone isn’t the same as being unwanted. It’s not permanent. And it’s almost always better than being in a situation that’s slowly eroding your sense of self. The fear of being alone is real, but it’s not a reliable guide to what you should do.
Tip 2: Start treating yourself the way you’d treat a friend in the same situation.
This is one of the most clinically effective self-worth practices I know, and it’s simple enough that you can start today. Take your situation and describe it as if it were your closest friend’s situation. She’s been in something undefined for eight months. He keeps saying he’s not ready for a relationship, but keeps calling when he wants company. Would you tell her to stay? Would you tell him he just needs to be more patient? Of course not. We’re usually far more compassionate and clear-eyed with people we love than we are with ourselves. Start applying that same clarity to your own situation. You’re rarely going to do this kind of honest self-reflection well without slowing down enough to actually hear yourself, and that’s where mindfulness practice comes in. You’re probably not going to get through an episode with me without me mentioning it!
Are You Even Allowed to Feel This Bad About Something That Was Never Official?
Yes. Completely and absolutely yes.
One of the most painful parts of a situationship is feeling like you don’t have the right to grieve it or be hurt by it. It was never official. Nobody made you any promises. You knew what you were getting into. That narrative is one of the most damaging things about how we talk about modern relationships, and I want to push back on it directly.
Your brain doesn’t differentiate between an official relationship and an unofficial one when it comes to forming an attachment bond. Neurobiologist Ruth Feldman’s research on human attachment shows that bonding is driven by the oxytocin and dopamine systems, activated by shared time, physical closeness, emotional intimacy, and repeated connection. All of those things were present in your situationship! Which means your brain formed a real bond. The absence of a label doesn’t make that bond less real, it just makes it harder to justify grieving.
When a situationship ends, or when you finally have the clarity conversation and realize it was never going where you hoped, you’re allowed to grieve that. You’re allowed to be angry and you’re allowed to need time. You’re allowed to be frustrated with yourself for staying longer than you wanted to, as long as you’re also compassionate with yourself about why. You stayed because your brain, your attachment history, and your nervous system all made staying feel safer than leaving. That’s not weakness, that’s just how this works.
What Should You Actually Do?
Four practical things to get you moving.
- Name what you’re actually in. Stop calling it nothing. If you’ve been sharing emotional intimacy, physical closeness, and real time with this person, that’s not nothing. Naming it accurately, at least to yourself, is the first step toward deciding what to do about it.
- Next, get honest about what you want. Write it down somewhere private. Not what feels realistic, not what you think you’re allowed to want, but what do you actually want? Most people in situationships haven’t let themselves fully admit this because wanting it and not having it is painful. But staying unclear about your own desires is part of what keeps you stuck.
- Now look at the pattern, not the highlights. Your brain will focus on the best moments when you’re trying to decide whether to stay. That’s your dopamine talking. Zoom out. Look at the last several months. How often do you feel secure versus anxious? How many times have you hoped a conversation would lead to clarity and it didn’t? The pattern is your real data.
- Lastly, have the conversation, or accept that ambiguity is already your answer. You can choose to say directly: what are we doing, where is this going, I want a committed relationship, is that something you want too? Or you can decide that months of ongoing ambiguity is itself a clear answer. Both are valid. What isn’t working is continuing to wait indefinitely, hoping they’ll eventually offer what you’ve been wanting without you ever asking for it.
What’s the Bottom Line?
You can’t leave a situationship easily because your brain has formed a real attachment bond through real shared experience, and that bond has been intensified by the very uncertainty that’s been making you miserable. That’s not a character flaw. It’s neuroscience and attachment science doing exactly what they’re designed to do.
But underneath the brain chemistry, there’s a self-worth question worth sitting with. Because when you genuinely believe you deserve to be fully chosen, it gets a lot harder to keep accepting almost. That work isn’t quick, and it isn’t always easy, but it’s absolutely worth doing!
You deserve to be fully chosen. Not almost chosen. Not chosen when it’s convenient. Fully, clearly, and consistently chosen. That’s not asking for too much.
Free Download
If you’re not sure whether what you’re in actually qualifies as a situationship, I’ve created a free two-minute self-assessment called Am I in a Situationship? It’ll help you name what’s actually happening so you can stop second-guessing yourself and start making intentional choices.
Therapy-to-Go Bundle
If you’re realizing this is a pattern for you and you want to do deeper work, I’ve put together a Therapy-to-Go Bundle called What to Do When You’re Stuck in a Situationship. Inside we go deep on the self-worth piece, how to identify whether your attachment history is keeping you in ambiguous relationships, how to get clear on what you actually want, how to have the conversation you’ve been avoiding, and how to manage the grief and withdrawal that comes when a situationship ends or shifts. It’s just $10, and the free self-assessment is included inside, so you don’t need to download it twice.
Resources for Why You Can’t Leave a Situationship (Even When You Know You Should)
How Attached Are You in Your Relationship?
How to Love an Anxiously Attached Partner without Losing Yourself
Anxious-Avoidant Relationships: Why This Romantic Pairing is So Common and So Hard
Why We’re So Afraid to Be Alone (And the Five Steps to Feel at Ease with Yourself)
Eight Ways to Build Your Confidence and Self-Esteem
How to Overcome Your Fear of Rejection and Abandonment
Why You Feel Insecure in a Healthy Relationship (Even When Nothing Is Wrong)
How to Make Mindfulness a Habit
How to Forgive Yourself: Five Tips to Let Go of Guilt, Shame and Past Regrets
References
Bruneau, E. (2019, May 23). What is a situationship? Women’s Health.
Kayla Kibbe. (2024, June 10). Why the three-month situationship keeps happening. Cosmopolitan.
Kristin Neff. (n.d.). Exercise 1: How would you treat a friend? Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.
Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of Reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Carnell, S. (2012). As cited in Fisher, H. E. (2016). Anatomy of Love. W.W. Norton & Company.
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
