Everyone loves to talk about relationships. Why? Relationships are natural components of our lives. From childhood to birth we are engaged in some sort of relationship, whether it’s parent to child, sibling to sibling, romantic relationships or that new thing we call a “situationship.” Let’s elaborate on this situationship since many of us know what the other relationships include (or maybe we need a refresher, see the blog on relationships).
Situationships tend to be those relationships (yes, it is still a relationship) that involve another human being that we find physically attractive and who we spend some sort of time with. We are emotionally attracted to that person but to an extent. It’s like having someone at arms length. We know that we are intimate with that person and sexually attracted and actually like to spend some of our time with them but we rather not make a full commitment to that person because either we see faults in them or in ourselves. I don’t want to digress into commitment phobia because that’s for a later blog. However, situationships only work if both parties agree to the terms or feel exactly the same. This is idealistic because two people in any sort of relationship will never feel exactly the same way all of the time. We get annoyed with the other individual when they want to make changes to the terms of agreements because we may have gotten comfortable and now they are as we say “trying to shake stuff up.” This is to be expected because as time passes we grow and our opinions change. The things that we once accepted we no longer want to accept. This is a normal growth process in life. But we become selfish and get angry with a person that is experiencing this growth and we are not; and rather than communicating how each party feels we try to selfishly avoid it. The situationship will usually continue until either one person walks away completely or both parties decide to commit to teach other or move on mutually.
A healthier way to deal with intimate relationships is to communicate and express thoughts and expectations. Just because you don’t place a “real title” on the involvement doesn’t make it any less of a relationship.
Dr. Z.