If newly-minted adults know one thing, that thing is certainly not how to consult for Fortune 500 companies. But I’d argue, that thing is, in fact, love.
Hear me out. There are many forms of love available at our fingertips. There’s familial love, fraternal love, puppy love, lust, and pure love; we may not be aware of it, but love permeates our every interaction. Those stepping into adulthood are arguably the most loved they’ll ever be; we’ve (hopefully) spent two decades basking in familial and platonic love, and are just having our first brushes with lust and romantic love. We’re at our most extroverted and exposed, yet simultaneously, our most insecure and anxious. We want to feel everything; we want to be loved freely, but we seem sh*t scared to do it. Consequently, the situationship was born.
The situationship (noun), in my understanding, is an attempt at a relationship without the expectations you have for yourself and your interactions, as well as the ones others have for you. It’s a hot debate among scholars and an even hotter one between lovers. It’s a supposed rejection of boundaries and goals, but is so much worse than a real relationship. The very boundaries you aim to reject are imposed on you in an ever-prevalent, unforgiving manner. A situationship permits you to be who you want to be behind a locked door and within whispers of “we shouldn’t be doing this,” but blocks any attempt at permeating such walls — metaphorical or physical. It’s littered, almost ridiculed, by “not here’s,” “later’s,” and most of all, by insecurities. But when a situationship shakes its hands with love, it becomes irrevocably more complicated.
Loving and caring for someone take on very separate meanings. You can care for anyone and everyone and need not express it for the world to see. It can be private like a card held close to your chest. But loving involves the public sphere. It constitutes boundaries, rules, agreements, and compromises; it involves relationships. It’s something that has to be socially defined. Love may be a feeling, but the relationship that follows is a rule. In real relationships, you get to make such rules. You get to dictate to some degree how that person should act, who they should talk to, and how they should talk to them; that’s your defense against insecurity. Without those, you’re subject to ramblings and what-ifs without having the excuse to ask them for the truth. But those ramblings don’t stop just because you’re not allowed to ponder them. Instead, they fester.
For some personal lore and so you can situate my ramblings in the grand scheme of things, here are my statistics. I’ve had four situationships — two bordering on relationships; one of which was long distance and the other felt like long distance but that was over more schedule and bCal-related matters. I spent a maximum of a fortnight’s worth of nights at each of their places, which isn’t nearly enough to get to know someone, but it does lull you into a false sense of reality. All of which I’d consider exes of mine, two of which were ex-boyfriends, but none were real relationships. According to both their words and mine, love didn’t notice and involved itself anyway, but expectations and insecurities took root regardless.
We’re all fighting all the time with expectations. We wake with expectations of how the day is going to go, what our house might serve us for lunch, what our discussion is going to think of our ideas, or of the friends we converse with throughout the day. Naturally, getting let down when we expect so much should be the accepted thing. But why are we so shocked when those we love never measure up?
I believe the potential you see in other people isn’t actually there; it’s just what you’d do in their shoes. People change, and one version of them may have met such expectations, but you can’t love them into changing back. Your love may remain steadfast, but theirs may change. And neither of you are at fault. It’s equally unfair to judge them against expectations you crafted entirely in your self-interest as it is for them to act against them. I’ve tried to rid myself of expectations, but they somehow always rear their head. Lines blur, preconceived convictions shift, and the versions of you behind said locked door aren’t always the versions you’re faced with when the world walks in.
But just as you have expectations of them, they have expectations of you. The very idea of you permeating in their heads during long car rides and particularly prosaic papers may be an entirely different version of the same self that stares back at you in the mirror. You’re not the only over-thinker or the only one ridden with anxiety; men are not so different from us. They may seem to speak an alternate language, but our hearts beat the same, we breathe the same, and for the most part, we think the same. That which hurts and confounds us often impacts our partners in the same way.
Similarly, the expectations you have for yourself shift. I thought I knew the version of myself playing the role of the “girlfriend,” but I’ve realized now that she had become a stranger to me. Once told to be a lawyer as a child (an excuse to call a child strong-willed and annoying whilst painting a smile on their face), I’m hard-headed and stubborn at the best of times, and I have a good sense of what should be right or wrong. But the version of me who was obsessed with what he thought, I became this enamored, almost weakened version of myself, stripped of any of the bites I was so used to being criticized for. I didn’t change because he asked me to, but I did change because I felt I had to be the kind of person he’d want to date. The person he’d be proud to love.
But these were all my creations — fantasies I had built up in my own head — and had neither his input nor his fingerprints. They were also entirely unique. My understanding of who I’d be was compared against who I knew myself to be in relationships, and what I thought relationships were supposed to look like. However, relationships only exist between the two of you, and thus the expectations you have for yourself are built upon past versions of yourself that now seem millennia away. Or, perhaps even worse, they’re based on what you see on social media.
As my rambling has probably proven, expectations are entirely more complex and convoluted than just an excuse to break up with a particularly disappointing boyfriend. The expectations you have for them are only part of the host of projections weighing on both your shoulders. But such expectations are not to be ignored or sniffed at, and conversations outlining preconceived convictions can help more than hinder a situationship that’s looking to get an upgrade. Love — pure unadulterated love — is always worth much discussion and vulnerability. But it relies on the acceptance that people change and consequently, expectations will expire.
Love is weird and it’s wacky but it’s also entirely wonderful. It’s humanity’s greatest curse and greatest blessing; the reason our hearts beat, yet simultaneously, the reason it stops for a few moments. It’s ubiquitously and unnaturally unique, yet it can feel like the most natural thing in the world. Love naturally, love freely, love unashamedly, and unafraid. And for God’s sake, tell them that you love them.