“Having no permanent bonds, the denizen of our liquid modern society must tie whatever bonds they can to engage with others. But none of these bonds are guaranteed to last.”- Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (2003) [1]

In a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Review, Samantha Joel and Geoff MacDonald asked a deceptively simple question: when people are genuinely unsure about a romantic partner, what do they do? The answer was not what most would expect. They do not leave. They do not commit. They stay, ambivalent, oscillating, collecting more data that rarely resolves anything. People facing relationship uncertainty were pulled by strong reasons to stay and strong reasons to leave simultaneously, a genuine ambivalence, not a step toward resolution. Any small positive signal simply resets the clock, prolonging the in-between [8].

That finding landed in 2021. By then, the term “situationship” was already coalescing in the cultural lexicon to describe this precise limbo. A situationship is a romantic entanglement that functions like a relationship in practice, with consistent communication, physical intimacy, emotional investment and shared time, but resists any label that would make it one. The growing popularity of these arrangements has sparked interest in the psychology of situationships, particularly among researchers trying to understand why so many people remain emotionally invested in undefined relationships. It is not confusing. For many people, it is a deliberate structure. You get the closeness. You keep the exit.

The question worth asking is not why people are afraid of commitment. That framing is too easy, and too flattering to the idea that commitment is obviously the right default. The harder questions are why ambiguity feels rational to so many people at once and what structural conditions make it the path of least resistance.These questions are particularly relevant to the evolving dating culture in urban India, where traditional expectations increasingly coexist with modern forms of romantic autonomy.  In India, those conditions are unusually dense: a generation navigating first-time romantic autonomy inside families that still expect arranged introductions, in addition to the existence of swipe-based dating apps engineered to keep options permanently open.

My argument is simple: situationships are not evidence that something is broken in us. They are a strategy that emerges when neoliberal selfhood, Indian family structures and swipe-based dating platforms collide. They help us survive a landscape where love looks simultaneously like an investment and a gamble, even as the evidence suggests that staying in the grey too long quietly taxes our mental health [3].To understand this contradiction, we need to examine the psychology of situationships and the social conditions that make ambiguity feel rational.

The sociological and psychological scaffolding:

The psychology of situationships cannot be understood through individual behaviour alone. It is shaped by larger cultural, economic and technological forces that influence how people approach intimacy. Bauman’s phrase “liquid love” was never meant to be cute. He was naming a form of intimacy where bonds are flexible, perpetually under review and easily unmade. In liquid modernity, the ability to leave becomes as important as the ability to stay. Commitment stops being a default assumption and starts looking like a risky constraint [1].

Eva Illouz extends this argument by shifting the spotlight from how relationships form to how they dissolve. She calls contemporary patterns of withdrawal, slow fading and emotional distancing “unloving” and connects them to a capitalism built around non-commitment. In markets, this looks like free cancellation policies and zero-loyalty consumers. In dating, it looks like bonds left deliberately semi-open so both parties can exit at minimal emotional cost [4]. Situationships are a textbook case: bonded enough to feel real, yet not defined enough to be taken to any kind of social or emotional court when things collapse.

Now layer this onto the specific texture of urban India.The dating culture in urban India occupies a unique space between individual choice and collective expectations, making romantic ambiguity especially attractive. Middle class  young Indians increasingly blend romantic autonomy with family endorsement, producing what Reed calls a hybridisation of arranged and love marriage rather than a clean break from either [5]. Many young Indians today are the first generation of “choose your own partner” adults who still live under the roof of arranged-marriage expectations and caste considerations. In this context, Illouz’s “unloving”, the ease of exit, is not merely a market choice; it is a way to avoid the massive social “switching costs” of a traditional relationship. A fully official relationship is not simply about two people. It has ripple effects through families, communities and (sometimes) caste and class networks. Labels are politically expensive.

The situationship functions as a social firewall. You can spend your twenties exploring connections that look and feel like relationships from the inside while remaining technically undeniable from the outside. “We are just talking.” “We are close friends.” “We are not serious.” These are not only emotional hedges. They are survival strategies for people navigating two incompatible scripts simultaneously.

The platforms amplify this limbo considerably. Swipe-based apps do not just offer too many options; they encourage what Illouz calls “Relations-Shopping,” where potential partners are evaluated like goods with specific attributes rather than being encountered as whole humans. The cognitive cost is real: the more alternatives available, the harder any single choice becomes, and the more regret it tends to carry. Every swipe is a quiet reminder that someone slightly different might exist two scrolls away. Committing to one person starts to feel like closing hundreds of other tabs. This dynamic, and the research behind it, is explored in depth here:  [Read previous article for further reading]

Situationship as decision strategy:

Consider the situationship not as a romance story but as a judgement-and-decision problem. Romantic choices can be considered as multi-attribute decisions: you are constantly weighing warmth, attractiveness, status and resources, geography, timing, and family fit. Work on progression bias suggests that, contrary to the Tinder myth of ruthless choosiness, humans are often biased toward moving relationships forward once they have started. We agree to second dates when we are unsure. We keep texting despite yellow flags. We slide into cohabitation because breaking up feels harder in the short run than staying [7].

Layer that bias onto apps and the Indian context and a specific pattern emerges. People slide into relational spaces faster than they can cognitively process them, then hesitate to name what is happening because naming feels irreversible. The stay-or-go ambivalence involves strong reasons to stay, strong reasons to leave and a stuckness that shows up as oscillating commitment [8].

Illouz’s concept of “negative relations” fits this eerily well. She defines them as bonds that borrow the vocabulary of commitment yet intentionally avoid evolving into stable forms, practiced in full awareness of the pain they create [4]. That is exactly the vibe when someone says: “I know this is bad for me, but I am not ready to give it up.” The relationship exists in a strange half-light, maintained by micro-rewards and enabled by the absence of shared long-term obligations.

In India, the mood is visibly split. One strand of media celebrates situationships as a liberated, low-pressure mode of connection. Another, newer strand of reporting points to a quiet shift toward “intentional dating” and long-term companionship among Gen Z, with app surveys suggesting that many young users now prioritise emotional stability over novelty [9]. We are collectively, slowly, realising that infinite scroll comes with emotional bandwidth costs. The situationship is not just an aesthetic. It is a compromise solution generated by all these forces simultaneously: progression bias, fear of finality, economic precarity and cultural constraints.

What ambiguity gives us, and what it quietly takes:

One of the central insights from the psychology of situationships is that uncertainty can function as both a source of comfort and a source of distress.The situationship is not a pure villain. For people experimenting with sexual orientation, recovering from trauma, navigating a new city, or recalibrating after grief, the ability to connect without locking in can feel genuinely protective. There is room to test chemistry, develop relational skills and learn what you actually want without rewriting your life overnight.

The problem is duration and opacity. Work on stay/ leave ambivalence shows that unclear relational signals prolong ambivalence and make it harder to withdraw from unsatisfying relationships, since people are always waiting for more data before making a move [8]. Even in explicitly casual sexual relationships, people often harbour unstated goals; a quarter of their sample secretly hoped the relationship would become romantic and that mismatched, unspoken expectations are a primary driver of hurt and dissolution when the relationship ends [10].

Situationships magnify these dynamics. Partners often behave in ways that look committed, which activates deep expectations of loyalty and mutuality, but retain the language of casualness, which offers a social alibi when they fail to meet those expectations. From the outside it can look sophisticated. From the inside it often feels like being emotionally all-in while legally on your own [3].

Illouz would say this is where market logic has fully colonised intimacy. You are encouraged to treat partners like subscription services: stay until the marginal utility drops, then churn. The ease of exit is sold as freedom [4]. What gets quietly lost in that story is the value of continuity for mental health. The broader literature on romantic involvement is consistent on this point: satisfying, committed relationships are generally associated with higher life satisfaction and better psychological outcomes, whereas unstable or chronically ambiguous relationships predict distress and rumination [8]. That does not mean everyone needs a long-term partner. It does suggest that if you choose intimacy, clarity about the frame you are in actually matters.

In the Indian setting, the emotional cost of ambiguity is compounded by secrecy. Many young people cannot discuss a non-official partner with their families. So they carry the entire weight alone, or outsource it to friends who are navigating their own grey zones. A generation ends up in group chats parsing blue ticks like ECG readings. The cognitive labour is intense. The relationship status remains undefined.

The research does not hand us a neat moral. It points to tradeoffs. The most useful starting point is simply naming the structure you are in, even if only to yourself. Joel and MacDonald’s work on the progression bias suggests that early investments, even small ones like naming the relationship, deepen commitment rapidly, which means that the earlier ambiguity is named, the easier it is to make a deliberate choice rather than slide into something by default [7]. From there, it helps to treat ambiguity as a trial period rather than a permanent state. The emotional costs of chronic uncertainty, confusion, emotional conflict and unmet expectations tend to compound rather than resolve the longer the ambiguity continues [3]. At that point, you are no longer waiting for clarity to arrive. You are deferring a conversation you have probably already had internally.

The more honest question to ask is what the ambiguity is actually protecting. Sometimes it is shielding you from genuine external constraints: an unstable living situation, a visa, a mental health season, a family context that is not ready. Those are real reasons and they deserve to be named as such. Other times, the ambiguity is protecting you from nothing more than the discomfort of a direct conversation. Those two situations look identical from the outside but call for entirely different responses. Leaving the label permanently open also tends to distribute the uncertainty unevenly. One person almost always carries it harder than the other, and unspoken expectations are not the same as no expectations [10].

In India, it is worth separating the cultural pressure from your own actual preference. Many young people who describe themselves as wanting a situationship are, on closer inspection, protecting themselves from a family conversation rather than from the relationship itself. The frame you present to your parents does not have to be the frame you inhabit with your partner. As the dating culture in urban India continues to evolve, situationships may remain one of the most visible ways people negotiate competing expectations around love and commitment.

The lingering reframe:

Real life is messy. Sometimes you genuinely do not know how you feel yet. Sometimes your circumstances make formal commitment unrealistic in the short term. The in-between can be honest.

What feels urgent is a shift from default ambiguity to deliberate ambiguity. The psychology of situationships suggests that clarity is often less about finding the perfect answer and more about consciously choosing the structure that best reflects reality. That means asking the unsexy questions that cut against the vibe. Why am I choosing this structure with this person? What am I protecting? How long am I willing to sit in not knowing before it becomes corrosive? What would clarity look like, even if the answer is “we are not on the same page”?

Ambiguity keeps options open and softens the social consequences of leaving, which suits a culture shaped by liquid love and negative relations [1, 4]. At the same time, prolonged uncertainty compounds emotional strain, feeds anxiety and makes it harder to invest authentically in future connections [3].

Maybe the real frontier is not moving from grey back to black and white, but becoming more literate about the shades you are inhabiting. Naming the arrangement. Naming the limits. Naming the expiry date of a structure that was only ever supposed to be temporary.

For a generation raised on choices, the radical move might not be keeping every door half open. It might be, every once in a while, saying a full yes or a full no, and accepting that some doors will close.

References:

1. Bauman Z. Liquid love: on the frailty of human bonds. Polity Press; 2003.

2. Indian Express. More than a hookup, less than a relationship: how situationship emerged as a popular dating trend among Gen Z. 2023.

3. Langlais, M. R., Podberesky, A., Toohey, L., & Lee, C. T. (2024). Defining and Describing Situationships: An Exploratory investigation. Sexuality & Culture, 28(4), 1831–1857.

4. Illouz E. The end of love: a sociology of negative relations. Oxford University Press; 2019.

5. Reed MN. Roka engagements and the hybridization of arranged and “love” marriage in urban India. Journal of Marriage and Family. 2025;87(5):2042–2055.

6. Schwartz B. The paradox of choice: why more is less. Harper Perennial; 2004.

7. Joel S, MacDonald G. We’re not that choosy: emerging evidence of a progression bias in romantic relationships. Social Psychological and Personality Science. 2021.

8. Joel S et al. One foot out the door: romantic ambivalence and relationship decisions. European Journal of Social Psychology. 2021.

9. Hindustan Times. Gen Z’s reset: commitment over casual hookups. 2025.

10. Machia et al. A longitudinal study of friends with benefits relationships. Personal Relationships. 2020.

About the author:

Sharvani is a bioinformatics graduate and neuroscience enthusiast passionate about understanding behavior, emotion, and connection. She enjoys exploring how science and technology influence modern relationships. In her free time, she loves watching films and reading. Connect with her on LinkedIn