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Recently, my niece came up to me with what she described as "gossip".
"Auntie," she said, "I'm in a situationship."
I paused for a second. She's in sixth grade.
Situationships, in my mind, belonged to late-night calls, secret meet-ups, quiet conversations in a parked car, to the kind of intimacy you only really see in movies, without ever having a definitive status. Not something that slips so easily out of a sixth-grader's mouth while carrying a slice of birthday cake at a family event.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He likes me," she said simply, "and I like him. But we're not dating."
She said it like it was obvious. No confusion, no hesitation. Just a matter-of-fact explanation.
And that was the part that struck me.
I remember when I was her age, romance looked very different. It was running around, hiding behind trees just to steal a glance at your crush. Passing notes in class, trying not to get caught by the teacher. Friends teasing you, singing your names next to each other like it meant something. Even fake marriages sealed with rings made out of woven flowers, and somehow, those felt more real than some relationships now.
It was simple. Maybe a little dramatic, in the way kids always are. But it was clear. You liked someone. They liked you. Or they didn't. There wasn't this in-between space to overthink.
And yet, there she was, already familiar with a kind of ambiguity that even we struggle to navigate with our fully developed frontal lobes.
This is not how it's supposed to feel
I've been through many different scenarios, with different men, different women, from different countries with different cultures, and somehow, they all seemed to end the same way.
I got hurt over something that was never clearly defined.
It was never really about what they did. It was always about what they didn't.
More often than I'd like to admit, I gave a lot of myself to almost all of them. In some cases, I was the one keeping things undefined. But even then, what I received in return was still the same: ambiguity, uncertainty, a kind of emotional gray area that never quite settled into anything solid.
There were never any clear boundaries. What we were allowed to do, what we weren't. What was acceptable, what wasn't. How romantic we could be with each other, how committed we actually were. Everything existed in this vague, ever-shifting space.
In one of my longest situationships, I felt like I was walking on eggshells every day. I would wake up with anxiety, not knowing how he would behave toward me. I was constantly tiptoeing around someone who, at the time, was supposed to feel like my escape.
It started with both of us not wanting anything serious. And I thought I could change the outcome, a mistake I think a lot of us have made. (Silly me. Silly us.) That was how I got hurt.
Because you can change someone's behavior for a moment, maybe even for a phase, but you cannot change their core beliefs. And he was already a non-believer from the start.
He was never a bad person intentionally. I wouldn't even call him manipulative. If anything, he was just comfortable in it.
And that's the part that feels the most unsettling to admit. Because at some point, it stopped feeling like an individual problem. It started to feel like something bigger, like situationships, and the comfort in ambiguity that comes with them, have taken root so deeply in our lives that they've become part of how we relate to one another.
What used to be the exception had gradually become the norm.
Why we stay
If we look at it honestly, and maybe a little uncomfortably, the logic of a situationship can almost seem reasonable.
In a city like Jakarta, it even starts to feel like the ideal solution. Take a random 22-year-old man. He's just starting to climb his career ladder, trying to maintain a social life, maybe squeezing in padel, the gym and time with family. He barely has the time or emotional capacity for a fully committed relationship. But he still wants the comfort of one, the companionship, the attention, the familiarity.
And so, almost by default: a situationship.
There are no explanations owed. You can come and go as you please, because in something undefined, there are no real grounds to demand anything. Without a label, expectations remain low. And without expectations, there is less room for disappointment.
Psychologist Satriyo Wibowo, who has spent more than two decades studying social behavior in urban communities, explains that ambiguity can function as a kind of emotional buffer, allowing people to experience connection while limiting the risks that come with it.
And maybe the uncertainty itself plays a role too. It gives people just enough to stay longer, even when they know their needs aren't being met, even when a part of them suspects those needs might never be met.
Because identifying a problem does not necessarily make solving it any easier.
Part of it comes down to how we deal with not knowing.
Most of the time, it's not that we don't feel anything. It's that we're not sure what the other person feels, and that uncertainty silently changes how much of ourselves we're willing to show.
According to Ermanda Saskia Siregar, a psychology lecturer at the University of Indonesia, people tend to hold back in the early stages of a connection when they're unsure if their feelings are reciprocated. Holding back, at that moment, doesn't feel like avoidance. It feels like protecting yourself from something that hasn't happened yet.
There's also something deeper underneath it. We want closeness. But at the same time, we're constantly weighing how much of ourselves we can give without risking too much in return. And in that negotiation, the situationship starts to look like a reasonable compromise, until it isn't.
The cost of situationships
What it comes down to, eventually, is this: being in something like that drains you.
Slowly, steadily, it wears on you, because you are constantly negotiating with something that doesn't quite exist.
There's a rising tension that builds between what you feel and what you allow yourself to acknowledge, between what you want and what the situation seems to permit. It becomes a low, ongoing conflict, not just with the other person, but with yourself too.
Uncertainty leaves very little room for rest. There's no solid ground to stand on, no clear understanding to return to. Just a series of maybes, of assumptions, of things that are felt but never quite mutually acknowledged.
The anxiety doesn't arrive all at once. It settles in slowly, then grows. It thrives in the gray area that situationships create, never entirely visible but always there. And when it begins to unfold, it doesn't unfold in isolation. It unfolds alongside everything else: the stress of figuring life out, of building something for yourself, of learning how to navigate adulthood as you go.
Because situationships promise simplicity. Low risk, high reward. The comfort of connection without the burden of commitment. But once feelings begin to settle in, as they inevitably do, that balance shifts. The uncertainty that once felt manageable becomes harder to ignore, and what was meant to make things easier slowly becomes more complicated than if it had just been defined from the start.
The real risk
Maybe the question isn't just whether we should stop getting into situationships, but why we keep ending up in them.
Because it's not always confusion. If anything, it comes from knowing too much. We've seen how things can go wrong, so we learn to read between the lines, to anticipate, to protect ourselves before anything develops into something painful. And somewhere in all that awareness, something gets lost.
Maybe it's not that we don't know what we want. Maybe we just hesitate to say it. We leave things undefined, soften what we mean, delay decisions just enough to avoid facing them directly. It becomes easier to stay in between than to be clear about what we actually want, not because we don't care, but because clarity requires a kind of courage we're not always ready for.
I can understand the instinct behind the desire to stay in something that feels good, without asking too much of it. But at some point, someone has to be willing to say what this is, or what they hope it could be.
"I like you. Do you like me back?"
It's a simple question, but in a culture that has grown comfortable with ambiguity, it can feel almost radical. It asks for honesty without any guarantee and vulnerability without any form of control.
Or, as Julia Roberts's character puts it to Hugh Grant in Notting Hill: "I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her."
Stripped of all the hesitation and undefined edges, that is still the essence of romance. One person standing in front of another, choosing to be clear, even when the outcome is uncertain.
And perhaps the real risk was never saying too much. It was saying too little.
