Friends, Lovers, and Everything in Between

A situationship is someone you don’t need to open the door for — not even on Christmas Eve — but you can call to go to the movies on any winter Sunday. The situationship label isn’t exclusive. You can have as many as you want. However, once you reach 20 at the same time, if you’re a girl, you become a wild girl, and if you’re male, you’re a dead man.

You don’t expect much from a situationship, except that they don’t annoy you and would rather gouge their eyes out than look at someone else. In that respect, they’re no different from a long-term boyfriend. You don’t have to break up with a situationship because you never really started dating them. They’re just there, like the dresser, the roses in the garden, or the trash can. You can call them when you can’t think of anything better to do, and you don’t even have to keep the phone to your ear while they talk — you can drop it in your bag without hanging up and go shopping, which is what you actually feel like doing. That way, you’ll still feel like you’ve spent ages talking to someone important to you. (RELATED: Feminism, the Nose-Ring Theory, and Our Potential Extinction)

A situationship partner is the kind of friend who finds it hilarious that you call her that — because she still hasn’t looked up what it really means. She’s tied to you by everything from borrowing your warm clothes when it’s cold, to managing your phone selfies and your class notes, to getting you in trouble in the summer when someone tags you in Facebook photos surrounded by too many bikinis. (RELATED: The Dating Game v. The Mating Game)

You can love your situationship with all your heart, certain she’ll never leave you alone — except on days when she has something truly interesting to do, like that girls-only party, a visit from her old London friends, playing video games in her room, the opportunity to scratch the soles of her feet for a good while, or staring at the kitchen ceiling for 15 or 20 hours — an activity far more fulfilling than going for a walk with her boyfriend. (RELATED: A Generation So Lonely, It Fell in Love With Furniture)

Situationships don’t “make plans.” They meet “where they always do.” Their hearts don’t skip a beat when they see each other — at least not any more than when they pass a burger stand. And a couple in a situationship would never stop to carve their names into a tree unless the tree were pointing a machine gun at them and threatening to shoot if they didn’t.

Experts say that a boyfriend is basically a long-term situationship. I suppose that means they can ride the bus together. In marriage, physical contact becomes mandatory — which explains why so many married couples take public transport. The rights of a situationship are measured in liters of beer per bloodstream. Besides, when two people in a situationship get married, somewhere in the world, a gladiolus blooms.

It’s also important to tell apart a situationship, a fling, a thing, or a mini-drama. You’re in trouble when you tell your situationship you’re going out partying this Saturday, she says, “Do whatever you want,” and you actually do. You’re in trouble too if you don’t. You’ve got a thing when the thing itself is kind of a bore — like falling for someone who knows way too much about Star Wars trivia or the influence of Greek classicism on contemporary Zimbabwean painting. And you’ve got a mini-situationship when your “partner” is so short you have to bend down just to argue properly.

Finally, among the groom’s obligations is to arrive at the church on time on the wedding day. Among the bride’s duties is to put up with the groom. Both obligations vanish in the case of a situationship, whose closest approach to the altar often happens during his own funeral — and not even always then. Let’s remember that the number of people in situationships mysteriously devoured by Nile crocodiles remains astonishingly high.

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By mfnnews