The worst heartbreak of your life will be a situationship because when it ends, you’ll feel like you have to be fine. So you pretend to be.
When your friends ask about what happened, you’ll shrug and say, “Nothing, really.” You’ll claim that the ending doesn’t hurt because you were never official, so it’s technically not even a breakup. Hell, could it even be called an ending if it never even started at all? And besides, you knew what you were getting into because you did agree to “see where things go.” And this is where they went. Nowhere. So that’s that, right?
Not really. Because when you go home alone, you crumble. You think back to the last time you saw them when you said you wanted more and they said that they did not. You remember leaving defeated and humiliated because you weren’t supposed to want something serious. It was supposed to be casual. Fun. No big deal.
Without any labels, an anniversary date, or even Instagram pictures to signify whatever the two of you had, your memories almost feel like they never really happened at all. There’s an absence of evidence and so your feelings feel unjustified. Unfounded. Foolish. So you don’t tell anyone about the aching. You figure you’ll get through it on your own.
And this is exactly what makes a situationship the worst heartbreak of your life: you feel like you have to go through it all alone because you believe no one will get it if you told them the full, messy truth:
You fell for someone who never had any intentions to catch you. You got your heart broken by someone who didn’t even realize they had it in their hands.
When someone goes through an “official” breakup, there are countless songs that understand. There are shoulders readily available to lean on. There are countless advice articles online that explain how to pull yourself together after a relationship ends.
But when you are wounded by a situationship, there is an idea that you are somehow to blame for the pain. That you should have known better. That if they wanted to, they would have, so it’s on you for waiting as long as you did. And because you were never exclusive, they don’t owe you anything, including closure.
But honestly, if you’re sharing your soul with someone, if you’re sleeping together, if you’re the first person they call with good news and bad, if you have a deep connection, you shouldn’t need labels to know that what you had mattered and was real. You shouldn’t need to be “official” for honesty and basic decency. You deserve those things, no matter what, and then some.
It’s okay that you fell for them. It’s okay that you loved them. And it’s okay that it didn’t work out the way you wanted it to.
But if you want to heal, you need to actually admit that you’re bleeding. You need to reach out to your friends and tell them that you’re falling apart. Giving your heart to anyone is an act of bravery, especially when there are no guarantees. And you may be surprised to find that more people understand than you may think.
Because even though it wasn’t defined as a “real relationship,” it was still deeply real to you. And that counts.
