Primary Investigators: Zhehui Cici Xie and Amelia Collet
Supervisor: Kieran Guimond
Disclaimer: Reader discretion advised. The content of this article aims to help exercise your faculty of judgement, reason, and scientific/academic background.
After conducting a rigorous review process for two weeks, the primary investigators of the inquiry into situationships reach the conclusion that ‘situationship,’ a word that comes from ‘relationship,’ engages heavily with semantics and human signifying processes. A number of key themes were identified through the text-based interviews conducted via Instagram:
- ‘FWB’ (Friends with Benefits), sexual connotations, intimacy
- Love, romantic, emotional connection
- More, plus, different
- Relationship, going out, dating
- Friendship
- Negative sentiments (e.g. concern, vulnerable, fear, stigma and promiscuity, imbalance, sticky, unsure, inconsistent, difficult, adverse)
- Semantics (e.g. know, signals, definition, say/regard, interpret, literal(ly))
Although the primary investigators will not go over each of the categories, we have identified that the word ‘situationship’ arises from a need to define the undefinable. The definition and understanding of situationship range from being closer to a friendship, to a relationship, and to uncharted territory (Figure 1). Engaging a Derridean lens of analysis, the properties of the signifier are more important than one may think. The word situationship is fundamentally built on the word relationship, with the suffix ‘ship’ attached to the noun ‘situation,’ forming a new noun that denotes a property or state of being. Thus, as one interviewee argues, “BY DEFINITION and nothing else,” the term “literally doesn’t mean anything else other than the status quo” (Interview 2023). The signifying difference connoted by the word situationship is accompanied by the constant deference of meaning—it engages in a verbal and interpretative play with other more clearly defined stages in a romantic/non-romantic relationship between two parties. However, this relative clarity may also be an illusionary false promise as they, too, engage in a verbal and interpretative signifying play with the signified ‘real life’ context-scenario, other signifiers, and economic socio-cultural contexts.
However, as seen in Figure 1, when the responses are charted on a spectrum, there are clusters around FWB and dating, with romantic implications, and there is a clear attempt in defining what does not exist. This reflects a need to use language to reflect a phenomenon, as the term ‘situationship’ enters the vocabulary of younger generations. One interviewee also identified a possible correlation between the zeitgeist of the existential angst of teenagers of this generation who grew up in an increasingly complex, interconnected, and information/media-bombarded environment. This angst can be explained as being reflected through the rejection of “traditional conformities of a traditional relationship; labelled as such by Western societal standards” (Interview 2023). Although arguments can be made that teenagers across all temporal-spatial axes are universally weary of commitment and unable to define it clearly—as one respondent put it, “a general fear of intimacy and commitment of the generation that coined it” (Interview 2023). This argument may be criticised as generalising, having reductionist properties, and overly seeking commonalities across the temporal-spatial axes of things. Finally, when being compared to a relationship, there seems to be a lack of a clear definable ‘we’ in situationships. What seems to be in place instead is two individuals who are connected by ambiguity.
