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What People Really Think About Situationships (The Data Is Complicated)

Pew Research asked. Reddit answered differently. Here's why both matter.

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There's a particular kind of emotional math people do when they're in undefined relationships: not technically dating but not exactly friends, spending significant time together but with no shared vocabulary for what that time means. The cultural term for this is situationship, and it has become one of the most searched relationship-related queries in the past three years. What I wanted to know — beyond the anecdotes — was what the actual data looked like. Not the viral Twitter thread data or the Reddit consensus, but the survey research from people who ask these questions systematically. The Pew Research Center has done more of this work than almost anyone. What their findings show is more complicated, and more interesting, than either the 'situationships are fine, it's just modern dating' take or the 'situationships are always harmful' counter-narrative.

#1

The official numbers first

In 2023, Pew Research Center asked a nationally representative sample of Americans about their relationship experiences. Among adults under 30, roughly 1 in 4 said they had been in a relationship where neither person had clearly defined what it was. Among all adults who had dated in the previous five years, about 38 percent said at least one of those relationships was ambiguous — not a friendship, not a committed partnership, something in between.

Those numbers are larger than most people expect. And they're probably conservative, because they depend on self-classification: the Pew framing asked people to describe their experiences, and many people in the middle of a situationship would not characterize it that way in the moment. The phenomenon is likely more common than even these figures suggest.

#2

What Reddit actually says

I've spent more time than I should reading r/dating_advice and r/situationships threads, and what strikes me is how consistently the people there underestimate how many others are in the same position. The posts read like confessions of something unusual — my situation is probably weird, but — when in fact the structure they're describing shows up dozens of times a day on the same board.

The recurring pattern: one person wants clarity, one person avoids giving it, and the person who wants clarity spends significant time trying to decode behavior rather than asking directly. The Pew data on why people don't define relationships is relevant here: the most common reasons cited were not wanting to seem presumptuous (41%), fear of ruining what's already there (37%), and uncertainty about their own feelings (29%). All three are honest. All three are also reasons that keep the ambiguity in place indefinitely.

What Pew doesn't capture — but Reddit does — is the exhaustion that accumulates. The cognitive load of maintaining something undefined is high. People describe tracking signals obsessively, rereading texts for tone, replaying conversations for subtext. The unspoken question underneath all of it is the same: what am I to you? And the reason it stays unspoken is usually the same: I'm afraid of what happens if I ask.

#3

The demographic split that surprised me

The Pew data breaks down by age, education, and gender in ways that aren't intuitive. Women report being in situationships at higher rates than men — but they also report more dissatisfaction with the ambiguity. Men are more likely to say they preferred the undefined arrangement; women more often described it as something they tolerated rather than chose.

This is not a story about one gender exploiting another. The picture is more complicated than that. Pew found that about 1 in 5 of the people who said they preferred the ambiguity also said they had been hurt by a previous undefined relationship. Preference for the undefined arrangement often comes from past experience with the defined one going badly, not from indifference to connection.

Age complicates it further. Among adults over 45 who were dating post-divorce or post-long-term relationship, the rate of intentionally undefined arrangements was notably higher — and the emotional coloring was different. Many described choosing ambiguity deliberately, as a way to ease back into connection without the pressure of relationship labels that felt loaded after a major ending. That's a different phenomenon than the 24-year-old who's unclear on what three months of consistent contact actually means.

#4

The specific harm Pew's framing misses

Survey data captures prevalence. It doesn't easily capture the specific harm of ambiguity, which is not just emotional distress but the particular kind of disorientation that comes from lacking a shared frame.

In defined relationships, both people have roughly aligned expectations about commitment, exclusivity, and investment — even if those definitions vary from couple to couple. In undefined ones, each person operates on their own private understanding, and those understandings frequently diverge. One person is behaving as if this is a committed partnership moving slowly; the other is behaving as if this is a recurring connection with no particular trajectory. Both feel justified. Neither has stated their frame. The eventual collision is experienced as betrayal by the person with higher investment and as a misunderstanding by the person with lower investment — and both are, in a narrow sense, accurate.

The researchers who study this more carefully than Pew's survey allows tend to look at what they call relationship ambiguity as a distinct variable from relationship quality. The finding that holds across multiple studies: ambiguity tends to amplify negative experiences and mute positive ones. Good moments in an undefined relationship are shadowed by uncertainty; bad moments feel worse because there's no shared foundation for navigating them.

#5

What this means practically

The instinct when reading statistics like these is to treat the problem as something the data helps solve. It doesn't, really. Knowing that 38 percent of recent daters have experienced ambiguity doesn't tell you what to do about the specific ambiguity you're in right now.

What the data does offer is a reframe. The situation you're in is not a product of your particular bad luck or your particular person's particular flaws. It's a structural feature of early-21st-century dating in a culture where formal relationship escalation norms have loosened faster than informal ones have developed to replace them. You're navigating something genuinely difficult, and the difficulty is not mainly about you.

The most consistent finding in the qualitative research — the interviews, not the surveys — is that the people who feel best about having been in a situationship, regardless of how it ended, are the ones who eventually named what they wanted and heard an honest answer. The conversation was usually harder to initiate than to have. The answer was sometimes not what they hoped for. But the clarity, in almost every account, was better than the alternative.

Pulling it together

The summary version of everything above: situationships are common, they're not evenly distributed across genders and age groups, and the harm they produce is often less about the ambiguity itself than about what the ambiguity prevents — specifically, clear communication about what each person actually wants. The research consistently shows that people who have the direct conversation, whatever the outcome, tend to feel better afterward than people who remain in the undefined state indefinitely. That is not an argument for forcing clarity before anyone is ready. It is an argument for taking seriously the difference between 'we haven't defined this yet' and 'we are indefinitely avoiding defining this' — because those two states, while they can look identical from the outside, tend to produce very different emotional trajectories over time.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if I'm in a situationship or just taking it slow?

The most useful distinction isn't pace but avoidance: taking it slow usually involves a shared understanding that both people are moving deliberately toward something. A situationship typically involves at least one person not knowing whether they're moving anywhere at all. If you've been seeing someone for several months and you still don't know whether they're seeing other people, whether they consider you a partner, or what would happen if you got an unexpected opportunity in another city — that's ambiguity that pace alone doesn't explain.

Is it worth having the 'what are we' conversation?

The research on this is consistent: yes, in almost every case. The conversation is typically harder to initiate than to have. The worst case — hearing a clear 'no' — is actually easier to process than continued ambiguity, even though it doesn't feel that way in advance. The emotional cost of ongoing uncertainty is, for most people, higher than the cost of an unwanted answer. The main exception is when you're genuinely uncertain yourself about what you want — in that case, the more useful conversation is probably with yourself first.

Why does the other person seem perfectly happy with how things are?

Pew's data suggests that for roughly 20 percent of people who prefer undefined arrangements, that preference comes from a past relationship experience that went badly when it became defined. For others, especially with avoidant attachment styles, the ambiguity itself provides a kind of safety — connection without the risk of commitment. Neither of these is about not caring about you. They're about the person's relationship with closeness and risk generally, which predates you and isn't primarily about you.

Is it possible to move a situationship into a real relationship?

Yes, but the research on how often this happens is sparse. What does appear consistently in the qualitative literature: the transitions that work tend to involve one person naming clearly what they want, the other person responding honestly, and both people then behaving consistently with that stated agreement. Transitions that stall usually involve one person hoping the situation will define itself over time without either person actually changing anything. The situation does not typically define itself over time.

Sources

What this article draws on. For the broader bibliography see our sources page.