On Girlfriendhood and its Alternatives

“Which one do you think you are?” he asks me. 

The boy I love has just explained to me that in a situationship (which I guess describes what we are), one person always has commitment issues and the other person has no self-worth. He demands an answer - which am I? .

I laugh and shake my head. 

—

The definition of a “situationship,” according to psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, is anything that exists in the space between a committed, labeled relationship and something more than a friendship. The dominant understanding of this term in popular culture aggressively posits a situationship as a temporary arrangement characterized by exploitation, inconsistency, and ambiguity. The situationship is thus something to be avoided at all costs, lest you end up sacrificing your dignity and the lingering shreds of your sanity. Searching the term on Instagram yields images of 20-something women crying with text overlaid: “i get situationship flashbacks like i was in the war or something.” TikTok provides similar testimonials: “my situationship ruined my life and sent me into a 6 month long psychotic break.” Even Reddit has reached a consensus: a situationship is “a microdose of hell.”

The usual source of situationship slander is the belief that one or both of the individuals in an unlabeled relationship is using the other person without fully “committing” to them, and as a consequence the situationship is inherently something toxic, insincere, and contemptible. For a year and a half, I drunkenly kissed the same boy every other weekend. On our off weeks, I watched him make out with other people in front of me, and I did the same out of spite. This boy and I used each other for validation and warmth on particularly cold nights, it was horrible and messy, and indeed equatable to eternal damnation. 

This is a story many people know all too well. As a result, “committed” relationships – Girlfriendhood or Boyfriendhood – are the ultimate goal, the light at the end of the situationship tunnel. Commitment is the core tenet of the modern-day relationship, but its implications and its consequences are too often accepted without question. Simply then, Commitment is my problem – not that I fearfully avoid devotion, but that I take issue with how it is understood.

Six months into my first Official Relationship, I found myself sobbing, begging, screaming at him about the nature of Commitment. Between chesty heaves, I stood and walked away from the Tompkins Square Park bench upon which we sat, only for him to follow me, grab my arm, and sit me back down again. The Breakup Dance. Essentially, it went like this: 

“I don’t like that you do/don’t [x behavior].” 

“Why?” 

“Because you’re my Girlfriend.”

—

Here is ground zero of the Girlfriend Problem: the weaponization of Girlfriend as the be-all and end-all, as an argument in and of itself, because jealousy and distrust lead to a desire for control. These desires are considered reasonable and even self-evident because of normalized beliefs regarding what a Girlfriend should say and do. 

In my first Relationship, friendships with straight men were the main point of contention. Regardless of constant, sincere reassurance that I respected my relationship, I should have “cut them out of my life,” according to Boyfriend, due to my status as Girlfriend. And if I wasn’t going to do that, I at least had to tell him every time I was with any one of them. “[Male friend] was at the bar last night and you didn’t mention that,” led to one of the biggest fights we ever had. Another occurred because I joined my gay friend in the bathroom at a party my ex also attended. “He literally sat down to pee,” I said.

This is not unique, or even gender specific. Countless male friends have removed me from their life without explanation because their girlfriends took issue with our friendship. A few weeks ago, one of these boys reached out to me with an apology after a year of silence; she broke up with him because he helped another girl with her deadlift form at the gym where he worked. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She wouldn’t believe that we’re just friends. Or that guys should have a girl “best friend” anyways. I tried to talk to her about it but she wouldn’t understand.”

Stories like this abound. Many of them involve individuals held back by some version of the phrase “not allowed.” Recently, a friend I hadn’t seen in months explained desperately that, “The only reason I’m allowed to be out at the bar tonight is because my Girlfriend and I got into a huge fight yesterday.” Just last weekend, I informed one of my guy friends that my roommate was on a day trip upstate with one of her close, only-ever-been-platonic guy friends. “Hell no,” he said. “Is her Boyfriend jealous? ‘Cause I would never let that happen.” The same day, a friend called me frustrated that her Boyfriend constantly goes through her phone, even though she has nothing to hide– “I’m suffocating.”

“That’s how things work,” my ex would explain. Boyfriends are jealous; Boyfriends need to know what their Girlfriends are doing and who they are with, by nature. “Your life is my life now,” he’d say, “we are one.” And it made him look stupid, feel embarrassed that his Girlfriend was going out in groups of guys every weekend, that she “abandoned” him at parties. “All of my friends say it’s weird,” he said. 

This boy was not evil; these criticisms arose from the belief that Relationships should be a certain way, that commitment, under the terms and agreements of an Official Relationship, should mean a certain thing. This way of things was, I felt, deeply wrong and viscerally unfair. I swore to myself and this boy and God Himself that I would never be anyone’s Girlfriend ever again.

—

I kept this promise upon involvement with Case Study #2. He was something else entirely, but still, as I made sure, something that was not my Boyfriend. He once told me, soberly, that he wanted other people to be scared to talk to me because they knew I was “his.”

“Mine,” he’d say, forcefully, and it made me grimace. “Good thing I’m not,” I said. He told me that he loved me two weeks in, and not long after that, swore on his mother’s life that he was going to marry me. I believed him, loved him back, and joked about the marriage thing. We were not going to get married; I knew this from the start. 

He was flawed – pill-addicted, technically homeless, struggling musician with both mommy and daddy issues type of flawed – and I eventually, with help from the DSM-5, unprofessionally diagnosed him with both Narcissism and Type One Bipolar Disorder. But it was not my job to deal with these things, to try to fix these things, because I was not his Girlfriend. It was only my job to spend time and laugh with him and occasionally let him sleep at my house. Conversely, he got me flowers, cooked me dinner, drove me to JFK during rush hour, and carried my grocery bags, even though none of these things were “expected” of him. He knew from the beginning that I would never be his Girlfriend, and so I not only had nothing to prove, but I also knew that his actions were genuine – removed entirely from notions of obligation. So, I loved and learned and grew in priceless ways because I cared for him from a place where I could see his flaws but they could not be used against me. He once picked me up from the club while vomiting Percocets onto the sidewalk. I told him not to come around like that again, and he never did. Similarly, he avoided parts of me he didn’t like, which mostly had to do with my being too drunk or laughing too hard around other men. 

As his Not Girlfriend, I had incredible agency; if negotiated well, a situationship will always see you as a full person – a separate entity – no matter how intimate you are. I often purposely did not invite him to parties I attended or even hosted, simply because I wanted time with my friends without him. There were a million things for him to be other than my appendage; the city was full of people he’d met in his escapades, and he’d been living a full life without me. Equally, I wiggled my way out of evenings playing pool in dingy bars with him and all of his friends who spoke in slang I couldn’t understand and smelled offensively of body odor. These things upset him, but he could not guilt me into acting differently because he was not my Boyfriend.

“I would never let my Girlfriend do that,” he said, when I came home at 11 a.m. after a night out clubbing with a co-ed group. Good to know. He could voice these things but I didn’t have to do anything about it, because in a situationship you don’t technically have the “right” to be jealous, or to have control over what your partner is doing. Many people confuse this with the right to communicate, and speak of being afraid to talk about boundaries or exclusivity. But, there is nothing about a situationship that necessitates ignorance of one’s wants and needs. A friend recently told me that the success of his situationship came from the attitude that it “wasn’t her place” to change his behavior, in that case his proclivity for smoking. In any healthy relationship, from lovers to family members, the expectation is that desires are voiced, and either complied with, compromised upon, or denied outright. 

As such, my situationship with Case Study #2 ended because the way I posted on Instagram – posing happily next to my male friends – made him insecure, and I refused to do anything about it. Apparently, his friends and family were extremely concerned about that: “Aren’t you guys like basically in a relationship? Who are all these guys?” Apparently, it made him look weak and stupid. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said. 

I am glad our situationship ended as it did. Labels are often used to “lock down” the other person, to prevent them from being able to leave you, to suppress their ability to act upon genuine desire. With nothing to hold him back, this boy went.

 “Good luck,” is the last thing he ever told me. 

— 

Okay, but that’s just two guys. You just got two bad apples, two particularly controlling men plucked from a sea of nonchalant women's rights supporters.

Unfortunately, while all partners might not be that bad, the soil from which every apple comes has been enriched with distrust, jealousy, and resultant desire for possession, control, and codependence. I can imagine where this came from. A caveman needs to know that his child is his child to ensure his gene propagation, so he might micromanage and keep careful watch over his partner, probably stripping her of certain types of independence in the name of evolution. But even after birth control and three waves of feminism, these expectations and consequential practices still remain under the guise of Commitment, and they have become The Way of Things. 

This Way, a product of good old-fashioned social conditioning is of course visible in the popularity of figures like Andrew Tate and their hard-right conservatism. But even mainstream media romanticizes obsessive, controlling tendencies, framing them as idealized, passionate love. The Disney Princess Belle develops Stockholm syndrome for her captor; Edward of “Twilight” monitors Bella incessantly and is arguably a stalker. The most popular in entertainment, including shows such as “You” and “Gossip Girl,” portray toxic, possessive relationships as devoted romantic commitment. This distortion pervades corners of the culture far outside the realm of fiction. A boy once told me that we were “just like John Lennon and Yoko Ono,” a relationship infamous for Lennon’s micromanagement of Yoko Ono’s image and social interactions. Ye, or Kanye West, is famous for having complete control over the way his partners dress. Among YouTube’s most clicked videos are street-style interviews where passersby are asked questions that begin with, “would you let your girl…,” and end with things like “stay in touch with her ex,” “go to the club,” or “have a guy best friend.” 

“Absolutely not!” the people say. 

—

As such, Commitment – an arbitrarily defined truth, naturalized – has been perverted into all-consumingness, into a desire for ownership and control over one’s partner. These desires seem inherent, go unquestioned, pass for love. Thus, the Official Relationship is hailed for its capability to enforce, to hold partners accountable to this “love,” in accordance with whatever expectations have been set. Hence, the “because you’re my Girlfriend” argument.  

I do not plan to spend the rest of my life avoiding Girlfriendhood simply because it is often tainted by control. I know very well that not every relationship is toxic, that not every guy is going to make me tell him who is at the bar, that not every apple is rotten. I hope that one day I will walk into the café beneath my apartment and find a tall brown-haired boy who smiles a lot and says things like “I don’t care if you go out with your guy friends tonight,” and “I hope you had an awesome time in the bathroom with that gay dude,” and eventually asks me to marry him. 

—

For now, situationships can be a tool, a protection from this, a space where the relationship is about the love itself, as opposed to what it should look like according to some corrupted definition. Human beings have always and will continue to try to impose rational frameworks upon irrational things like attraction, love, trust, and jealousy. All of them are going to be flawed — but a situationship might be compatible with a freer, truer, and more genuine kind of human connection that leaves space for unpredictability, impulse, and negotiation. Basic human emotions cannot be altered, but the ways in which they are mediated, expressed, and potentially weaponized can be. 

Thus, the situationship is a gift, an alternative framework that subverts and destabilizes Official Relationship expectations, that prevents trespass into control. It is a prioritization of the experience itself; I bring a boy joy and he brings me joy until we no longer bring each other joy and that is that. When the joy ends, someone will get hurt, as happens in any other kind of relationship – but if I suffer either way, I will do it on my own terms, as a full Self.