{"id":788936,"date":"2026-10-01T21:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T21:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/788936\/"},"modified":"2026-10-01T21:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T21:10:08","slug":"the-rise-of-the-term-situationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/788936\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of the Term ‘Situationship’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Consider, for a moment, the wide variety of terms that we use to talk about attraction<\/a> and interpersonal connection. English has many such words, and the stock of vocabulary we use to describe them continues to expand.<\/p>\n

Terms Denoting Intimacy<\/p>\n

In some cases, these emotional connections are mostly or completely one-sided, and we use terms like crush or infatuation to describe them. <\/p>\n

In other cases, the attraction may be mutual but short-lived. When it involves two young people, for example, we may say that this is “just a case of puppy love.”<\/p>\n

Terms like fling or dalliance also imply short-term pairings, albeit of a more intimate nature, while entanglements can be complicated romances that continue over a longer period of time.<\/p>\n

The umbrella term relationship has existed in English since at least 1724, although it initially referred to any kind of association. Its emergence as a way to describe an emotional or romantic connection is surprisingly recent: Its earliest attestation by the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1944.<\/p>\n

As a term, \u201crelationship\u201d is unsatisfying because it\u2019s too broad: Romantic partners are in a relationship, but so are ex-partners, as well as family members, friends, and colleagues. We often have to qualify the term, perhaps by stating that we have a \u201cclose\u201d or a \u201cdistant\u201d relationship with someone. In addition, the variety of intimate relationships can be quite diverse, so a generic label isn\u2019t very satisfying or even particularly useful.<\/p>\n

Facebook<\/a> famously recognized this problem and attempted to address it: The company added It\u2019s complicated to its lineup of relationship status options in early 2006. The ambiguity of the term made it surprisingly useful, and the phrase entered the vernacular as a shorthand for characterizing many types of on-again\/off-again liaisons.<\/p>\n

Some relationship terms refer unambiguously to physical intimacy<\/a>. The phrase friends with benefits (FWB) has been around since the late 1990s, and comedian Bill Bellamy popularized booty call during the same decade. Hooking up, on the other hand, is notoriously problematic, since it can be used to describe a wide variety of interactions, ranging from just spending time with someone to explicit sexual<\/a> activity.<\/p>\n

The Rise of “Situationship”<\/p>\n

As it happens, a new relationship term is having its moment.<\/p>\n

According to the Nexis Uni database, it first appeared in print in the Western Daily Press, a regional paper in southwest England, in March 2008. During an interview, the Welsh TV presenter Josie d\u2019Arby was asked about her favorite word. She replied, \u201cI should say the word I invented myself\u2014 \u2018situationship’\u2014it\u2019s like a relationship but less serious\u201d (“In the Hot Seat”, 2008).<\/p>\n

Five years later, in November 2013, the term cropped up again in the pages of Marie Claire magazine. A 31-year-old woman named Erica related that \u201cFor the past five years, I\u2019ve been with this same guy, but he won\u2019t commit\u2014I call it a \u2018situationship,\u2019 not even a \u2018relationship\u2019\u201d (“Most Awkward”, 2013). It\u2019s interesting to note that, in both early cases, the speakers themselves claimed to have coined the term\u2014and they may well have done so independently.<\/p>\n

In early 2014, it popped up again in the British version of the TV game show “Deal or No Deal.” A transcript of the episode captured a contestant saying \u201cAh! I\u2019m in a \u2018situationship.\u2019 That is one of these modern words!\u201d (Edmonds, 2014).<\/p>\n

Some early references to the term hyphenate it (situation-ship), or place it between quotation marks, or provide a brief gloss about its meaning. A 2016 article in Medium, for example, employed all these devices (Olojo, 2016). Linguistic chaperones such as these often accompany new terms as they make their debuts.<\/p>\n

But after only sporadic and limited usage during the 2010s, situationship began to break out. This can be quantified by its uptake in high-circulation newspapers and magazines.<\/p>\n

The New York Times, for example, first employed it in a mid-2016 article about an episode of “Empire,” Fox\u2019s musical drama series. The editors chose to bracket the term in quotation marks and also provided a definition (\u201cnot an official relationship but maybe more than friends with benefits\u201d (Best, 2016). But over the next six years, the paper employed the term only seven times. In 2023, however, situationship appeared in a dozen articles, and by 2025 The Times was employing it, on average, twice a month.<\/p>\n

A similar pattern of usage appears in The Washington Post. Its reporters first employed the term in early 2018: \u201cMelissa was fine with casual at first, but eventually she wanted to label their \u2018situationship\u2019\u201d (Birch, 2018). After that, it appeared only sporadically, but then usage accelerated in 2023 and 2024.<\/p>\n

The Atlantic also began to use the word with some frequency, starting in 2025. And if we examine articles published on the Psychology Today website, we see that usage of the term tripled between 2024 and 2025. Situationship was even one of four finalists in Oxford University Press\u2019s 2023 Word of the Year competition<\/a>\u2014although it was beaten out by rizz<\/a> (a shortened form of charisma<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Situationship is clearly derived from \u201crelationship,\u201d and -ship is a very flexible suffix, adept at attaching itself to a variety of nouns (citizenship, companionship, craftsmanship). It\u2019s not surprising, then, to see it spinning off additional interpersonal terms. But very few of these\u2014and possibly none\u2014will gain enough traction to enter the language as full-time, dues-paying members.<\/p>\n

As one example, Urban Dictionary recorded crush-ship as far back as 2010, and delusionship appeared in a USA Today story in mid-2023. Crushship, however, hasn\u2019t yet appeared in The Times, The Post, or Psychology Today, and delusionship has cropped up in The Post just once, in 2023. Whatever their merits, these other terms lack the quintessence of ambiguity that makes situationship so useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Consider, for a moment, the wide variety of terms that we use to talk about attraction and interpersonal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-788936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}