We are constantly told that we will meet our soulmate at Uni. In fact, before TV shows like the ‘Sex Lives of College Girls,’ a lot of what we saw of women at university in cinema consisted of women meeting their husbands. For instance, Legally Blonde is a great movie in showing how Elle Woods doesn’t need to get married to succeed, and yet she still ends up falling in love with someone else at Harvard.
The first question I get asked when I go home from University for the holidays is not ‘How is your degree going?’ or ‘What have you been up to?’, it’s ‘Have you met any nice boys yet?’ All we seem to talk about is relationships, i.e. who is in one or who has just got out of one (I’ve got to admit even I am guilty of this).
Uni situationship culture is something most students have experienced at some point in their University career. The Chappell Roan song ‘Casual’ sums it up quite nicely but these types of attachments are hard to define. They present a grey area between friendship and a relationship, becoming incredibly popular amongst Gen Z and are rife in uni culture.
So what is the problem with being casual?
We are young, things are going to not work out and we are all making mistakes, but the idea of meeting your soulmate at uni makes these failed almost-relationships that much harder to bear. You walk past them on campus and find yourself pressing play on your Olivia Rodrigo playlist, thinking back to what could have been, fixating on the potential rather than seeing how unhealthy that situation was.
Going on a few dates is a bit of fun, but when you are being strung along by someone who isn’t ready for a relationship, things can get ugly fast. You find yourself trying to prove yourself to them, hoping that will make them change their mind and want to be your boyfriend, but it never works out, leaving you crying and running out of rom coms to watch on Netflix.
These situationships are meant to present an easy way out of a long term committed relationship, and this is something that both men and women seemingly enjoy. With the pressure of uni, thinking about what you want to do with your life and running around in a part time job, it’s unsurprising that students are finding comfort in these non-committal relationships.
However, it’s worth asking, are they ruining our perception of love?
Zoe Zhang’s article in The Michigan Daily highlights the toxicity in these emotionally detached partnerships. The way that these two people hold no responsibility for the other’s emotions or wellbeing can have a damaging effect on that person, but also the way you view yourself in relationships in the future. Viewers of TikTok will be familiar with the term ‘situationship survivor,’ people are even getting it printed on T-shirts. Although comical, this holds testament to how damaging these situational connections are.
These ongoing, no-strings-attached relationships seem to have stemmed from uni hook-up culture. People want physical attachment to someone without the hassle of the emotional attachment, but when this becomes an ongoing thing it always leads to someone getting hurt.
The idea of a situationship is so much more complicated than friends with benefits, as the term suggests that when the situation changes you could get into a relationship. Hearing stories of people completing the challenge and moving up to the next stage are constantly spread around, making us believe that it is possible! This means you are in a state of limbo – which for some of us that means romanticising the little attention they are giving us, with hope that they will realise they want more.
The idea that there is a possibility that a relationship may come from all this becomes addictive. There seems to be two types of people in regards to this 1. there is the person who does not want a relationship and 2. the person who doesn’t mind as long as they get to spend time with that person. News flash: YOU DO MIND!!
To prove this I will be letting you in on a little 1-1 gossip session. This is REAL GIRL TALK…
In my three years at uni I have been in not one, not two but three situationships (one for each year now that I think of it). No matter how bad my first one was, I kept going back for more. In fact the most recent one, I was the situationship supporter. I’d convinced myself I didn’t want anything more because that would make it ‘complicated,’ but by the end I turned into the victim and, therefore, crown myself the biggest situationship survivor. I was convinced that going along with a situationship was just part of the uni ritual, but is that just evidence of the damaging effect it is having on our perceptions of what love is?
If I am honest, I think situationships in uni are unavoidable. While they are frustrating and at times overwhelming, they teach you A LOT about yourself – and, ultimately, self love. So, perhaps it’s something we all have to go through in order to really understand how to love both ourselves and our future partners properly.