Situationship Amnesia: Why We Miss Folks Who Weren’t Good for Us
Wednesday, November 26, 2025.
There is a particular kind of forgetting that happens only in the aftermath of an almost-relationship.
It is not graceful, and it is not poetic.
It is the kind of forgetting, for some, that feels like a survival strategy invented by someone who has never actually survived anything.
This is Situationship Amnesia—the neurological blackout that convinces you the person who barely showed up for you might, under slightly improved astrological conditions, be the great love of your life.
It would be touching if it weren’t so corrosive.
The amnesia has a rhythm:
You’re fine, you’re functioning, you’re finally feeling like someone who could fall in love again—and then loneliness drifts in like bad weather, and suddenly you’re remembering a relationship that never existed.
Situationship Amnesia is not nostalgia.
It is distortion as self-soothing.
And it is remarkably effective.
The Brain Prefers a Rewritten Past to an Honest Present
Memory has never been a historian; it’s a novelist with a drinking problem.
It rearranges, beautifies, omits.
Nader & Hardt’s research on memory reconsolidation (2009) found that every time you recall an experience, the brain edits it. Not slightly—meaningfully.
The more you miss someone, the more your brain collaborates with the fiction.
Loneliness isn’t content with the truth.
It wants a story.
And stories, by definition, invite revision.
So the brain begins its renovations:
You remember the one afternoon you laughed together, not the 27 unread texts.
You remember the kiss, not the disappearance.
You remember hope, not exhaustion.
This is not accidental.
It’s neurological mercy.
Unfortunately, mercy can sometimes be dangerous.
Why Situationships Are So Hard to Forget: The Attachment System Never Got Its Ending
Situationships are psychological cliffhangers.
Your attachment system is still waiting for the next episode.
Mikulincer & Shaver (2016) showed that the attachment system becomes most activated not when a bond is stable, but when it is inconsistent.
Intermittent reinforcement—first established in animal learning research (Ferster & Skinner, 1957)—turns human beings into emotional archivists of every fleeting moment of affection.
You’re not attached to them.
You’re attached to the potential they performed briefly and strategically.
That potential becomes the ghost that haunts you.
You’re chasing not the person, but the version of them your nervous system invented in a moment of deprivation.
Loneliness Is the Real Regressor: It Brings Out the Worst Historian in You
When loneliness hits, cognition bends.
Cacioppo & Cacioppo (2018) documented that loneliness alters perception, increases longing, and distorts the emotional significance of past relationships.
You’re not remembering them fondly.
You’re remembering yourself fondly—the version of you who briefly felt desired.
Loneliness is not an emotion.
It is an editor.
Its goal is not accuracy.
Its goal is relief.
The Body Remembers the High. The Mind Forgets the Harm.
This is the part people underestimate: Situationships produce disproportionately intense emotional peaks because they exist outside the responsibilities of actual intimacy.
Intensity is sometimes slavishly misinterpreted as meaning—a phenomenon tied to salience networks in the brain (Kapur, 2003).
So when the nostalgia hits, your nervous system replays the moments that were strongest, not the moments that were truest.
Intensity is not intimacy.
But the body doesn’t care—it catalogs adrenaline and discards ambiguity.
This is why you can remember the exact way they touched your hip and absolutely nothing about the night you cried alone waiting for them to reply.
Situationship Amnesia Is the Nervous System’s Attempt at Closure
Boss’s work on ambiguous loss (1999) explains why undefined endings create a psychological ache: the brain cannot file the experience properly, so it cycles repeatedly through the fragments.
To survive the incompleteness, your mind improvises meaning.
It tells you there was something worth salvaging.
It tells you maybe timing was the villain.
It tells you that if you reached out—if you reopened the door—things might go differently.
This is not intuition.
It is desperation dressed as insight.
Why You Reach Back: The Brain Wants Relief, Not Reunion
People do not return to situationships because they believe in second chances.
They return because the alternative—emotional emptiness—feels intolerable.
Fisher et al.’s neuroimaging research (2010) on romantic rejection showed that longing activates the same reward pathways implicated in drug craving.
You’re not craving them.
You’re craving the neurochemical hit their inconsistency conditioned you to expect.
Situationship Amnesia is a withdrawal symptom.
How Social Media Turns the Memory Distortion Into a Full Fantasy Novel
Social media is the gasoline.
The situationship posts a photo looking alive, hydrated, allegedly well-adjusted, and your brain collapses under the weight of projection.
Festinger’s work on social comparison (1954) anticipated this long before Instagram existed.
You’re not comparing your actual relationship to their actual life.
You’re comparing your loneliness to their highlight reel.
This is why Situationship Amnesia intensifies at exactly the worst moment: when they appear online looking “better.”
You are not missing them.
You are missing the version of yourself you wished they made you feel like.
The Path Out of Amnesia Is Not Strength. It’s Memory Accuracy.
The cure is kinda stark:
You must remember your truth.
Not the edited truth.
Your living one.
You must remember:
How often they withheld.
How ambiguous you felt.
How your nervous system lived in low-grade suspense.
How rarely they chose you when it mattered.
How lonely you felt beside someone who technically counted as “in your life.”
Healing happens when you name things by their proper titles:
The spark was chemistry.
The confusion was emotional unavailability.
The longing was dysregulation.
The fantasy was yours.
The reality was theirs.
They were not almost-love.
They were almost-honest.
FAQ
Why does Situationship Amnesia feel so physically real?
Because it really is. Loneliness alters your physiological regulation, and intermittent reinforcement distorts your reward system. It’s not weakness; it’s faulty wiring.
Why do I miss them even though they made me miserable?
Because “miserable” is a stable feeling. “Maybe” is a drug.
Do people ever successfully rekindle a situationship?
Only in the same way people successfully revisit a haunted house: with adrenaline, illusions, and predictable consequences.
How do I stop wanting them?
Maybe you don’t stop wanting. Maybe you endeavor to replace the wanting with clarity, then with self-respect, and then perhaps ultimately replace them with someone who doesn’t require narrative acrobatics.
Final Thoughts
Situationship Amnesia is the mind’s attempt to restore meaning to an experience that never offered any.
It’s the longing we manufacture when we don’t know where to put our loneliness.
But here is the hard truth:
If it was meant for you, you would never need to forget the bad parts to justify the good.
The real closure is not getting over them.
It’s getting over the idea that this was ever almost something.
When the nostalgia pulls you back, remember this:
You don’t miss them.
You miss the hope you attached to them.
And hope, misassigned, is the most seductive liar in the human story.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Cacioppo, J. T., & Cacioppo, S. (2018). Loneliness: Human nature and the need for social connection. W. W. Norton & Company.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393246538
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674003810
Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
https://doi.org/10.1037/10627-000
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
Fisher, H. E., Aron, A., & Brown, L. L. (2010). Romantic love: A mammalian brain system for mate choice. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1537), 2469–2478.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0081
Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: A framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(1), 13–23.
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.13
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
https://www.guilford.com/books/Attachment-in-Adulthood/Mikulincer-Shaver/9781462525567
Nader, K., & Hardt, O. (2009). A single standard for memory: The case for reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(3), 224–234.
https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2590