Situationship Grief: Mourning Someone You Never Really Dated

Tuesday, April 29, 2025.

There are breakups no one asks you about.
No casseroles.

No sad Taylor Swift playlists delivered by well-meaning friends.

Just you, sitting alone with a grief you’re not sure you’re allowed to have —
because the relationship you’re mourning technically never existed.

Welcome to situationship grief: The Grief That Dares Not Speak Its Name
The silent funeral for the love you almost had.

What Is Situationship Grief?

Situationship grief is the emotional aftermath of losing a non-relationship: a flirtation, a "talking stage," a months-long undefined entanglement that felt real enough to matter, but officially didn’t.

It’s crying over the ghost of a future you both built in lowercase promises —
"someday we should travel"
"we’re just vibing"
"no need to label things yet."

Only to discover that you were the only one carrying those blueprints.

Why Situationship Grief Hits So Hard

Situationship grief cuts deeper than many realize because:

• There are no rituals.
  There’s no breakup anniversary, no mutual friends taking sides, no "closure talk" to dignify the loss.

• There’s no social recognition.
  You’re supposed to shrug it off. Get over it. Laugh at yourself for catching feelings.

• There’s massive cognitive dissonance.
  You’re grieving both what was and what never had the chance to be.

As Breen and O'Connor (2007) found, unacknowledged or disenfranchised grief can prolong emotional suffering — precisely because it isn't socially validated.

In other words:
It's real heartbreak, without the sympathy card.

Cultural Drivers Behind the Rise of Situationship Grief

The Normalization of Ambiguous Relationships

Apps, DMs, "vibes" — modern dating often floats in the liminal zone between stranger and partner.
Sociologists call this relationship ambiguity, and it's now a standard life phase, not an anomaly (Lamont, 2014).

When you live in permanent maybe, every loss is half-buried.

Attachment Theory’s Pop Culture Explosion

Pop psychology taught a generation to recognize attachment wounds —
but it didn’t teach them how to handle it when someone triggers your Anxious Attachment without ever agreeing to be your partner (Levine & Heller, 2010).

Thus: the ache of feeling "left" by someone who never promised to stay.

Capitalism’s Gamification of Romance

Online dating platforms turn people into swipable commodities (Sales, 2015).
Relationships become part of the gig economy:
short-term contracts, no benefits, no promises.

You’re encouraged to think of every connection as disposable — until you wake up missing someone who was never yours.

Contradictory Research: Are We Just Too Sensitive?

Some psychologists argue that grief from undefined relationships is a symptom of emotional overinvestment — that clear relationship boundaries protect against disproportionate attachment pain (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).

Yet contrasting studies suggest the opposite:
Emotional bonds form even without official agreements, particularly when intimacy and vulnerability are exchanged (Reis & Shaver, 1988).

Translation:
You weren't crazy for catching feelings in a no-label situation.
You were human.

Real-World Examples of Situationship Grief

• Maya, 27: Spent six months "talking" to someone every night. When he ghosted, her friends rolled their eyes: “You weren’t even dating.” She spent two months wondering if she made it all up.

• Leo, 34: Had a year-long friendship-plus-flirting with a coworker. She got engaged to someone else. He cried in his car, then told himself he "had no right" to feel anything.

• Carmen, 52: Watched her almost-relationship move on publicly — Instagram official with someone new — while she sat there deleting their old memes from her phone.

None of them had a "real" relationship.
All of them had a real, complicated grief.

The Meme-ification of Situationship Grief

Naturally, the internet — that grand library of unspoken emotional realities — has noticed:

"We were just 'talking' but now I need two months of grief leave."

"Imagine dying for someone who didn’t even claim you."

"The stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, checking their Spotify activity."

These memes hit because they name what culture still pretends isn’t real:
Feeling deeply connected to someone who never made it Facebook official doesn't make you pathetic. It makes you alive.

Future Implications: A New Language for Unofficial Loss

If situationship grief becomes more widely recognized, we may start to see:

• Expanded models of grief counseling that acknowledge ambiguous losses (Boss, 1999).

• Shift in friendship norms, where mourning non-relationships is treated with the same tenderness as mourning formal breakups.

• More explicit dating conversations about intentions — or at least, more self-protective cynicism disguised as chill vibes.

Or perhaps a revival of rituals for partings that don't have legal paperwork attached.

Because humans, it turns out, need endings almost as much as beginnings.

You Were Real, Even If They Weren't

Grief is never proportional to the paperwork.
It’s proportional to the hope.

Situationship grief hurts because hope grew faster than certainty.
Because, in your best moments together, you weren't deluded.

You were building a house on sand —
but you were still building.

And that deserves to be mourned.

Even if the world doesn't send flowers.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.

Breen, L. J., & O’Connor, M. (2007). The fundamental paradox in the grief literature: A critical reflection. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 55(3), 199–218. https://doi.org/10.2190/OM.55.3.c

Lamont, E. (2014). Negotiating courtship: Reconciling egalitarian ideals with traditional gender norms. Gender & Society, 28(2), 189–211. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243213510783

Levine, A., & Heller, R. (2010). Attached: The new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find—and keep—love. TarcherPerigee.

Reis, H. T., & Shaver, P. (1988). Intimacy as an interpersonal process. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of personal relationships: Theory, research and interventions (pp. 367–389). Wiley.

Sales, N. J. (2015). Tinder and the dawn of the “dating apocalypse.” Vanity Fair.https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating