situationshiphelpn.

A plain-language reference for modern dating words

The words for what you're in

Plain definitions for modern dating, and the difference between the ones people mix up. No verdicts about anyone involved.

Two half-finished coffees on a bright café table, a phone face-down between them and one person's sleeve at the edge of the frame.
AI-generated imageFrom the outside almost every undefined connection looks like this. What separates them is whether anyone has said out loud what it is.
situationshipnoun

A situationship is a romantic or sexual connection that continues without an agreed definition. The two people behave in ways associated with dating — regular contact, time together, often exclusivity in practice — while avoiding the conversation that would name the arrangement or state where it is going.

often confused with a relationshipfriends with benefitsthe talking stage

Start where you actually are

A flat kitchen counter in daylight with two used mugs and a set of keys on it, a dark green coat left over the back of a chair and the room beyond empty.SituationshipThe state itself: what the word covers and the four shapes it takes. Then how it differs from a relationship and from friends with benefits, and which decisions are actually on the table once you have named it.Someone sitting sideways on a windowsill at dusk with a phone in one hand, face turned away toward the city outside.Talking stageThe phase before anything is decided. What moves it forward, what it looks like when it has stopped moving, and which questions are worth asking. Also why nobody can honestly tell you how many weeks it should take.An open notebook covered in small unreadable handwriting on a pale desk, a green pen across the page and a phone face-down beside it, with someone working at a laptop at the edge of the frame.Dating termsThe vocabulary: ghosting, orbiting, haunting, zombieing, benching, soft launch, delusionship. Each one is defined in plain language. Each page gives where the word came from and what it looks like from the receiving end.

Tell them apart

Two pairs of shoes left by a front door, one set placed neatly and one kicked apart, a single key on the shelf above, and someone in a green coat walking out through the bright doorway.

Naming it is not the same as ending it

Most of what is written about undefined relationships treats the name as the verdict: once you can call it a situationship, the only thing left to do is leave. That is one option out of several, and it is not always the right one.

These pages keep the two questions apart. First, what is this — a question about things you can check: whether the arrangement has been stated, whether both of you would answer the same way, whether plans reach past the near term. Then, what do you want to do about it — a question only you can answer, and one that has more than one honest answer. Some pages here are about staying and changing the terms. Some are about leaving. One is about how to tell which of the two you are looking at.

Start with what a situationship is →
A single small table with one untouched glass on it and one empty chair, alone in a wide, bright, empty plaza, with someone walking away in the background.

Nobody here will tell you what the other person meant

You cannot read intent from the outside, and a page that claims otherwise is guessing on your behalf. What can be described is behaviour: what changed, in what order, and what a given reply does and does not settle. That is the level these pages work at.

It also means no verdicts about the person you are asking about. Not that they are careless, not that they are wasting your time, not that you deserve better. Those are conclusions, and they belong to you, after the facts are straight — not to a website that has never met either of you.

What ghosting does and does not tell you →

Why this site exists, and who edits it

I have been in one. That is the single fact behind the name at the bottom of this section, and I am not going to tell you about it: the details would be the least useful part, because the shape of mine is not the shape of yours, and an anecdote offered as evidence is exactly the move this site avoids.

What it left me with is the habit these pages are built on — keeping "what is this" apart from "what do I want to do about it". The first is a question about things you can check: whether the arrangement has ever been said out loud, whether both of you would answer the same way, whether any plan reaches past the near term. The second is yours alone, and it has more than one honest answer.

So this site will not call an undefined arrangement normal, and it will not call it a failure either; both are verdicts dressed as descriptions. It will not tell you what the other person meant, because that is not readable from the outside. And where a question is about anxiety, depression or anything a professional should hear, a page names the kind of help and stops.

Theo Lanyon Editor · has been in one

A pen name for this site's editorial team. The portrait on the about page is AI-generated and not a photograph of a living person, and there is no licence, training or case history behind the name.

How this site is put together →

Which one am I in, and what then?

Almost every page here is a longer version of the same three moves. They are in this order for a reason: the second one goes badly when the first has been skipped.

  1. One

    Name the state to yourself

    Before anyone else is involved: has the arrangement been said out loud, and would the two of you give the same answer if somebody asked you separately today? Everything else — how often you talk, how long it has been, how it feels — sorts nothing.

    Am I in a situationship?

  2. Two

    Ask once, in plain words

    One question, at a time when nobody is leaving, with no preamble built to soften it. Asking twice turns a question into pressure, and pressure produces an answer about the pressure rather than about the arrangement.

    What to ask, and when

  3. Three

    Read the answer you get

    Including a non-answer. Someone who will not name the thing has told you it is not going to be named, and that is information rather than an insult. What you do with it is the part that was always yours.

    Turning it into something defined

How a page here is built

This is a reference, not an advice column. Four things are true of every page, and you can check all four on any of them.

  1. The answer comes first

    Every page opens with a definition card: the headword, what it means in plain language, and the words it gets confused with. If you read nothing else on the page, that block still answers the question you arrived with.

  2. Every heading is a question

    Sections are named the way people actually type: how long, how do I know, what do I say, which one is this. The paragraph under a heading answers that heading completely, so you can land in the middle of a page and it still works.

  3. A number ships only with its source

    Figures here are traceable to a named research organisation, with the year and the exact group they measured. Where a popular number turned out to be a dating company surveying its own users, the page says so instead of repeating it.

  4. Where a page stops, it says so

    No page here pretends to know what someone else was thinking, and none of them is therapy. Where a situation is doing real damage, the page points at a professional rather than at another article.

In practical terms that means the figures on this site come from named research organisations — Pew Research Center andYouGov, for instance — and never from a dating company surveying its own users. The numbers themselves, with the exact wording of every question behind them, are collected on the statistics page. How the pages get written and checked is on theeditorial policy.

Which of these words are actually documented?

In brief: some of them have a dictionary entry, some appear only in a publisher's slang glossary, and one has nothing at all. A page here says which, because the difference changes how much weight a word can carry.

A situationship is a romantic or sexual connection that continues without an agreed definition. That is not only this site's phrasing.Dictionary.com defines it as "a romantic or sexual relationship that its participants have not defined, and which can also lack commitment or exclusivity". The same entry marks the word informal and dates its first recorded use to 2005–10. It was also one of four finalists for Oxford University Press's Word of the Year 2023 (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Ghosting is the best documented of the rest —Dictionary.com gives it a full entry as "the practice of suddenly ending all contact with a person without explanation". Others sit a step down. Soft launch has a relationship sense in the same dictionary (Dictionary.com, 2026), while words such as benching, orbiting and zombieing appear only in an editorial dating-slang glossary (Dictionary.com's dating-slang glossary). A glossary describes usage; it is not the same as a word being accepted.

What kind of record each word has
WordWhere it is recordedWhat that means
situationshipDictionary entry, plus a Word of the Year shortlistingEstablished vocabulary, with a dated first use
ghostingDictionary entryEstablished vocabulary in the dating sense
soft launchDictionary entry, relationship senseEstablished, though the sense is newer than the phrase
benching, orbiting, zombieingPublisher's dating-slang glossary onlyDescribed usage, not an accepted entry
delusionshipNo dictionary or glossary record foundIn circulation, undocumented — the page says so
Checked against the primary source in each case; see the sources page for the method · Checked on 2026-08-21.

For example, that last row is why the delusionship page opens by saying the word has no dictionary status rather than quoting one. Every source behind this table is listed on thesources page.

One line each

The short version of every word this site carries. Each one has a page behind it with where it came from, what it looks like in practice, and what it is regularly confused with.

Benching means keeping someone on hold in case other options do not work out (Dictionary.com's dating-slang glossary). Every other line below is written to the same standard: what the word describes, not what it says about anyone.

Every page on the site, in one list →

Addenda

New entries, when there are new entriesn.

A short note sent when a word is added to this reference, or when an existing entry changes because the evidence behind it changed. There is no schedule and none is promised: a reference book does not publish on Tuesdays.

The address is stored to send that note and nothing else. An unsubscribe link is in every one.