Editorial policy
In brief: this page settles how a page here gets written, where its numbers come from, what happens when we find a mistake, and who pays for the site to exist.
How is a page here written and checked?
Content on situationshiphelp is AI-assisted and human-edited. Drafts are produced with the help of AI tools, then reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by our editorial team before publication. Bylines are editorial pseudonyms of that team; we never invent professional credentials.
Editorial verification means checking a claim against the original source before it is published, rather than trusting how it was already phrased elsewhere. For example, a word-history claim such as Dictionary.com, 2026 is quoted directly from the dictionary entry, not from an article summarizing it.
Bylines and pen names
This site is signed with one name, and that name is a pen name of the editorial team rather than a person whose biography you could look up. It exists so a page has somebody answerable for it. It is not there to borrow authority the text has not earned, and the following are things it does not claim and will not be given: a degree, a licence, a professional title such as therapist, counsellor or coach, a training in any method, an employer, a city, a date, a duration, or anybody else’s name. No reader is quoted anywhere on this site, and nothing here is offered as evidence on the grounds that it happened to somebody on the masthead.
The portrait published beside that name is an illustration generated with an AI tool. It is not a photograph of a living person and it is not a likeness of one; it carries a visible “AI-generated image” label wherever it appears, and the caption beside it names the byline as a pen name. Removing either would misrepresent the picture, so a build gate checks for both rather than trusting anyone’s memory.
What the byline does claim is one thing: whoever edits these pages has been in an undefined connection. That is lived experience, not a qualification, and it is worded that way on purpose — it earns the site’s method and nothing else. The method is to ask what has been said out loud rather than what somebody must have meant, because intent is not readable from the outside. So no page here tells you what the other person meant or what they are like, no page calls an undefined arrangement either normal or a failure, and no page prints a script for getting somebody to commit. Where a question is about anxiety, depression or anything a professional should hear, a page names the kind of help and stops. The full disclosure sits on the about page.
Where do the numbers come from?
A primary source is the original study, government data, or the organization's own reporting a number comes from, as opposed to a secondary article that quotes it. Every statistic we publish is verified against one and named in the same sentence it appears — consider Pew Research Center, 2020, linked straight to Pew's own report rather than to coverage of it.
The full list lives on our sources page and statistics page. Numbers we cannot trace to a primary source do not get published.
What does a checked standard actually look like?
It means every number below names its publisher and its year in the same sentence, and every claim links to where it was actually read — for instance,Pew Research Center, 2020 is the source behind the "friends with benefits" awareness figure used across this site.
| Claim | Figure | Publisher (year) |
|---|---|---|
| Ever been in a situationship, US adults | 39% | YouGov (2024) |
| Ever been ghosted, US adults | 29% | Pew Research Center (2020) |
| Had heard the term "friends with benefits" | 89% | Pew Research Center (2020) |
What happens when we find a mistake?
A correction is a factual fix that is noted openly on the affected page, not a silent edit. Found an error? Email hello@situationshiphelp.com. We correct factual errors within a week, note the correction on the affected page, and update the page's modified date honestly — it only changes when the content substantively changes.
Who funds this site?
situationshiphelp is an independent publication. This site is funded by our own products and services promoted to our email list. We do not run paid rankings.
What do we disclose about AI?
We label AI-generated illustrations, allow AI crawlers to read this site (see robots.txt and llms.txt), and welcome citation of our work with attribution and a link.