Dating in 2024 is…variety-packed. Is Gen Z using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of their romantic prospects? Are dating apps losing popularity among young people? Is speed dating making a comeback?! Even as a millennial, I’m having a hard time keeping up, so you can imagine how baffling this must be for my baby boomer friends. To find out, I recently spoke with two baby boomer women in my family (we’ll call them Mary and Laura), and of all the dating trends I threw at them, they agreed there was one that concerned them the most: the situation ship.
First, a quick primer on situationships from Associate Editor Sydney Meister. To write an article explaining the phenomenon, Meister tapped New York-based psychologist Dr. David Tsar. Dr. Tsar explains, “A situationship is a romantic relationship without a clear definition or commitment. Roughly speaking, it’s a no-strings-attached relationship, or an emotional/sexual bond without a title. Partners don’t define the relationship, put it into categories, or set clear boundaries.” Meister continues, “In that sense, a situationship is different from a boot call because a boot call tends to generate ‘intense feelings’ and ’emotional intimacy.’ A boot call is about sex without feelings, whereas a situationship is about sex and feelings (with commitment).”
Now, I’ve seen my fair share of situationships in the real world, so maybe I’ve grown immune to their toxicity, but both Mary (born 1961) and Laura (born 1955) found the concept particularly irritating. (We agreed that situationships sounded like, excuse me, “complete nonsense,” to use their words, not mine.)
Laura, who’s been married for nearly 40 years, told me she “doesn’t understand why younger people are so obsessed with appearing cool or disinterested” when dating. She added that her millennial daughter has dated mercurial men who didn’t seem all that interested in commitment, and her advice is always the same: “Never ‘go along’ with what a guy wants if it’s not what you want, just to avoid awkwardness.”
Meanwhile, Mary was married in her 20s, divorced in her 40s, and continues to date casually. “How do you think it’s different from casual dating without getting too serious?” I asked. Ultimately, Mary is doing this in the only healthy way. Over the past decade or so, the men she’s dated have made it very clear from the start that they were on the same page when it came to getting serious. “I think after you’ve been married and divorced, it’s a lot easier to be honest about what you want and don’t want,” she explained. “Maybe it’s because I’m older, but there’s no pressure to get into relationships that you’re not interested in.”
As I stepped back and listened to their concerns (which were similar, if not less clinical, than those expressed by the psychologists consulted in Meister’s Situationship story), I realized that while women have come a long way since Mary and Laura first entered the dating world, there’s still a lot we can learn from our predecessors.
Serapause is the sneaky harmful dating trend to watch in 2024
