Tessa Ndjonkou has lived through a fair share of (literature) situationships and questions why readers - herself included - keep coming back for more.
I’ve asked myself this question countless times. How do you mourn what never was? How do you tie off the loose end while they’re trying to strangle you?
I’ve used literature as a roadmap for most of my life, but when it came to the charged question of situationships, I was coming up empty. Probably because I didn’t know what I was looking for nor what I was hoping to find.
Let’s start here. It seems that no one seems to know exactly what a situationship is. Although the Cambridge dictionary defines it as “a romantic relationship between two people who do not yet consider themselves a couple but have more than a friendship”. The inherent liminality and unbalanced nature of a situationship is perhaps what makes it so painful. Salt in the wound, really.
The inherent liminality and unbalanced nature of a situationship is perhaps what makes it so painful. Salt in the wound, really.
Despite this inherent pain, books about or with relationships stuck in limbo are evergreen and a constant throughout Western literature because of the inexplicable catharsis they bring. Regardless of if you have personal experience with this (oversharing time - I do!) or know someone who has, you’ll find yourself unable to look away as disaster unfolds agonizingly slowly.
Perhaps the most evocative examples I can muster right now for twenty-somethings would be the Sally Rooney and Phoebe Waller-Bridge literary universe. I’d go as far as to rope in David Nicholl’s slice of life novel - One Day, recently adapted for Netflix. In Normal People, Conversations with Friends, Beautiful World Where are You, Fleabag (The Scriptures) and One Day, social class feeds the character’s inability to connect fully and to understand each other on a deep level. In all three of these works, we can see the inexplicable push and pull dynamics that create tension between kindred spirits that are both equally lost yet seem to find each other in the darkness wordlessly.
In Normal People, Conversations with Friends, Beautiful World Where are You, Fleabag (The Scriptures) and One Day, social class feeds the character’s inability to connect fully and to understand each other on a deep level.
While they often manage to cross the Rubicon of physical intimacy, it’s the chasm between what they mean to say and what they end up saying that causes the most damage. We all remember where we were when Connell and Marianne spent an entire summer apart and heartbroken because they felt rejected by the other. Personally, I was on my couch seething and begging these characters to just get over themselves and communicate. What I didn’t understand at the time was that they were communicating in the capacity they knew how. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that you could share such intimacy with someone and yet come up with only silence. Fresh off Normal People, I was reading Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag Scriptures and wondering why I hadn’t learned my lesson at all. My entire body seized when Hot Priest replied to Fleabag’s earnest last ditch attempt to get him to stay, “I love you” with “It’ll pass”. My God. The right person wrong time trope was in full effect here and I for one, couldn’t be sadder.
But things aren’t beautiful because they last or because they necessarily serve a purpose.
The point of such tropes is nor cautionary or aspirational - it’s just the human condition. Sit with that and allow it to be a full stop rather than an ellipsis. You will miss connections, you will misinterpret glances, fleeting touches and moments suspended in time. You will wonder about, marvel at and love who you know you rationally… shouldn’t. But does it even matter?
The point of such tropes is nor cautionary or aspirational - it’s just the human condition. Sit with that and allow it to be a full stop rather than an ellipsis.
Contrary to what Plato’s Symposium suggests, humans do not always slot into each other’s lives flawlessly to make a united whole. We may have all come from stardust but frankly it’s been eons since we’ve been scattered across the galaxy. Tracing our way back to each other is no small task. But the appeal of the situationship remains - from The Great Gatsby to Sense and Sensibility, why does the pain feel so good?
Narratively, the bittersweet pain holds a function: it is a mirror to the protagonists. I mean, isn’t a situationship defined by the fact that it’s ephemeral. Before its fire is asphyxiated though, it is your own face you will see in the flames. It’s those misshapen ridges and divots in your psyche that you need to confront to finally move on and scatter the ashes. When Daisy breaks down inside Gatsby’s mansion, she is confronted to the fact that she lost the love of her life and to her own valuing of the material over substance. Similarly, when Marianne admits to Eleanor Willoughby he never told her he loved her in such terms (“It was every day implied but never professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it had been, but it never was”) she is confronted with her own ability to delude herself into realities that are hers alone.
While my argument does not extend to relationships where toxicity infiltrates all areas of life and makes it unbearable, I do see how books about romantic liminality are a sound reminder to us all to pause, and to purge ourselves of the need to categorize and intellectualise all we’re feeling.
While my argument does not extend to relationships where toxicity infiltrates all areas of life and makes it unbearable, I do see how books about romantic liminality are a sound reminder to us all to pause, and to purge ourselves of the need to categorize and intellectualise all we’re feeling.
In her non-fiction novel Conversations on Love, Natasha Lunn speaks to psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz who explains: “Life is a series of necessary losses”. He continues on to say: “We risk everytime we choose to love someone: not just that they might outlive us, or we them, but that they might break the heart we place in their hands. It’s remarkable I think that many of us are willing to take that risk again and again”.
Perhaps we ought to all take a page out of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity and dedicate musical obituaries to our past loves. Or maybe, if you’re so inclined to the macabre, dance on the metaphorical graves of your lovers like Hal Robinson in Aidan Chambers’ Dance on My Grave.
For what it’s worth, I’ll keep reciting Carol Ann Duffy’s Valentine (For as long as we are/It promises light) and maybe book a flight to New York to see Magritte’s Lovers.