If you are trying to get over a situationship, the first thing worth saying is that you are allowed to grieve something that never had a name. A person who was in your evenings, your phone and your plans for months has gone quiet or gone elsewhere, and the sadness is real even if you could never have said “my boyfriend” or “my girlfriend” out loud. Nothing about that makes you dramatic, and nobody gets to hand you a deadline for it.
Here is the short version, in case it is the only part you read. Getting over a situationship goes best when you treat it like any other ending: you give it a small marker, you quietly rearrange the places where it lived, and you spend a little time each day on what is yours. It is slower than it should be, because there was no conversation to close, and it is much more doable than it feels at eleven at night with the phone in your hand.
Why getting over a situationship feels so strange
An ordinary breakup comes with a few things built in: a date you can point to, a sentence somebody said, friends who know to bring soup. A situationship usually ends in a fade, or a vague “I am just not sure”, or a slow drift into likes and the occasional meme, and you are left holding a feeling with no edges. Part of you keeps waiting for the real ending, the conversation that would explain it, and the waiting is what makes the days feel so long.
It also helps to know why it hurts as much as it does. For months you were giving real attention, the good morning texts, the saved Thursday, the way you learned his or her coffee order, and attention is how most of us love. That does not become less real because the label was missing. It means you showed up with a whole heart in a setup that left you guessing, and you can respect what you gave without needing the other person to confirm it.
Give it the ending it never got
Since nobody is going to hold the closing conversation, you can hold a small one yourself. Pick a day, this week if you can, and call it the day it ended for you. Write three plain lines on a piece of paper: what I enjoyed, what I was hoping for, and what I would like to have next time. Then fold the paper into a book or a drawer. It is a modest ritual and it does a surprising amount of work, because the mind rests more easily once something has been declared finished, even if only by you.
You do not need to decide what the other person meant, or whether the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Those questions have answers that live in someone else’s head, and why is he sending mixed signals goes into how much of that guessing is worth doing, which is usually less than the hours it takes. What you can know is your own side: what you wanted, what you got, and what you would like from here.
Rearrange the places where it lived
A situationship lives mostly in small habits, and the habits are where you can make the biggest difference. Move the chat out of the top of your list, mute the stories for a few weeks rather than blocking if blocking feels like too much, and take the photos out of the album you scroll past every day. None of this is a punishment and nobody needs to be told. It simply means your thumb stops landing on the same name on autopilot, which is how most relapses into checking begin.
If you tend to reach for the message box when the evening goes quiet, how to stop texting your ex has a few small moves that work just as well here. Decide in advance what you will do instead, a walk to the corner, a call to your sister, a shower and an early night, so that the hard minute already has an answer waiting.
The part about missing them anyway
You will probably still miss the person on some Thursdays, and it will feel as if you are not making progress, which is the point where a lot of people quietly start the old pattern again. Missing someone is not a sign that you made a mistake in stepping back. It is what it feels like when the attention you used to spend has nowhere to go yet, and it eases as new places for it appear. Why do I still miss my ex goes into that in more detail, and a lot of it applies to a situationship too.
If part of you still wonders whether the door might open again, that is human, and you do not have to argue yourself out of it tonight. A useful test is to ask what you would want to be true for you before you reopened it: more clarity, a real name for it, someone who says plainly what they want. Those are good standards, and you can hold them without anyone’s permission. The relationship or situationship quiz is a quiet way to look at it from your own side.
Looking after the days
The thing that helps most, in my experience, is filling the empty places with things that are plainly yours. Say yes to the invitation you would normally have saved for him or her, finish the book that has been on the nightstand since spring, book the haircut. It does not have to be a big reinvention. It only has to be a few evenings that belong to you, and a few of those in a row change how the week feels more than any amount of analysis of an old message ever did.
If you would like a gentler place to think out loud, a three card reading starts from your side of the question and ends with a step you can do today. You could also read should I wait for him or move on, which looks at the same crossroads from a slightly different angle.
What to do today
Today only needs to be small. Tonight before bed, take a piece of paper and write the three lines, what you enjoyed, what you were hoping for and what you would like next time, then put it in a drawer and mute the chat until Sunday. That is the whole of it.
You gave real attention to something that left you guessing, and you are reading this instead of waiting by the phone, which is already a quiet kind of strength. Come back and tell me how the drawer feels tomorrow.
Clara
