Situationships Over Relationships: Why I Don’t Fall in Love Again

Love Can Hurt. It can hurt especially when both sides know little about how to love each other.

How Love Disappointed Me

I have stopped dating for three years and counting. I became frustrated after putting in 100% of my effort, only for the other person not to appreciate what I had done and simply take my acts of kindness and love for granted.

Worse still, I was furious when someone kept claiming how she had been victimised in her previous relationships, yet I later learnt that she was the exploiter. Her words (claiming how simple-minded and vulnerable she had always been) did not align with her actions (which were abusive, disrespectful and revealed her shallowness).

At first, I thought I would take a year off from dating to allow myself to heal, recover and then re-enter the dating market. Gradually, that “one year off” extended to two years, then three years.

Why I’ve Ended Up Having Situationships

In the interim, I have been seeing people. Some connections turned into friends, some into friends with benefits, and a few turned into situationships. Neither I nor the people I was seeing typically initiated sexual relationships straight away. I usually started slowly, becoming friends or companions with those I was seeing. I appreciated the slow start because I believe the golden rule often applies:

“things that come fast will go fast.”

Sometimes, after seeing each other a few times, we agreed to become friends with benefits. Yet, at times, both the people I was seeing and I acknowledged that we could hardly remain just friends once we had become sexually involved. So eventually, we either ended our brief friendships or slowly faded away from each other’s lives.

More often, I have maintained authentic and long-term friendships with people. Initially, there was no sexual attraction between us for years. Somehow, after a few home gatherings, or when we were emotionally supportive of each other after encountering setbacks and frustration in life, we ended up having sexual relationships. When long-term friends suddenly turned into sex partners, I was usually able to maintain our friendships. We either continued to be friends (with or without benefits again) or our connection turned into a situationship.

There are many reasons why my situationships never turn into relationships. Among them, one of the notable barriers is that I had been so frustrated and disappointed with relationships in the past. In recent years, I’ve not cared too much about the embarrassment and perhaps “guilt” of letting someone unveil my imperfections.

However, I worry that our values, lifestyles and preferences will not align well with each other or even will be contradictory. (This is often the case because we are different persons and have different upbringings). I worry that our differences will, once again, lead to disappointment, frustration and conflict.

I’m Afraid That I’ll Fail in the Love Test Again

The “love” part is always the easy bit in a relationship. However, the “life” part is something that I did not manage to figure out in my 20s. Now I’m 30 years old. I’m not sure if I have the capacity and ability to undertake the “life” part of a relationship. I have become more mature and stable in recent years, and I believe I am now more emotionally available than I was years ago.

However, when life is being unjust and unkind to me, do I still have the emotional maturity, availability and stability to offer another person? Sometimes, I doubt it.

So, it’s not that I am a “playboy” and do not want to commit, as shallow people might assume at first. It’s more that I am really not sure if I can handle the “life” part of a relationship, so I take the easy way out and seek the closest thing to a relationship — which ends up being a situationship.

The longer I stay single, the less I feel it is a “must” for me to build a relationship. Of course, on many lonely and empty nights or through my imagination, I often crave and romanticise how a relationship should be. Yet, in reality, I have chosen to stay single.

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