It is 11pm and you have opened the thread again. The last message is from you, three weeks ago, something light about a show you both liked. No reply. Before that, months of good mornings, inside jokes, a weekend that felt like the start of something. You never called it anything. They never called it anything. And now you cannot eat properly, you check their stories from a friend’s phone, and you feel ridiculous, because how do you grieve something that was not even a relationship? So you typed it into the search bar: how to get over a situationship.
Why does a situationship hurt this much when it wasn’t even a relationship?
Stuck in the same argument again?
Talk it through with Figlet right now. Private, judgment free, built on 17 years of couples therapy.
It hurts this much because your body never cared about the label. The attachment was real even though the title was not. You get over it the same way you get over any bond: you stop arguing with the grief, you stop feeding the hope that keeps it raw, and you let the loss become a loss instead of an open question. That takes longer than you think it should, and that is not a sign you are doing it wrong.
I have been a couples therapist for seventeen years. The people who come in after a situationship ends are often more ashamed than the people coming out of a marriage. They tell me they should be over it. They tell me it was only a few months. Then I ask what happens in their chest when they see that person’s name, and the tears start.
Was it real if we never had a label?
From the cradle to the grave, you are hardwired to need a primary attachment figure, and your body is constantly asking two questions. Are you there for me? Am I enough for you? A situationship is a system perfectly designed to never answer either one. So for weeks or months your nervous system stayed switched on, waiting for a verdict.
Your mind may have been fine with keeping it casual. Your mind was committing accounting fraud. The human body is the original ledger. It records every interaction that matters, every moment of safety and every moment of being left. Your limbic system is like a naked mole rat. It does not see clearly and it does not read labels. It only knows whether you were held or whether you are now alone. You knew their coffee order and what they were like when they were sick. Your body filed that under bond, whatever you both agreed to call it out loud.
Why can’t I stop checking my phone?
Because a situationship trains you on intermittent reinforcement, and that is the hardest habit there is to break. They went quiet for two days, you dropped into the basement of abandonment, then a warm text arrived and your body got a flood of relief. Your system confused that relief with love. Unpredictable reward produces more dopamine than predictable reward. It is the same mechanism that keeps people at slot machines.
Romantic attachment runs on the same circuitry that lights up with cocaine. When the supply stops, your brain goes into something very close to withdrawal. That is why you pick up your phone forty times a day. You are not pathetic. You are a mammal coming off a drug your own body made to keep you attached.
There is a cruel extra layer here. A clear no hurts, but your system can process it and start to grieve. A maybe keeps the alarm running around the clock, because the threat is never confirmed and never resolved. Most situationships do not end with a no. They end with a fade, and a fade is just a maybe that keeps going.
Why does it feel like I lost a whole future?
Because you probably did lose one, even if it only lived in your head. The person who stays in a situationship usually stays because, somewhere underneath, they hope the ambiguity will eventually convert into real love. You were not only grieving who they were on Thursday nights. You were grieving the version where they finally chose you.
So part of getting over it is letting yourself mourn something that never happened. That is real grief. It does not need permission from anyone, least of all from the person who left.
How do I get over it when there was no closure?
When something happens to you that does not get processed, the body moves on as best it can, but the unprocessed part stays in what I think of as an internal mempool. Unconfirmed. Floating. Still taking up energy. Still broadcasting to the system that this needs to be settled. That is what anxiety is: unconfirmed transactions. Every unanswered text is an open transaction. Without closure, your body keeps rebroadcasting it, which is why you keep rereading the thread looking for the moment it went wrong.
What you are living through has a known shape. When a young child is separated from their mother, they search for her for the first few days. Then they become depressed and stop eating. Adults do the same thing. First the frantic searching: checking their social media, replaying every conversation. Then the flat gray despair. If nobody tells you that protest and despair are normal stages, you assume you are broken.
The hard part about closure: you are waiting for them to give it to you, and they may never be able to. When people ghost, it is very often not because they did not care. It is because something in the bond hit their second question, am I enough, so hard that disappearing felt like the only survivable exit. That does not make the ghosting kind. It means the explanation you are waiting for may not exist in a form they can say.
So you settle the transaction yourself. A client of mine put it better than I can. She said she could create the corrective experience for herself by knowing: okay, this person was not trying to hurt me, and they are not bad. They are just making choices for their life that do not work for me. And I cannot regulate my nervous system with somebody who is making that choice. So it is sad, and you have to grieve it. But it does not mean they are bad. That sentence is closure. You do not need their signature on it.
Why is it taking me so long?
Six months after a breakup of my own, I sat across from a mentor at the Esalen Institute fully expecting the standard prescription. Meditate more. Write a forgiveness letter. Move on. Instead he looked at me and said, “Six months? That’s nothing. You’ll feel like this for at least another year. Maybe longer.”
Something inside me unclenched. Nobody had told me that before. Nobody had said that confusion, longing, not knowing and grief were allowed to take their own time.
I tell you this because the shame you feel about still hurting is doing more damage than the hurt. The grief comes in waves. At first they last days. Then hours. Then thirty minutes. Then they come and go like weather. The waves get shorter before they get softer, and you cannot hurry that by being disappointed in yourself.
It also helps to know that this ending is often sitting on top of older ones. When someone you are attached to turns away, your nervous system time travels. It reaches back to every earlier moment of being overlooked or left. If you catch yourself saying “I can’t believe this is happening again,” the word again is the clue. The pain is not out of proportion to what happened. It is in proportion to the whole stack, and this person just touched the top of the pile.
Why was I always the one reaching?
Situationships almost always pair two opposite nervous systems. In our work we call them the Relentless Lover and the Reluctant Lover. The Relentless Lover reaches when connection feels at risk, because their deepest fear is being left. The Reluctant Lover retreats when things get intense, because their deepest fear is being seen and found lacking. The pursuer moves closer. The withdrawer moves away. Neither one is the villain.
When it ends, the shame of not being chosen sends you somewhere on what I call the Compass of Shame. You attack yourself: if I had been less needy, they would have stayed. You attack the other: they used me, they never cared. You withdraw: I will handle this alone. Or you avoid: the drink, the scroll, the new person on the apps by Saturday. Watch which direction you run. One more trap to name. “People hurt me, so I will rely only on myself” looks like growth. I call it Orphan Sovereignty, and it is avoidance in spiritual clothing. If you leave this situationship and walk straight into another one, you have not changed the pattern. You have imported it.
If what you are leaving involved threats, someone tracking where you go, controlling your phone or money, or showing up when you have asked them not to, that is not a dance and it is not something to grieve your way through. Get help today. In the US you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
What do I do tonight?
Do not send them the message. Name the wound instead of the behavior, out loud if you can: “My abandonment wound just got activated.” Not “I’m pathetic.” Not “I’m crazy.” That moves you from what is wrong with me to what happened to me.
Then reach toward someone safe, because your body needs co-regulation, not a better argument with yourself. Send one friend this, word for word:
“Something happened today that hit me harder than it should have, and I don’t want to be alone with it. Can you call me for ten minutes? I don’t need advice. I just need a voice.”
And stop feeding the crumbs. Every time you check their profile you give your limbic system a micro dose of the drug it is trying to quit, and you reset the clock.
If you are the one who went quiet
Sometimes the person reading this is the one who faded out, carrying guilt about it. Kindness here is not softening the no into a maybe. Mixed messages keep the other person’s reward system spinning far longer than a clear, warm ending would. One honest sentence settles a transaction they cannot settle alone. Be honest, be gentle, and then let them grieve without you. That is its own form of care.
Where to go from here
If you are still trying to make sense of what that connection actually was, start with what a situationship really is and why it hooks your attachment system. If it has not fully ended yet and you are the one who wants more, read how to end a situationship when you want more. If the slot machine pull of their occasional texts is what keeps reopening the wound, the breadcrumbing pattern explains the mechanics. And if the sting of not being chosen is the part you cannot shake, here is why rejection hurts so much.
If it is 11pm and you need to say all of this to someone right now, I built Figlet for exactly that. Tell it what happened, the fade, the last text, the silence, and it will show you the dance you were caught in and give you the one line to say to yourself or to them. It is free to start tonight.
Keep Reading
Stuck in the same argument again?
Figlet is relationship coaching built on 17 years of couples therapy. Talk through what is happening the moment it matters, get a clear next step, and stop circling the same fight. Private, judgment free, ready whenever you are.
Free to start. No credit card needed.
Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
