Why We Stay: Situationships and Attachment Anxiety

Written By Addy Dunkley-Smith

Six Months In, and Still No Answer

By Dr Addy Dunkley-Smith, Doctoral Clinical Psychologist | May 2026 | 4-minute read

Maya lives in Melbourne. She is 31, works long hours in UX design, and has been seeing someone for six months. They cook together. They have slept over more times than she can count. He has met two of her close friends. Last Saturday, while washing up after dinner, she asked, quietly, whether he thought of them as a couple.

He smiled, said something about not wanting to "put pressure on it," and changed the subject.

Maya told herself it was fine. She is not clingy. She is not the kind of person who needs labels. She texted her friend later that night and said it was probably nothing.

By 2am she was still awake, re-reading his messages, trying to find evidence of where she stood.

What Maya is living inside has a name most people now recognise: a situationship. And the sleeplessness, the hypervigilance, the shrinking of her own needs to keep the peace, are not signs of personal weakness. They are predictable psychological responses, documented clearly in the research.

What the Research Shows

The word "situationship" has moved from social media shorthand into clinical and academic discourse. A 2025 study described it as an intimate relationship that deliberately resists formal definition: neither friendship, nor partnership, nor casual arrangement (Loyola et al., 2025). These undefined relationships are now particularly common among millennials aged 28 to 38, driven partly by economic precarity (delaying commitment) and partly by dating app culture, which has normalised keeping options open.

The psychological cost falls unevenly. Research grounded in adult attachment theory, shows that people with anxious attachment styles are particularly vulnerable to the ambiguity of situationships. Those high in attachment anxiety have a strong drive toward closeness and fear of abandonment, along with a tendency to suppress their own needs when they sense a partner might withdraw. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy found that attachment anxiety was associated with heightened social media surveillance of partners and greater relationship distress in the context of digital-era ambiguity (Métellus et al., 2025).

The painful irony is this: anxious attachment leads people to accept situationships more readily, not because they are satisfied with them, but because the fear of losing what little they have overrides the desire for what they actually need.

Schema therapy research adds further understanding. Jeff Young's model identifies the abandonment/instability schema as a core vulnerability pattern in which the person holds a deep, often preconscious belief that meaningful connections will eventually be lost or withdrawn (Young, Klosko and Weishaar, 2003). For someone running this schema, a situationship can feel paradoxically safer than a defined relationship: its ambiguity prevents the definitive rejection they most dread, while the ongoing contact provides just enough reassurance to keep them in place.

This is not a failure of intelligence or self-respect. It is a well-worn psychological groove, carved early.

What Actually Helps

The research points toward three practical directions:

1. Name what you actually want, separate from what you are afraid of

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy offers a useful lens here. It distinguishes between a part of us that holds the longing for genuine intimacy and a protector parts that suppress that longing in various ways to avoid rejection. When Maya tells herself "I don't need a label," there is a reasonable chance her protector is speaking, not her actual values.

A grounding practice: set a timer for ten minutes and write two separate lists. The first is titled "What I genuinely want in a relationship." The second is "What I am afraid would happen if I asked for that." The gap between the lists is where the work lives.

2. Practise tolerating the discomfort of honesty

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) approaches relationship anxiety not by trying to eliminate fear, but by helping people take values-based action despite it. Research on social connection interventions in young adults found that ACT-informed skills, including interpersonal values clarification and committed action, significantly reduced both loneliness and depression.

In practice, this means identifying one small, honest thing you have been avoiding saying, and saying it. Not to force an outcome, but to act in accordance with what you actually value in relationships. The goal is not to secure a particular response; it is to stop shrinking yourself in order to remain acceptable.

3. Examine the early script

Schema therapy's practical entry point is noticing when a current emotional reaction feels disproportionate to the immediate situation. If Maya's 2am sleeplessness feels more like terror than disappointment, that intensity is data: it suggests an older wound is being activated, not just a current frustration.

A question worth sitting with: "Is this the first time I have felt unseen in a relationship, or does this feeling have a longer history?" Therapy, offers a structured way to rework those older patterns so that they have less power over present-day choices.

The Bigger Picture

Young adults report the highest rates of loneliness of any age group, with 29.7% saying they rarely or never receive the emotional support they need. Situationships are, in many ways, a symptom of a wider social disconnection: people deeply hungry for closeness but armoured against the vulnerability it requires.

The answer is not to harden further. The research across attachment theory, ACT, and schema therapy converges on the same point: genuine connection requires the risk of genuine honesty. Not recklessness, but the kind of slow, courageous transparency that lets another person actually see you.

Maya deserves someone who can meet that. So do you.

References

Addy Dunkley-Smith
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