They say a fifteen-day love affair shouldn’t leave a mark. How could something so fleeting really hurt? What kind of madness can such a brief connection inspire? Can it actually sink into the mundane moments—like washing dishes—leaving you staring at the soapy water, inexplicably blue?
They say you shouldn’t feel this way because it was fresh, the days too few, and the promises were never spoken. No real commitment, no roots deep enough to matter. And yet, there it is—this ache, this quiet gnawing at the edges of your routine, like a phantom limb reminding you of something that never fully formed. It’s strange how the heart, so easily fooled, doesn’t seem to care about the clock. It invests, it hopes, it hurts, whether the calendar has granted it permission or not.
What “they” don’t seem to grasp is that the abrupt end of a short-term attachment can sting even more than the slow unraveling of a long-term relationship. Maybe it’s because our hearts don’t read romance through tidy labels. "Casual," "serious," "just seeing where this goes"—these words are all for the mind to make sense of. But the heart? It feels what it feels, regardless of the script we try to follow.
Take the nebulous term "situationship." A word our brains are still fumbling to define, let alone navigate. We use it as a placeholder—somewhere between dating and commitment, hovering in a gray space where things are too undefined to be a relationship but too intense to be casual. You tell yourself it’s fine, you don’t need to put a name on it. And yet, there’s that little tug in your gut, the question you try not to ask: “What are we?”
How do you even know you’re in one? Maybe it’s that uneasy feeling of being in something but not quite being in it. The way plans are made and canceled without too much explanation. The shared intimacy that somehow feels suspended in midair, never quite landing in the realm of real, stable commitment. You stay, hoping for clarity, but the truth is, in a situationship, clarity isn’t the point. Ambiguity is.
The term "situationship"—coined by journalist Carina Hsieh in 2017—has, like so many modern concepts, swiftly embedded itself into our digital lexicon. Even if you’ve never found yourself tangled in one, the word is nearly impossible to avoid as you scroll through social media. It’s often defined as an almost relationship—a blurry space just shy of dating. But the internet’s second-highest-rated definition gets to the heart of why situationships are so maddening: “Let’s just chill, have sex, and be confused about the fact that we are not together but have official emotions for each other.”
And there it is—what passes for a "grown-up" situationship. We pretend we’re too sophisticated to be shaken by this half-baked emotional arrangement. But the reality is, at least one person is bound to get hurt. It’s practically written into the fine print of the deal.
So why, when it inevitably ends, do we feel so unsure about our right to grieve? Why are we hesitant to mourn the loss of something that never quite became, say, a "real" relationship? Is it because society tells us that short-term affairs, or these no-name connections, don’t count as much? That they should be brushed off as mere flings, hardly worth the tears? Or maybe it’s something deeper—the unspoken rule that long-term relationships deserve real heartbreak, while the collapse of something brief and undefined should be shrugged off with a “Well, it was fun while it lasted.”
But it doesn’t work like that. The heart, for all our posturing, doesn’t ask how long it’s been attached before it gives itself away. And when the end comes, we’re left questioning: Should I really be this upset? Was it even real? All these questions, circling endlessly, when maybe the better answer is simpler. Maybe it's okay to feel hurt. To cry over the short-lived, the almosts, the could-have-beens—because every connection, however fleeting, has the power to matter.
Just because someone was never officially labeled your “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” doesn’t mean their absence won’t hurt. In fact, the pain that comes when a situationship ends is a unique kind of heartache—a quiet, unsettling grief for something that never fully bloomed but felt like it could have.
It’s the agony of unrealized potential. That jarring shift from the initial rush of excitement—"This could be the one"—to the cold, hard reality of a quick and often unceremonious breakup. Your brain needs time to catch up to the reality of what’s happened. It lingers in that in-between space, replaying those early days of possibility when everything still felt wide open and full of promise.
Because the truth is, in a short-term relationship, the ending is somehow more poignant. The brevity of it, the lack of depth or definition, leaves room for your mind to fill in the blanks. You’re left with a story that hasn’t fully written itself, with characters still in draft form, leaving you to wonder what might have been. The possibilities haven’t been pruned yet, so the mind loops—ruminating, fantasizing, torturing itself with all the "what ifs."
And that’s what makes situationships particularly tricky—they live in the land of murky half-truths. You’re often stuck in that rose-colored, honeymoon phase where the person is still more fantasy than reality. You project your hopes and desires onto them, putting them on a pedestal without really knowing them at all. The relationship itself becomes a kind of dream—a fragile, beautiful thing that feels untouchable, but it’s just as unreal.
Then there’s the ambiguity that hangs over everything, thick and suffocating. With no clear labels or boundaries, neither person is obligated to be vulnerable, to share what’s really going on inside. So, you hold back, keeping everything guarded, and the other person does the same. What happens in that emotional limbo? Anxiety, frustration, and endless confusion. The lack of clear communication and defined boundaries creates a fertile ground for misunderstandings to fester.
And when it ends, it feels like unfinished business—like a book abruptly slammed shut in the middle of a sentence. You’re left holding the weight of what could have been, wondering how the story might have unfolded if only it had been given the time to breathe.
All these feelings build quietly, gathering weight beneath the surface, until the moment comes when the relationship—or whatever you’ve been calling it—fizzles out. You gave it time, effort, pieces of yourself, and yet it leads to nothing. And there you are, left with a heartbreak that somehow feels disproportionate to the brevity of it all. It’s confusing because we’re wired to think of heartbreak as a side effect of long-term relationships, the kind that come with shared histories and well-worn routines. So, when something that was never even defined leaves you feeling shattered, it’s hard to make sense of it.
Our brains aren’t great at processing the ambiguity of short-term connections. The questions come rushing in: Why does this hurt so much? Was the person really that impactful, or am I being dramatic? Am I obsessing over something that was never really mine to begin with? If it wasn’t mine, why does losing it feel so much worse than losing what was?
These are the questions we ask ourselves, often dismissively, as if grief needs to be justified by time spent or commitments made. But the truth is, it doesn’t. The pain is real because the connection was real—no matter how brief or undefined. We tend to minimize these short, almost-relationships, brushing them off as flings, as fleeting distractions. And yet, sometimes those are the very connections that leave the deepest imprints. Why? Because they were never given a chance to grow, to fail, or to find their limits. The loss is not just of the person, but of the possibilities, the hope that hung in the air before reality set in.
What’s more natural than the confusion is the acceptance. The acceptance that, yes, it’s okay to feel hurt—even deeply hurt—over something short-lived. It’s okay to mourn the loss, even if it was a brief bloom. The heart doesn’t measure time the way the clock does. And the mourning is valid, even if the relationship wasn’t long or defined, because it meant something to you, and that’s enough.
