A 2024 study by the Kinsey Institute found that 73% of American adults have been in at least one “situationship,” a romantic connection with no defined terms, no clear future, and no agreed-upon ending.
Call her Maya. She is 29, a UX designer in Chicago, and she spent eleven months in exactly this kind of arrangement. They cooked dinner together on Sundays. He saved her parking spot. He never once used the word “girlfriend.” When she finally asked what they were, he said he was “just not in a place for labels right now.” She nodded. She waited four more months.
Maya is not unusual. She is, statistically, the rule.
The Agreement Nobody Signed
Commitment-free connections did not arrive fully formed. They evolved from a collision of cultural forces: dating apps that gamified attraction, a post-pandemic reluctance to make plans, and an economic reality that the current economy makes genuinely difficult to navigate alone but also terrifying to navigate with someone else.
Nobody tells you this about commitment-free connections: they often feel like relationships. You get the warmth, the inside jokes, the 11pm texts. What you do not get is the security. And the brain, which cannot tell the difference between implied safety and actual safety, starts behaving as if it has something to protect.
That gap, between what the connection feels like and what it actually is, is where most of the damage happens.
What the Research Actually Says
The Kinsey Institute’s 2024 findings did not stop at prevalence. Respondents in undefined relationships reported 31% higher rates of anxiety than those in clearly defined partnerships. A separate 2023 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that ambiguity in romantic relationships was a stronger predictor of psychological distress than relationship dissatisfaction itself.
Read that again. It is not the relationship being bad that hurts most. It is not knowing what the relationship is.
Did You Know: According to a 2023 Pew Research report, 63% of adults who described themselves as “casually seeing someone” said they privately wanted more commitment but had not said so directly.
The silence is not passive. It is a choice, often made out of fear, that compounds quietly over months.
How long have you been waiting for this to become something?
Take a moment with that question. Not rhetorically. Actually count the months.
Maya counted eleven. By month seven, she had stopped mentioning him to her closest friends because she was tired of saying “I do not know what we are.” That isolation, the small social editing you do to protect something that has no name, is one of the quietest costs of commitment-free living.
It is messier than the advice columns suggest. It is not just about heartbreak at the end. The cost accumulates daily, in the low-grade uncertainty that hums underneath everything, in the plans you half-make and half-abandon, in the version of yourself that is always slightly on hold.
The Misconception Worth Naming Directly
There is a persistent belief that commitment-free connections are chosen by people who do not want more. The data does not support this.
That same Pew Research 2023 report found that only 18% of people in situationships said they genuinely preferred no commitment. The rest reported wanting clarity but fearing the conversation would end things. They were not choosing freedom. They were choosing the connection over the cost of honesty, hoping the terms would eventually renegotiate themselves.
They rarely do.
Warning: Ambiguity does not resolve on its own. Research from the 2022 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that people in undefined relationships tend to interpret neutral behavior from their partner as positive, a bias that extends the arrangement and delays necessary conversations.
When did you last feel genuinely chosen by this person?
Not assumed. Not convenient. Chosen.
There is a difference between someone who is present because you are available and someone who is present because they picked you, deliberately, and said so. That difference is not small. It is, for most people, the entire thing.
Maya told me that the hardest part was not the ending. It was realizing she had been optimistic on his behalf for almost a year, building a case for his feelings that he had never actually made himself.
The Script That Actually Works
Most people avoid the defining conversation because they fear the version that ends things. But the conversation does not have to be an ultimatum. It can simply be honest.
Here is language that works without forcing a corner:
“I want to check in with you about us. I have been enjoying this, and I realize I have not been clear about what I actually want. I would like something more defined. I am not asking for a decision right now, but I wanted you to know where I am. Can we talk about what this is for you?”
That is it. No ultimatum. No pressure. Just clarity offered, and an invitation for theirs.
Pro Tip: Do not have this conversation over text. Do not have it after midnight. Choose a neutral, low-pressure setting and a time when neither of you is rushed. The environment shapes the conversation more than most people account for.
The Loneliness Nobody Warns You About
The deepest cost of commitment-free connection is not the absence of a label. It is a specific kind of loneliness, one that is harder to name than ordinary loneliness because it is surrounded by warmth.
You are not alone. There is someone there. And yet, on the days that matter most, the days when you need to be genuinely held by someone who has chosen you and said so out loud, you realize the arrangement does not cover that. You reach for the security that was implied but never given. And you feel almost more alone for the contrast, for the closeness that was real in so many ways and yet stopped exactly at the line where it would have cost something to cross.
That is the loneliness the articles do not name. The one that lives inside a connection that looks, from the outside, like it should be enough.
Action Step: If you recognized yourself anywhere in this piece, the first move is not confrontation. It is clarity with yourself. Write down, privately, what you actually want. Not what you think is realistic. What you want. That document becomes your compass for every conversation that follows.
Are you building a life around someone who has never agreed to be in it?
Sit with that one. It is the question most people in Maya’s situation eventually arrive at, usually later than they wish they had.
Your Next 3 Steps
Step 1: This week, write down the one thing you have been afraid to say out loud to this person. Not to send it. Not to plan a conversation around it yet. Just write it down, by hand if you can, and read it back to yourself. Clarity on paper almost always comes before clarity in conversation. Give yourself 24 hours with what you wrote before you do anything else.
Step 2: Within 72 hours, use the script in this article to initiate one honest check-in. You do not need to memorize it. You do not need it to go perfectly. You need to begin. The conversation that scares you is almost always less catastrophic than the eleven months of silence it replaces.
Step 3: Set a personal deadline before you close this tab. Not an ultimatum for them, a boundary for yourself. If nothing has shifted in 30 days, you do not wait another 30. You decide, in advance, that your time has a value you are no longer negotiating away for the sake of keeping something that was never fully yours to keep.
Maya eventually had the conversation. It did not go the way she hoped. But she told me it was the first time in nearly a year that she felt like herself again.
That is not nothing. In fact, for most people, it turns out to be everything.
