Situationship, Isness, And The Relationship Thesaurus
Because this is what it is with a capital isness.
From Phillip Roth’s, The Human Stain, a story that explores the ambiguous boundaries between truth and falsehood.
Situationship: (1) Any problematic relationship characterized by one or more unresolved, interpersonal conflicts. Usually confused with dating. (2) A relationship that enters solely due to extenuating circumstances. All rebounds, for example, are situationships.
Definition courtesy of Urban Dictionary:
For those who have never heard or read the words above, you’re welcome. I read Roth’s line a couple months back in an excerpt featured in Esquire. “Situationship” was a word introduced to me last week after somebody used it on Twitter. The reason I have both quoted is to show how one (Roth’s “isness”) is used for a creative purpose, but the second one (“situationship”, which is also creative) has been ordained by no less of an authority than the Urban Dictionary, which can only mean one thing: People are actually using it to describe serious situations, which made me think, If it wasn’t used in a song, what smart dumb person actually came up with the word and decided to toss it into the urban lexicon for future use?
Situationship has to be the saddest word I have heard being used to describe the state of a relationship between two people, ranking right up there with wifey and baby-mama. I will acknowledge the word is a clever mash-up of “situation” and “relationship”, but whoever keeps on using it and trying to make it sound like something real is a straightupidiot.
I don’t have a problem with the actual word. As a writer, I actually enjoy the occasional witty turns of phrase our young people come up with. Matter of fact, I might even use one of them on occasion. For example: I have swagger for days, which is to say I have charisma, or am disarmingly charming. Certain mash-ups are also okay and have been around for years, e.g. boyfriend and girlfriend.
But what I cannot stand is when people want to make up words as a cop out to the truth. Words like “situationship” and “wifey” (to me, this has always translated to a combination of the words, “wife, maybe”) are nothing more than game and sad substitutes for more honest words and phrases. Situationship is the funniest because it shows someone has actually found a way to put an official title on an unofficial arrangement between two people. Anyone who uses it to describe the gray area between themselves and another person, is either denying a gray area actually exists or convincing themselves it is okay. Sort of similar to the way men use the word wifey to describe a woman they would like to marry but probably never will.
Back in my younger days, I used words like wifey and baby-mama (for others, remember I have no children) because I thought they were cool adjectives, but when I realized most people who were older than me and had a college education didn’t know what they meant, I decided my vocabulary needed to grow up. Another major factor contributing to the maturation of my speak was when I realized all these words we have made up often times spawn more questions than answers. We’d like to think they explain how we feel and what we feel, when they actually do neither, and sometimes it’s just easier to “call a spade a spade”, to borrow another classic phrase.
Real adults, at least the ones who are smart and honest, do just that. If they’re not in a relationship with a person, but they are dating, they won’t say, “Oh, me and this girl have been kicking it hard, we’re in a situationship.” Even someone like me, who stays in a situationship, would never actually use the word at least, not seriously.
There’s nothing wrong with having fun on the account of the English language. Whether your name is RL and you used to sing in a group called Next, or you’re a renowned author named Phillip Roth. Our language is made to manipulate. But to make up words and add them to a relationship thesaurus, just so we can feel better about what is or isn’t going on between us and another person is doing ourselves a disservice. Made up words and mashed up words are best used for creative purposes only, and if we ever have the urge to resort to them in any type of serious conversation, we have probably come to the point where what we say isn’t quite true and our words should probably give way to action.
