“Why can’t I get over someone I was never even officially with?”
It’s one of the questions therapists hear more often than you might think. Sometimes the relationships that leave the deepest marks aren’t the ones that lasted the longest or came with a label. They’re the ones that never quite became what we hoped they would. You’d think ending something undefined would hurt less. After all, how can you grieve something that was never official? But that’s exactly why situationships can feel so difficult to leave.
Unlike a breakup, where there is often a clear ending, situationships exist in the grey area. There’s rarely a defining conversation, no shared acknowledgement of what has been lost, and often no permission to fully grieve. Instead, you’re left mourning not only the person, but the future you imagined with them.
This is where disenfranchised grief comes in.
The grief nobody validates
Disenfranchised grief is the pain of losing something/someone that others may not fully recognise as a loss. It happens when your grief does not fit into a category that society easily understands. There may be no breakup announcement, no anniversary to acknowledge, no obvious reason why you should still be hurting.
Situationships often create exactly this kind of grief.
You may find yourself asking: “Why am I this upset when we were never together?” or “Do I even have the right to miss them?” But grief is not measured by relationship labels. It is shaped by attachment, meaning and emotional investment.
You are not only grieving the person. You may be grieving the conversations you never got to have, the version of the relationship you hoped would develop, the future you quietly pictured, and the possibility that kept you holding on.
Sometimes what hurts most is not losing something that fully existed. It is losing something that felt like it was almost within reach.
The lack of acknowledgement can make this grief even harder to process. When there is no clear ending, you may feel pressure to move on quickly or minimise your pain because “nothing really happened.” But something did happen. You formed a connection. You invested emotionally. You allowed yourself to hope.
Why your brain won’t let go
Psychology tells us that uncertainty is one of the hardest things for the brain to tolerate. We are wired to seek patterns, predictability and closure. A situationship offers the opposite: mixed signals, inconsistent effort and unanswered questions.
Rather than allowing us to process an ending, our minds stay busy searching for explanations, replaying moments or hoping for a different outcome. Attachment theory can also help explain why these connections can be so difficult to walk away from. If you have an anxious attachment style, inconsistency can heighten your emotional investment. When affection is unpredictable, your nervous system can become increasingly focused on earning closeness, making it harder to recognise when the relationship is no longer meeting your needs. It’s not simply about wanting the person back. It’s about your brain continuing to search for the sense of safety and connection it briefly experienced.
Even those with a secure attachment can find themselves caught in this cycle. Intermittent reinforcement, the unpredictable pattern of connection followed by distance, can strengthen emotional attachment. The uncertainty keeps you invested, not because the reward is guaranteed, but because it might come next.
The person you became to keep them
But often, what is even harder to leave isn’t the other person. It’s the version of ourselves we became in the process.
Many of us begin to self-abandon without even realising it. We silence our needs to avoid seeming “too much.” We accept less than we want because asking for more feels risky. We tell ourselves we are being patient, understanding or easy-going, when in reality we are slowly disconnecting from our own needs in the hope that someone else will eventually choose us. This is one of the quietest forms of heartbreak.
Because when the situationship ends, we are not only grieving the loss of the connection. We are also confronted with all the moments we abandoned ourselves to maintain it. Perhaps that’s why situationships leave us blaming ourselves. If only I’d been less needy, if I’d played it cooler or if I’d waited a little longer. But often the pain does not come from personal failure. It comes from trying to create certainty in a relationship that was never able to offer it. Healing begins when we stop chasing clarity from the other person and start offering it to ourselves.
It begins by asking not:
“How do I get them to choose me?”
but:
“Where did I stop choosing myself?”
Questions worth sitting with
If you’re in a situationship right now, these questions may help you reconnect with yourself:
- Am I holding on to who this person is, or who I hope they’ll become?
- If nothing changed six months from now, would this relationship still feel enough for me?
- What needs am I asking myself to ignore in order to keep this connection?
- Have I been waiting for clarity from them instead of giving it to myself?
- Am I confusing inconsistency with chemistry?
- When was the last time I felt emotionally safe, rather than emotionally activated?
- Am I choosing this relationship from self-worth, or from fear of losing it?
- If my closest friend described this relationship to me, what would I want for them?
- Where have I been abandoning myself in the hope of being chosen?
- What would choosing myself look like today, not next week, not if they text back, but today?
Coming home to yourself
Sometimes the most important question isn’t:
“Do they want me?”
but:
“Does this relationship allow me to be the version of myself I like most?”
Healthy relationships don’t require you to shrink yourself, second-guess your worth or earn your place. They allow you to feel emotionally safe, accepted and fully yourself. The relationship may have been undefined, but your feelings were not. The attachment was not imaginary. The loss was not meaningless.
Sometimes leaving a situationship isn’t just about walking away from someone else. It’s about coming back home to yourself.
