Apparently, We Were All in the Same Life-Altering Three-Month Situationship

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The worst breakup I’ve ever been through wasn’t even a breakup (and trust me, I’ve had my share of breakups). It was whatever you call it when you get high and tell the guy you’ve been in a romantically ambiguous situationship with for the past few months that you love him, then cry yourself to sleep in his bed when he rejects you.

I had just finished my junior year of college and was interning in New York for the summer. I was 21, he was 37 (*Avril Lavigne voice* Can I make it any more obvious?), and I fell into the kind of delirious romantic infatuation that’s pretty much inevitable when you’re a woman in her very early 20s dating a man in his late 30s who is a little less into you than you are into him. The night before I had to leave the city, I decided to shoot my shot, failed fantastically, and returned to my parents’ place the next day an absolute mess of a human being.

Because I’d had a bad case of lovesick motormouth, my parents knew I’d been dating someone that summer. One morning, when I made a rare appearance outside my bedroom to get a cup of coffee, my dad made the mistake of trying to engage with the lovelorn recluse who had replaced his daughter by asking me something innocuous like, “So what did this guy do for work?” to which I replied by bursting into tears in front of the Keurig.

Suffice to say my parents were baffled. They knew I couldn’t have been dating this guy for more than two or three months, but for all these tears to make sense, I should have been a divorcée whose husband of 20 years just walked out or, like, a pregnant war widow in a movie about WWI.

But what my parents didn’t understand was something they couldn’t have understood—I had just gotten out of a Life-Altering Three-Month Situationship.

If you’ve never been in a Life-Altering Three-Month Situationship, you might not know what I’m talking about. But if you have, you know exactly what I’m talking about—and TBH, you’re probably still recovering.

Perhaps best embodied by the three-month 2010 romance between Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal responsible for not one but four different versions of the breakup anthem “All Too Well,” the Life-Altering Three-Month Situationship is a brief but intense, often romantically ambiguous and poorly defined quasi-relationship. Its effect on your life (and potentially your artistic output) is inordinately pronounced, its demise seems inexplicably devastating (especially from an outside perspective), and the recovery process defies the laws of mathematics. If conventional dating wisdom suggests it takes half the time you were with someone to get over them, it takes, by my calculations, approximately eight times the length of your three-month situationship to get over it.

In recent months, the Life-Altering Three-Month Situationship has taken over Twitter, where LATMS survivors have come together to commiserate over this oddly specific, shockingly common form of heartbreak. Like most things on Twitter, it’s mostly ironic and mostly self-deprecating. But the reason these jokes land is there’s a hell of a lot of truth to them.

While our reactions to these short-lived affairs may seem totally outsize—especially to the friends and loved ones who barely even knew you were dating anyone and now have to deal with the aftermath of what was apparently the most traumatic relationship of your life—there are some legit reasons these brief situationships are so uniquely devastating. In fact, according to clinical therapist Naomi Bernstein, PsyD, cohost of the Betches’ Oversharing podcast, they’re a “perfect storm” of hormonal, emotional, and personal factors uniquely primed to leave you reeling. Let’s unpack, shall we?

You’re Pretty Much an Addict

Bernstein says these sustained periods of undefined courtship are the perfect breeding ground for a particularly addictive form of love. Because these relationships aren’t clearly defined and because one partner is usually more emotionally invested than the other, the level of affection, attention, and otherwise positive romantic reinforcement you receive from the object of your obsession can vary significantly, setting you and your romantically infatuated brain up for a roller coaster ride of high highs and low lows.

“There is passionate sex, romance and fun on some days and distancing, avoidance, flakiness, and mixed messages on others,” says Bernstein. “This leaves the partner who is desiring of commitment craving the dopamine high she feels on the good days. In psychology research, this is called ‘intermittent reinforcement,’ and it is the most powerful and addictive type of reward of all.”

In other words—the words of one of the great minds of our generation, Kesha, to be specific—“I get so high when you’re with me but crash and crave you when you leave.” Yeah, that’s your brain on an ambiguously romantic situationship. You’re quite literally an addict.

Thus, when that relationship ends, you’re basically in a state of withdrawal, says therapist Lindsey Brock, founder of the Breakup Therapist. “When you’re no longer getting your dopamine hits, you crash, hence feelings of depression and anxiety over the person that gave you that high.”

You’re Stuck in the Honeymoon Phase

As for the three months of it all, there’s a reason this weirdly specific length of time seems to be so universal to this experience. According to Bernstein, three months is around the time when the “lust” stage transitions into the “attachment” stage. When this happens, the more infatuated partner will probably find themselves reaching a breaking point and thus be more willing to confront their partner with their desire to DTR, despite fears that forcing that issue might be relationship-ending. As Bernstein notes, it often is relationship ending (sorry), which explains why so many of these situationships seem to meet their demise around the three-month mark.

Now this ambiguous affair that’s been your primary source of dopamine for the past three months is over, and to make matters worse, you’ve been cut off right in the middle of the honeymoon phase, adds breakup and relationship coach Emmi Fortin, author of Who Is Your Red Dress?.

Think about it: Three months in, most relationships are going pretty well. They’re still full of romance and affection, and you haven’t had enough time to get bored of your partner or uncover all their character flaws. When a longer relationship ends, you can at least find comfort in reflecting on all the ways that person annoyed TF out of you and all the fights you definitely won’t miss. But three months in, you probably haven’t had much time to make any of the bad memories that prove comforting after a breakup—you probably haven’t even had enough time to see the object of your affections as an actual person with actual flaws.

So now you’re just stuck with this fantasy version of this person and a fantasy version of what could have been—which, according to Brock, is a major part of what we’re actually mourning when a situationship comes to an end.

“It is so difficult for most of us to tolerate uncertainty, which makes it almost second nature for our brain to fill in the gaps for the unknowns in life,” says Brock. In the case of a quasi-unrequited situationship, this often looks like imagining future plans or making assumptions about how the other person feels. “But when these assumptions are untrue, it makes the recovery from the end of these relationships that much harder.”

You’re Probably Gaslighting Yourself a Little

Another reason these non-breakup-breakups can be so devastating? Because we don’t give ourselves the time and space to actually heal from them. We tell ourselves these weren’t even “real relationships,” so we have no right to be so upset. Surprise, surprise, invalidating your own emotions is a great way to never fully recover from them!

“Judging our feelings makes it nearly impossible to process and release them,” says Brock. “A short relationship can still trigger feelings of grief, rejection, or the devastating disappointment that comes with the shifting of future plans, dreams, or desires.” To assume we should be able to quickly and easily move on after a brief relationship undermines the very real impact of our lived experience.

Just because your situationship didn’t meet the societal criteria for a “serious” and therefore “valid” relationship (that criteria is mostly a load of heteropatriarchal nonsense, BTW) doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to mourn the loss of a romantically significant period of your life.

If you or a loved one have been emotionally destroyed by a Life-Altering Three-Month Situationship, you are very much entitled to be really dramatic about it! Besides, if Taylor Swift has taught us anything, it’s that a single situationship is a straight-up gold mine for creative genius—or, in my case, a 40-page personal essay that I literally included in my senior honors thesis and which should probably be physically destroyed on the grounds that it is simply too cringe for this world. Same thing!

The point is, you owe it to yourself to honor your feelings, and if you happen to stumble into your Red era in the process, thoughts and prayers for the Jake Gyllenhaal in your life.

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