Half of Americans between 18 and 34 say they’ve been in a situationship, according to YouGov’s national survey of 1,110 U.S. adults. Across all age groups, the number drops to 39%, which tells you something on its own: this isn’t a one-generation quirk that older adults simply missed. YouGov defines a situationship as a romantic connection stuck in a gray area, not quite platonic, not quite official. Most people can describe one without needing the definition spelled out. What the data adds is a clearer picture of where these connections actually begin, and it isn’t where you’d guess.
Dating apps get blamed for a lot of modern romantic confusion, but they’re not the main entry point into a situationship. Just 7% of people who’ve been in one say it started through an app. The overwhelming majority, 55%, say it began in person. Among 18-to-34-year-olds specifically, social media plays a bigger role than it does for the general population: 29% of younger respondents say their situationship started on social media, compared with 17% across all age groups. The pattern suggests situationships are less a product of swiping culture and more a product of ordinary proximity, work, school, mutual friends, that never gets a formal label attached.
There’s also a split in how people feel about the format itself. YouGov found 40% of adults would recommend a dating app built specifically for situationships, meaning a platform designed around ambiguity rather than commitment. Men are considerably more open to the idea than women, 44% versus 35%. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, that number jumps to 63%. That gap is worth sitting with. It’s not that younger people are simply drifting into undefined relationships by accident; a majority of them would actively opt into a structure built around staying undefined.
What the research says these connections actually feel like
A qualitative study published in the peer-reviewed journal Societies interviewed young adults directly about their experience in situationships and found a pattern that the prevalence numbers alone don’t capture: emotional impact that gets dismissed precisely because the relationship isn’t “official.” Researchers Sarah Anderson and Matthew James Phillips describe participants reporting real distress, including what one called “soul-crushing” pain, alongside a persistent sense that they weren’t entitled to that distress because the relationship had no formal status. The study also found situationships often carry emotional and physical intimacy comparable to committed relationships, without the “progression toward becoming committed or having a merging of lives” that usually accompanies that intimacy. That mismatch, real closeness without a shared trajectory, is where a lot of the confusion and hurt seems to concentrate.
The same research identified imbalanced emotional investment as a recurring theme: one person in the pairing often wants more clarity or commitment than the other, and dating apps get named as a contributing factor less because people are meeting through them and more because the abundance of options they represent makes committing to defining any one connection feel unnecessary.
Why the label gap matters more than it seems
None of this means situationships are inherently bad or that people should avoid them. Plenty of adults value the flexibility. But the data suggests a specific risk: because these connections form casually, often in person, often between people who already share a social circle, they don’t naturally trigger the conversations that defined relationships tend to force early on. Nobody is having the “what are we” talk in month one, because there was no clear moment when things started. That ambiguity can drift for months.
The generational split in willingness to formalize situationships through a dedicated app also hints at a shift in how younger adults think about relationship structure itself. Older generations tend to treat undefined status as a temporary phase on the way to something clearer. A meaningful share of 18-to-34-year-olds seem to be treating it as a viable end state, one worth building infrastructure around rather than resolving.
The Societies study also flagged something practitioners are only beginning to catch up on: because situationships aren’t recognized as “real” relationships in most clinical or social frameworks, the grief that follows one ending often goes unacknowledged too. Anderson and Phillips found participants describing a kind of disenfranchised loss, real heartbreak with nowhere socially appropriate to put it, because friends and family tend to respond to a situationship ending with “well, it wasn’t official anyway.” That dismissal doesn’t match the emotional and physical intimacy the relationship actually contained, and it can leave people processing a breakup alone that everyone around them has already decided didn’t count.
If half of young adults have already lived this, the practical takeaway isn’t to avoid ambiguity altogether. It’s to notice when the absence of a label is doing work you haven’t consented to, quietly setting expectations, or lowering them, without either person ever agreeing to the terms out loud.
