“I just wanna stay in this unlabeled Lavender Haze!” I said to a male friend who didn’t immediately get the reference in a dim restaurant one Friday afternoon late this past July. We were catching up over midday filets in some swanky midtown Manhattan establishment or other—a whenever-we-feel-like-it tradition of ours where he pays and we drink martinis at 3 p.m. like it’s the ’60s and we’re having an affair, which we’re not. I get afternoon tipsy and look around at all the wealthy New Yorkers who can somehow afford to be eating steak on a weekday afternoon instead of doing their jobs and get to pretend I’m actually one of them—that I could do this every day if I wanted to.
I was giving him the latest on my summer fling with a certain Handsome Surgeon for whom I happened to be developing some not strictly fling-like feelings, which weren’t a problem in and of themselves. The problem was that I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I wanted to do about them. As someone who was literally in the midst of penning a column all about my skepticism toward the trappings of traditional relationships, I wasn’t exactly in any hurry to lock this romance down by way of labels or monogamy. Hence why I wasn’t convinced I really needed to do anything with those feelings at all. Couldn’t I just…have them?
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After all, if there was one thing I’d learned from my last relationship—which began two years earlier when an older man I was sugar dating started referring to himself as my “boyfriend,” effectively whisking me out of the slutty, single, and fairly lucrative tail-end of my early 20s and into a monogamous-except-for-when-he-wanted-threesomes union I wasn’t sure I remembered agreeing to—it was that I definitely didn’t want to be in one. The possessiveness that men apparently felt entitled to wield over the women in their lives once they decided (and they always seemed to be the ones doing the deciding) that those women belonged to them in a labeled, socially sanctioned way was certainly not for me, I concluded when that relationship mercifully dissolved. I had much more to lose than gain from it.
But here I was, only a year or so later, trying not to notice some impossibly sweet, abjectly terrifying feelings creeping into my latest supposedly innocuous, no-strings situationship with my Handsome Surgeon lover-friend. Feelings that had me doodling “I heart KK” in his notebook when he wasn’t looking and gushing about him to strangers at bars who absolutely hadn’t asked and getting jealous at his birthday party of the friend he used to hook up with and blurting out, “I love you” in a sleepy, half-high daze when he woke me up from a nap and handed me a Diet Coke in an Atlantic City hotel room and pretending to play it all cool. Casual. In love? Who, me? Can’t you see I’m far too busy flaunting my history of other-womanhood and being almost naked on Instagram?
None of these things were really a problem. The problem was that while Handsome Surgeon and I tiptoed around the subject of exclusivity—as quasi-romantic partners in unlabeled limbo are wont to do—I could feel myself sliding into a monogamous state of mind like I was slipping under anesthesia. “Having sex with other people isn’t as fun as having sex with you,” I admitted one night in his broken bed that broke exactly how you think it did.
But I was wary of locking myself into another trap like the one my last relationship had turned out to be. Besides, I couldn’t be sure whether my increasingly one-man-womanly thoughts were truly reflective of my own desires or just a backslide into the mono-normative ideals I’d spent the past five years as a sex writer actively unlearning. Didn’t I, of all people, know that love doesn’t have to equal labels and exclusivity? That sometimes those were the very things that destroyed it?
It was just that, slowly and then suddenly, no one else’s hands seemed to feel quite right on my body. Everyone else’s lips felt foreign—too hard or too cold or too wet—against mine.
I’m not terribly unique among women my age in this aversion, or at least ambivalence, toward traditional relationships—although it can feel that way in the midst of the mid-to-late-20s surge of invitations to friends’ weddings where people ask you questions like, “So, have you met anyone in New York?” and you forget that this is a euphemism for, Why don’t you have a boyfriend? It’s making me uncomfortable, so you get halfway through telling them about how New York is a big city and you work in a pretty social industry, so yeah, you meet people all the time before you realize that what they’re really asking is, Why are you single? Just how fucked up are you, exactly?
But the stats, the internet, and the wine-soaked, till-dawn conversations with your roommate in the kitchen where you reach the same conclusion you’ve been reaching for years—that tying your life to a man’s just feels too risky—tell a different story. Last year, Bumble reported that only one in five women on the platform are actively seeking marriage. The previous year, Tinder announced that Gen Z was not only reinventing but embracing the situationship, something its millennial originators had decried as the death of modern romance.
In a time when non-traditional modes of loving, sexing, and otherwise relating—from non-monogamy to solo-polyamory to relationship anarchy—have never been more mainstream, the romantic ambiguity at the heart of the situationship no longer feels frustrating, perhaps, but freeing. Maybe millennials had it all wrong—maybe situationships are just another way of experiencing love and sex outside the rigid confines of a devoutly monogamous society. Maybe they aren’t just a cowardly game of chicken based on commitment-phobia and poor communication skills and the fact that whatever it is either of you really wants or doesn’t want out of this thing, you’re scared that asking for it will risk what you have. And you like what you have. You like it a lot. You might even love it.
Except for when your situationship is, in fact—despite your most delusional efforts to convince yourself and anyone who will listen otherwise—just the messy no-man’s-land of things unsaid and desperately guarded hearts.
Because maybe you’re a woman who’s been subjected to a lifetime of messaging that the absolute last thing you should do if you’re in love with a man is let him know that you are—that doing so will immediately send him running for the hills and telling the world what an insane, clingy nightmare you turned out to be. About how he was obviously just trying to get his poor, innocent dick wet and you and your girl feelings had to go and ruin it because, Jesus Christ, how fucking stupid are you?
Or maybe you’re a hardworking doctor who wants children to bring into the kind of life your overworked, underpaid immigrant parents wish they could’ve given you and she’s a cynical sex writer who pens phrases like, “the rotten core at the center of the domestic fairytale women are sold from birth.” And maybe your brother was already married by the time he was your age so you’re kind of running out of time to be falling in love with documented marriage skeptics.
But one morning the documented-marriage-skeptic wakes up in your bed and you ask her how she slept and she says, “Really well, actually,” and you pull her closer and whisper, “That’s because you’re home.” And fuck, it really is starting to feel that way, isn’t it?
But obviously it’s way too hard to reconcile all of that so you both figure it’s better to just never mention any of it at all. Why don’t we just not talk about it until it inevitably blows up in our stupid faces?
And so I did what any closeted, commitment-wary romantic would do: absolutely nothing. I lazed away in my Unlabeled Lavender Haze, playing house in his apartment where he let me keep a toothbrush and kissing him in Girlfriend Places—on his cheek, just under his collarbone, atop his fingertips that curved slightly to the right—and thinking Girlfriend Thoughts I didn’t say out loud and pretending I hadn’t when I accidentally did.
Until, of course, one deceptively sunny September afternoon when he turned down the radio in the green Jaguar where he used to trace a hand up my drugstore-tanned thigh as we careened through summer-in-the-city streets and said, “So I think there’s something we should probably talk about” in a way that made me want to open the passenger’s side door and quietly hurl myself out onto the BQE.
Instead I laughed nervously and said, “Oh no. Why would we have to do that?”
“I just want to make sure we’re on the same page,” he uttered, trying to pretend he wasn’t saying what I already knew he was saying—something men only say when you are not, in fact, on the same page. When they are about to tear out the page that you’re on and rip it to shreds before your very eyes.
“I just think that—you know—at the end of the day, we want different things.”
At the end of what day? What things? But I knew exactly what things: the marriage and children he wanted and I’d published essays about explicitly not wanting. But I still felt unfairly, stupidly blindsided. How could he be so sure we wanted different things when I wasn’t even sure what things I wanted? Not really, not anymore.
Still somehow in the car and not lying curled up on the side of the highway, I managed to ask him something to that effect, the words catching in a throat I could feel closing as the tears boiled behind my eyes.
“Well,” he said. “What do you want?”
What do you think I want and why is that not the right answer? It’s whatever the opposite of that is. I want to throw up. I want to go back in time to 72 seconds ago before you started this conversation, grab the wheel and yank this car into oncoming traffic. I want to scream, “Why are you doing this to me? I asked you for nothing! I thought I was safe!” I want to fall the fuck apart right in front of you and I want it to be all your fault.
But all that came out was: “I don’t know. I just want to love you.”
Wrong answer.
Wrong answer because love after a certain age isn’t just about love. It’s about plans to make and boxes to check and kids to have—things I’d been casually clear I didn’t want from the very beginning, lounging one guileless May morning in his apartment in the depths of Brooklyn shortly after we’d met, drawling on about my choice to remain childless, to prioritize the limitless, otherworldly kind of love that all these checkmarks and timelines and parenting seemed to threaten, to suffocate, to kill.
Because my aversion to labels and the pipeline of successive ones you sign up for once you accept the first (girlfriend, fiancée, wife, mother) is partly about self-preservation, yes, about maintaining the freedom that men seem incapable of not wanting to take from me—even when they’re not trying to, even when they swear they’re just trying to love me. But it’s also about wanting to preserve something else, too. The love itself. The romance. The haze of this liminal, lilting period that only seems to exist at the beginning of things before they grow stale or fall apart. About preventing it from turning into something that can break or sour or evaporate into the mundanity of a sexless weekday morning scrambling to get the kids to school. Something that can disappear. Something—or someone—you can fall out of love with.
I’ve convinced myself that by rejecting labels, I can immunize myself against all of this. How can you end something that never really, technically began? As long as we never slap a label on this thing and “officially” start dating, we can never stop, right? As long as I never admit to you or to anyone or, most of all, to myself that I want to do this and do it for real because my whole stupid heart is yours and yours alone, you can’t break it, right?
Wrong.
“We’ve had fun, but I’ve had fun all my life. And life is about deeper joys,” he said, both hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead, like a driving test. “Joys that take planning and sacrifice.”
And I didn’t say what I couldn’t say: I don’t know how you can say something like that when this was a deep joy to me. So I just cried.
“This will only get harder the longer we wait,” he said.
And he’s probably right, isn’t he? That months or years will go by and I’ll never change my mind about not wanting kids and he’ll resent me for it. Or maybe I will change my mind and later regret it and I’ll resent him for it. And what if I’m right, too? About all these things I slowly stopped wanting to be right about in his apartment that summer: my fear that that’s just what relationships inevitably turn into—resentment and cheating and boredom and falling out of love and growing apart and drunk crying on your birthday and endings and endings and endings and I’m better off alone.
And so I didn’t say, “You’re right—I don’t know what I want. It’s just that I felt really pure sitting on your couch that morning in June when we took turns listening to each other’s heartbeats on the stethoscope that you kept in the empty TV stand (I used to joke that that’s something I would do if I were pretending to be a doctor, remember?) and you can’t tell me that didn’t mean anything.”
And so I didn’t tell him that I already knew what it meant way back then—late morning, early summer, his heart beating in my ears: The dangerous, dizzying truth that I could’ve wanted those things with him. That I would’ve tried to, anyway.
Kayla Kibbe (she/her) is the Associate Sex and Relationships Editor at Cosmopolitan US, where she covers all things sex, love, dating and relationships. She lives in Astoria, Queens and probably won’t stop talking about how great it is if you bring it up. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
