Why You Keep Ending Up in Situationships (It Is Not About Your Standards)
Something shifted in the group chat this year. The conversation used to be about how to handle the situationship you were already in. Now it is about how you are done with them entirely.
BLK's 2026 State of Black Singles Report confirmed what a lot of women were already saying out loud: 75% of Black singles are seeking serious, intentional, or marriage-minded connections. Only 14% want to keep things casual. The situationship era, at least in the group chat, is officially over.
But here is the part that report does not address. If you have been in the group chat saying you are done with situationships for the last two years, and you are still ending up in one, wanting more is not the missing piece. The question worth sitting with is not what you want. It is why your nervous system keeps choosing what it already knows.
Situationships are not usually about low standards. They are often about a nervous system that has learned to feel most at home in something that is close enough to feel real, but not close enough to feel dangerous.
This is the part nobody is saying in the comments. And it is the part that actually explains the pattern.
The conversation everyone is having and what it is missing
The discourse around situationships over the last few years has produced two main arguments. The first: you are in a situationship because you are accepting less than you deserve and you need to raise the bar. The second: the men are not serious, and the apps are making it worse.
Both of those things can be true and still not explain why you, specifically, keep ending up here. Because the women in situationships are not uniformly women with low standards. A lot of them know exactly what they want. They have said it out loud. They have written it on a sticky note. They can articulate it clearly.
And they still end up in the same place.
The missing piece is not a clearer list of requirements. It is understanding what the nervous system is doing underneath the wanting.
What the nervous system has to do with any of this
Your attachment style is the pattern your nervous system developed around closeness and connection based on what early relationships taught it to expect. If the people you depended on early on were inconsistent — warm sometimes, unavailable others, unpredictable in ways that made you stay alert — your nervous system learned to recognize that texture as what connection feels like.
That is not a character flaw. It is adaptation. The nervous system is very good at learning what to expect and then seeking it out, because familiarity reads as safe even when safe is not actually what it is.
This is why a relationship that is available, consistent, and clear can feel boring or even suffocating, while one that is unpredictable, undefined, and just out of reach can feel like chemistry. The nervous system is not reading the situation incorrectly. It is reading it perfectly accurately against the wrong reference point.
The situationship is not the problem. It is the solution your nervous system already knows how to tolerate. Changing the pattern means building a new reference point, and that is nervous system work, not standards work.
This shows up in three specific ways that are worth naming.
The almost-relationship is familiar
Something that is close but not quite committed maps onto a kind of closeness that many women grew up around: care that was real but not consistent, love that was present but conditional, connection that required monitoring. The almost-relationship does not feel bad because something is wrong with you. It feels legible. It feels like home.
Full availability feels suspicious
When someone is genuinely consistent and available, the nervous system that learned to stay alert can experience that as a problem to solve rather than a gift to receive. You find yourself looking for the catch. Waiting for the other shoe. Bracing. The anxiety that should come with uncertainty gets displaced onto the certainty.
The talking stage produces its own chemistry
Anxious attachment and the early talking stage have a particular relationship. The uncertainty activates the nervous system in a way that can feel like excitement. The not-knowing, the highs and lows of will-they-won't-they, produces an emotional intensity that gets mistaken for connection. By the time the ambiguity resolves, in either direction, the pattern is already set.
The cultural layer that does not get named enough
There is a version of this that is specific to Black women and to women from Afro-Caribbean households, and it does not show up in most dating content.
A lot of women in these communities grew up watching a certain kind of love: love that was real and also work, love that required patience and endurance, love where you did not ask for too much and you did not make things harder. The message, absorbed over years, was that wanting a lot was a liability. That self-sufficiency was the safer bet. That needing too clearly was risky.
The situationship can be the relationship you settle into when you do not fully believe that asking for more is something you are allowed to do. Not because you think you do not deserve it. You know you do. But because the part of you that learned to manage and accommodate and not make things complicated is still running the show at the level of the nervous system, even when your mind has moved past it.
WORTH NAMING DIRECTLY
Wanting commitment and being afraid to ask for it clearly are not mutually exclusive. The group chat can say the situationship era is over while the nervous system is still not sure it is safe to say out loud that you want to be chosen.
This is not about being broken or behind. It is about understanding that the nervous system does not update through declarations. It updates through experience. Through having the thing you are afraid to ask for and surviving it. Through the relationship that does not fall apart when you say what you need.
That is the kind of work that actually changes the pattern.
What changes and how
The cultural moment in 2026 is pointing somewhere real. Black women are not wrong that something has shifted. The appetite for the situationship, for the ambiguity and the emotional labor of the not-quite-relationship, is genuinely exhausted for a lot of women.
But exhaustion is not the same as readiness. And declaring yourself done with situationships is not the same as having the nervous system capacity to stay in something stable when it shows up.
What actually shifts the pattern is slower than a declaration and more specific than a list of requirements.
It involves understanding what the ambiguity was giving you: the distance that felt safe, the uncertainty that felt familiar, the low ask that felt manageable. It involves being able to tolerate the discomfort of something steady long enough to let the nervous system learn that steady is not the same as boring or dangerous. And it involves, usually, doing that work in a relationship, therapeutic or otherwise, where you have the experience of being met with consistency before you try to build it with a partner.
The women who are genuinely done with situationships (not just frustrated with them, but done) tend to be the ones who have done something with the pattern rather than just declared themselves over it.
The nervous system does not update through wanting. It updates through evidence. And building that evidence is the actual work.
If you are in the group chat saying you are done but still ending up in the same place, the problem is probably not your standards. It is that the pattern is happening at a level that the declaration cannot reach.
That level is reachable. But it takes something more specific than a decision.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
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Knowing what you want does not automatically change what your nervous system gravitates toward. If you grew up in environments where closeness was unpredictable, inconsistent, or conditional, your nervous system learned to recognize that texture as normal. Fully available, committed relationships can feel unfamiliar or even unsafe in ways that are hard to name. A situationship, by contrast, feels legible. The pattern repeats not because you have low standards, but because the nervous system is seeking something familiar. Changing it requires working at the nervous system level, not just the decision level.
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According to BLK's 2026 State of Black Singles Report, 75% of Black singles are actively seeking serious, intentional, or marriage-minded connections, and only 14% want to keep things casual. The data suggests the appetite for undefined relationships is genuinely declining. But culturally, there is a difference between being exhausted with situationships and having the nervous system capacity to stay in something stable and committed when it shows up. Wanting more is the first step. The pattern changes when the nervous system has evidence that more is actually safe.
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Anxious attachment and situationships have a specific relationship. The early stages of an undefined connection, the uncertainty, the will-they-won't-they, the not-quite-there, can activate the nervous system in a way that feels like chemistry or intensity. For someone with anxious attachment, that activation is familiar. It mirrors earlier relational experiences where love required vigilance. By the time the situationship resolves in either direction, the pattern is already embedded. Understanding this is different from blame. It is information about what the nervous system is doing, which is where the work actually starts.
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When your nervous system is calibrated to unpredictability, consistency can register as something to be wary of rather than something to receive. You might find yourself waiting for the catch, scanning for what is wrong, or feeling an odd flatness where you expected to feel safe. This is not ingratitude. It is the nervous system responding to an absence of the signals it learned to associate with connection. The remedy is not to settle for less stimulation but to slowly build a different internal reference point for what connection feels like when it is safe.
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The framing of attraction can be misleading here. What is often happening is not that you are drawing in unavailable people magnetically. It is that unavailability reads as familiar, and familiarity is what the nervous system scans for when it is looking for connection. The shift is less about changing who you attract and more about building the internal capacity to stay in connection with someone who is available. That is a slower process than a dating strategy, but it is the one that actually holds. Therapy that addresses the nervous system level of the pattern, rather than just the behavioral level, is often what makes the difference.
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Yes. Repeating relationship patterns are one of the most common reasons women come to therapy, particularly attachment-based therapy. The work is not about analyzing your childhood indefinitely or identifying who is to blame. It is about understanding what the nervous system learned, and creating enough new relational experience that it starts to learn something different. Most women notice meaningful shifts within a few months, not in the sense that the pattern disappears, but in the sense that they can see it coming and sometimes choose differently. That gap between the feeling and the behavior is where things begin to change.
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Malika Latchman, LMHC is a licensed therapist providing attachment-based therapy for women in New York and New Jersey via telehealth, with a specific focus on relationship anxiety, dating patterns, and people-pleasing, particularly within the cultural contexts of Black and Afro-Caribbean women. She offers a free 15-minute consultation and evening appointments. More information is available at mlmentalhealth.com.
