Sex and the City is the most prevalent piece of situationship scripture.
Carrie and Mr. Big chase each other around New York City for years, refusing to label what they have and sabotaging all their subsequent relationships due to their unresolved feelings for one another. Their story ends over and over again. In season two, Carrie compares their love story to that of Katie and Hubble in The Way We Were. She finds Mr. Big on a street corner after his engagement to another woman and says, “Your girl is lovely, Hubble.” He replies, “I don’t get it.” Carrie flips her long, unruly blonde curls over one shoulder and devours him with what should be the definitive end to their relationship, saying, “And you never did.”
During the years I was in a serious relationship, I viewed this kind of unlabelled in-between space as a heterosexual realm. My voyage into the dating world proved me wrong. A bartender who smelled like lemongrass and worked with their hands kissed my forehead and drove me home while Fleetwood Mac yelled something about secondhand news. I never asked what we were, and they never answered. I half-fell in love with an English major who played the guitar and bought me Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. After years of serious monogamy, I figured I would wade into the lack of formal expectation like a warm, jewel-blue ocean — I thought casual would come naturally to me.
Of course, Carrie and Big see each other again, bound together by affairs and nostalgia over a relationship that began and ended without any communication or real closure. Big wants Carrie when she is unavailable to him, craving her most when she is with another man and he is married. During my initial viewing, I judged this catting-and-mousing harshly. However, as I callously avoided answering the girl who responded to my Instagram story quickly, and obsessively checked the story of the one who ignored me, I began to understand where Carrie was coming from.
I created rules to avoid attachments. I would not stay over, I would not get stoned and text anyone something very personal about my childhood, I would not say I miss you. Of course, I committed to these half-heartedly. Though jaded, the romantic within craved an ultimate romance, as the possibility of being able to say “I broke the rules for you” in a pivotal, confessional moment was too great a temptation. So I broke them every time, which meant nothing to anyone except me. I still wanted to chase somebody through the airport.
Dating apps create situationships for us. Instead of awkwardly asking a mutual friend to coffee and blindly asking if they are looking for a relationship, we can specify relationship types and dating goals to avoid that awkward interaction entirely. This surface-level transparency accounts for only absolute honesty, and does not factor in the sickly romantic wannabe cool girl who is “figuring out her dating goals.” My situation is as follows: After my five-year relationship ended, I resolved to be single for a significant amount of time, to avoid anyone being maimed by the jagged pieces of baggage I began to unload post-breakup. I told my friends it was sex I missed, but what I am deeply addicted to is romance. I missed obsession, wondering, wearing someone’s jacket, walking them home.
When my ex and I were newly in love, they would meet me after my hardware shift at Canadian Tire and walk me all the way home in the brutal Ottawa winter. It was almost an hour if we didn’t take any detours. We were 17, and they never expected to come upstairs. We’d walk in the dark, and sometimes it was nearly midnight by the time we arrived at my parents’ apartment. We would kiss, for a long time, then they would take the bus home. I did not wonder if they were serious about me. I drew hearts in my notebook margins and made approximately one million playlists with the only common denominator being “I love you and I think about you when I hear this.”
The transition from absolute certainty to the frigid winters of “casual” was bleak. How do I say, “The last time I felt this way, I’m pretty sure I lost my mind” in a chill, low-maintenance way?
Carrie and Big share an epic love that is undeniable. It is also undeniable that on some level, neither of them is destined for a traditional relationship. When Carrie tells Big her boyfriend is planning to propose, he shakes his head and says, “You’re not the marrying kind.” They love the chase, the uncertainty. Who doesn’t?
In my limited experience, the lesbian situationship is forged in fear. When I say I am keeping things casual, I mean, “I am sure about you but I am not sure you are sure about me” or “I am not sure about you and I don’t know how to say it” or “I’m trying to do more things I am scared of but the last time I let myself fall in love with someone we tore through each other with well-meaning, affection-drenched hacksaws and I don’t know if I’m put back together right.”
I want these casual relationships to teach me something about what I want. I want them to file down the sharp edges of the hopeless romantic inside of me, and transform me into a chiller, more low-maintenance person. If Sex and the City has taught me anything, it’s that the only real way to find selfless, unassuming love is to first truly know yourself. Which sounds like a total bummer, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that.
À la Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder: Who is actually capable of a casual relationship? And where is she, so I can fall in love with her?
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