Notes Toward a Phenomenology of the Situationship

We weren't lovers; we were co-authors of a failed experiment in asynchronous intimacy

With very little fanfare, my third situationship met its whimpering end.

It ended as it began (and middled): over text. He was always texting. Long, charming missives about politics, family trauma, hockey, and occasionally the inexplicable behavior of single women on Reddit. I was flattered. I felt chosen.

He was busy. We saw each other once or twice a month. His phone became a proxy for his body. I started confusing pings with presence. My nervous system got drunk on regular doses of dopamine.

We sent each other links, jokes, and long semi-flirtatious affirming paragraphs about our parenting styles or creative work. He was contextually expressive, but emotionally elusive. It was like being in a relationship with an extremely eloquent vapor. (Or, as he might argue, not a relationship.)

Eros requires distance, the friction of absence. But what do you call it when the only thing that exists is distance, veneered over with constant micro-contact? A ‘proximity simulacrum’? A ‘romance-as-a-service’ subscription plan?

I wasn’t in love with him, but I enjoyed his attention. Which is different, but adjacent: like being nourished by the smell of food. I was on an algorithmic refeeding program. In this way, he functioned less as a person than as a text-generating ghost. He was fully accessible (except in any physical, calendrical, or emotionally reciprocal sense).

Simone Weil says that ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ And he gave it to me daily, often hourly. The attention wasn’t generosity, it was volume.

At some point I realized I was praying, not texting. I was offering up parts of myself to be witnessed and hoping for a benediction disguised as a blue bubble. I became the choir boy of my own romantic ambiguity (the spiritual payoff was memes).

If the Word could be two Words, they’d be emotionally avoidant, but I thought one word was less problematic, grammatically.

I didn’t know him well enough (by far) to make him a god, but romance, for me, often veers ecclesiastical. Intimacy has always had a spiritual edge.

In my recovery program, we talk about surrendering to a higher power. It’s so easy to make another person into that. I tithed time, energy, and emotional bandwidth to an altar made of potential. He was so great! Really, he was. But mostly, he was a fantasy that I made up. A very handsome, funny, and smart SMS ghost, delivering a hit whenever I needed it. The person I wanted him to be isn’t who he is. Absence allowed my projections to flourish, allowed the ghost to haunt.

Real intimacy is not evasive. You don’t have to wander around in the dark with a flashlight and a magic phrase to summon it.

I told my friend K about the breakup. They’ve been watching me eat crumbs for a while now, and they congratulated me for surrendering to reality. It struck me as ecstatically true. I broke up with the phone, with the fantasy of an actual relationship.

Simone Weil says that, “Spiritual living is accepting reality at any cost.”

So here I am. Back in the land of the living. If attention is a form of prayer, then I spent the last five months worshipping at a shrine that never opened its doors. It was a lesson in how longing, unreturned, becomes its own cruel form of devotion.