The Situationswitch Is Why Situationship Breakups Are so Hard

Cosmopolitan

6 days ago

You know what they say, situationships are a spectrum. One minute, you're soaking up body heat in bed with the object of your unlabeled affections in the apartment where he lets you keep a toothbrush and the next morning, he's breaking up with you on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
If any of this sounds familiar, you are either an avid fan of my work—love that for you and you for that—and/or a fellow victim of a life-altering situationship. Either way, you know how uniquely devastating these adventures in ill-defined romance tend to be on pretty much all levels plus a secret other level you probably didn't even know existed till someone drove a knife through it!
But as Cosmo's resident sex and situationships editor, a woman with an exceptional degree of expertise in the field of getting emotionally annihilated by a man who was less into me than I was him, I have identified one specific aspect of the often blindsiding, always eviscerating demise of a situationship. Allow me to introduce 'the Situationswitch.'
Essentially, the Situationswitch is the rewriting of history that occurs at the end of a situationship whereby the person ending said situationship tries to downplay the seriousness and/or emotional intensity of your quasi-relationship in order to convince you that you actually don't have any right to feel angry or heartbroken about this whole thing because clearly it wasn't that deep!
Suddenly he has conveniently forgotten about that time he let an 'I love you' slip out on the fifth date or all those times he called his bed 'our bed' and his apartment your 'home.' What, that? Probably just a slip of the tongue—are you sure you heard him right? Oh, and last night? When he held you close in that bed formerly known as 'our bed' and pulled you in even tighter every time you tried to wiggle away because you were overheating in his embrace? You must have been dreaming. You must have been dreaming this whole time, actually.
Basically, the Situationswitch is the kind of simultaneously heart-shattering and blood-boiling behavior that had Taylor Swift insisting, 'YOU WERE THERE. YOU REMEMBER IT!' A form of gaslighting as gutting as it is confusing, as infuriating as it is disorienting.
But just how intentional is this flipping of the situation-script? Is this a master manipulator, a man who's been waiting to rip off the mask, rip out the rug, and rip your heart a new one all this time? Or just your average dude doing what dudes do best—screwing up, tucking his tail between his legs, and backing away slowly hoping no one notices?
According to clinical therapist Naomi Bernstein, PsyD, cohost of the Betches Oversharing podcast, this little breakup maneuver is likely more of a defense mechanism than the calculated hit on your heart it feels like from the other side of it.
'I believe the Situationswitch is a prime example of a psychology term called 'cognitive dissonance,'' says Bernstein. 'Humans desire for their values, beliefs, and actions to be in sync with one another.' When those things don't line up, she explains, we often feel compelled to shift either our beliefs or behavior in order to convince ourselves we are showing up as the person we want to think we are.
Unfortunately, in the case of the Situationswitch, this adjustment tends to take the form of revisionist history meant to distance the Situationswitcher from their previous feelings and actions while downplaying your perception of them.
'In short, the person ending the situationship doesn't want to be seen as the bad guy,' says Bernstein. And in order for them to not be the bad guy, they need to not be hurting you—you have to be the one hurting yourself with all your delusional fantasies and unrequited feelings. See, he never led you on; you simply got too attached.
So he's not trying to hurt you. In fact, he's trying really, really hard not to—in a way that will backfire more spectacularly than he can possibly imagine. Because the thing about a man who is breaking your heart is that there is absolutely nothing he wants to be doing less. Partly because he doesn't want you to get hurt, sure. But mostly because he just doesn't want to be the one doing it—the one responsible for the pain he's causing. The bad guy.
Because it's too hard to say, 'I did mean all those things I said. I did have all those feelings you felt. We did do all those things together and I did hold you that close in bed last night because I knew this would be hard for me too. It's just that I don't feel those things anymore and I don't know why. Or maybe I do love you, just not enough.'
So instead, he plays dumb. Tries to rewrite your memories. Plants and produces evidence—signs you clearly must have missed. He's going to Portugal next week, did you know that? No, you didn't. And don't you think that's the kind of thing you would've known if he'd been as in love with you as all these tears seem to suggest you thought he was? Besides, he's run the numbers and knows exactly how many dates you've been on—a figure he will hurl at you to the subtextual tune of, 'See, that's not even that many!'
Meanwhile, you're left mentally clawing back through text messages, late-night phone calls, photos of his hand on your thigh, any artifacts to prove you're not delusional. But you can drag out all the evidence you want—it doesn't matter. In fact, it's probably better not to give him any more proof to destroy, any more memories to tie to a chair and interrogate till you admit you made the whole thing up.
Because that's the worst of it all—the real reason these seemingly insignificant blips of not-quite relationships are so hard to get over. Worse than the heartbreak and the gaslighting and the future he's just ripped away from you is the fact that he's trying to take the past with him too.