You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships.

I'm your host, relationship coach Stephanie Rigg,

and I'm really glad you're here. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment.

In today's episode, we're going to be talking all about the dreaded situation ship.

So for anyone who's not familiar with the term situation ship, this is one of

those dynamics in the dating process whereby you're kind of in a relationship, but kind of not in a

relationship. It might look and feel like a relationship, but you haven't actually progressed to

that stage. And so you are lingering in limbo or no man's land.

And for obvious reasons, that can throw up a lot of challenges, particularly if you're someone

who leans more towards anxious attachment. Because having that degree of uncertainty and a lack

of clarity around the structure of the relationship, its future, how someone feels about you, all of those

things can be really, really hard. It runs counter to everything that you want and need in order

to feel safe and secure in relationships. And yet, unfortunately, situationships are extremely

prevalent in modern dating. And it's something that a lot of people really struggle with.

I know because I get so many messages from people.

So I'm going to be talking about some of the drivers of this on both sides,

you know, why someone might hold on to a situation ship and not want to commit

and why you might participate in a situationhip, even though you really

do want the relationship to be more than that. Why do we stay in these situationships that are

clearly falling short of what we really want? And as you can imagine, there are plenty of

attachment dynamics that we can overlay onto that that can offer

us some really useful insights. Alongside that, I'm obviously going to give you hopefully some

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