Skills We Were Never Taught — Issue 18
There is a particular kind of relationship that has no name, and nearly everyone has been in one.
You have been seeing someone for a while. Long enough that they have met at least one of your friends, long enough that a toothbrush situation is quietly developing, long enough that you would be genuinely wrecked if it ended tomorrow. And yet if a stranger asked what the two of you actually were, you would not have a word for it. Partner overstates it. Seeing each other undersells it. You have built something with real weight and left it deliberately unlabelled, and lately a question has begun forming that you cannot quite bring yourself to ask, because asking it feels like the most dangerous thing you could possibly do. What are we.
We have somehow turned that question into a faux pas. To ask it is to be needy, intense, the one who caught feelings and ruined a perfectly good casual thing. So we do not ask. We wait, and hint, and read the tea leaves of someone’s texting habits, and tell ourselves the not-knowing is proof of how relaxed and modern we are being. It is usually proof of something else. We are frightened of the answer, and the fear is worth listening to before another word is spoken.
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Why the question got dangerous
It is worth asking how a perfectly reasonable question became a social landmine, because it did not used to be one, and it still is not one in most of the relationships that matter to you. Nobody agonises for months over whether to define a friendship.
The dating version got dangerous for the same reason most of modern dating did. Somewhere along the way, wanting became the least cool thing a person could do. To ask for a definition is to admit you are invested, and to admit you are invested is to hand the other person proof that you have more to lose than they do, which feels, in a culture that prizes never seeming to care, like handing over a weapon. The studied casualness this run of essays keeps circling, the slow replies, the horror of seeming keen, arrives at its purest form right here, in the one question we most need to ask and are most afraid to. We would honestly rather not know than be caught wanting to know. Which is a remarkable thing to prefer, once you say it out loud.
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The waiting room that is not neutral
We get one thing badly wrong about ambiguity. We treat it as a neutral holding pattern, a waiting room in which the relationship is simply undecided, pending further data, as though both people were suspended in the same fog, equally unsure, waiting together for clarity to arrive from somewhere outside.
The culture has finally handed this arrangement a name, the situationship, and it is close to universal now: something approaching half of young adults report having been in one. That ubiquity should not be mistaken for harmlessness. When researchers actually study these unlabelled in-between relationships, they do not find easygoing freedom. They find lower trust, higher anxiety, and more distress than in either clear commitment or clean singleness, and, tellingly, the cost is not shared evenly between the two people in it.
But ambiguity is rarely neutral, and it is rarely shared out equally. Far more often, one person is really quite clear and has simply not said so, while the other is left doing all of the not-knowing. The fog is not weather. It is a position someone is holding. And the longer it holds, especially once you have asked for more and not been given it, the more the ambiguity stops being an open question and becomes the answer itself. A person who wanted to build something with you, and was able to, generally sets about building it. The sustained absence of that is not nothing. It is information, delivered in the one language we are least willing to read: the quiet, steady decline to choose you.
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Learning to translate “I’m not ready for labels”
There is a whole vocabulary designed to keep the fog in place, and it repays learning to translate. “I’m not ready for a label.” “I don’t want to put pressure on it.” “Can’t we just enjoy what we have.” “I’m not in a place for anything serious right now.” Every one of these can be completely sincere. Every one of them can also be a soft no wearing the costume of a maybe.
The way to tell them apart is to stop listening to the words and start watching the behaviour underneath, which is where this newsletter keeps insisting the real message always lives. “I’m not ready for anything serious” means one thing from a person who is nonetheless choosing you, planning with you, folding you a little further into their life each month. It means something entirely different from a person who says it while holding you at precisely the same arm’s length they always have, available enough to keep you there, unavailable enough to keep their options open. The first is someone moving towards you slowly. The second is someone who has found an arrangement that suits them and would rather you did not disturb it. The words are identical. The behaviour tells you which one you are actually in. This is not merely folk wisdom, either. The research on couples who resolve their uncertainty well is consistent that it is steady behaviour, not verbal reassurance, that actually builds trust over time, and that the gap between what a person says and what they reliably do is the most honest information you are ever going to get.
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When the not-knowing is honest
None of this means you should march in on the third date demanding a title, or treat every early flicker of uncertainty as an emergency. Some not-knowing is honest, and mutual, and completely fine. Two people genuinely near the start of something, both a little unsure, both actually turning towards each other as they find out, are not lost in a fog. They are in the ordinary early weather of a real thing forming, and rushing to pin it down can be its own kind of anxiety, an attempt to force a certainty that only time can honestly give.
The difference is whether the uncertainty is shared and shrinking, or one-sided and stable. Early, mutual, and slowly resolving towards each other is a beginning. One-sided, and sitting at exactly the same distance month after month no matter what you do, is not a beginning. It is a destination someone has quietly chosen and not mentioned. Time is the test. Genuine not-knowing moves. Strategic not-knowing stays precisely where it is, because it is not actually waiting for anything. It already has what it wants.
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How to ask, and then how to listen
When you do decide to ask, and at some point self-respect requires that you do, the aim is not an ultimatum, and not a performance of how casual you can be. It is the plain directness this whole run of essays has been about: saying something true about what you want, and giving the other person the dignity of a real choice. And if the fear needs a counterweight, it is worth knowing that this is exactly where the research points too. What deepens intimacy over time is not the careful avoidance of the hard conversation. It is the resolving of doubt through direct talk. Asking is not the thing that threatens closeness. It is, quite literally, how closeness gets built.
It is far less dramatic than the fear makes it sound. Not “where is this going” flung across a silence, but something clear and warm and unmistakable: “I’ve loved the last few months, and I’ve got to the point where I want to be exclusive with you. I’d like to know whether that’s something you want too.” That is not needy. It is a person stating a preference and asking a direct question, which is close to the most self-respecting thing you can do inside an undefined situation. And if saying even that feels impossible, the difficulty is worth noticing in its own right, because a relationship in which you cannot speak one true sentence about what you want is already telling you something about the relationship.
Then comes the part that takes real nerve, which is letting the answer be an answer. If it is yes, you have moved out of limbo and into something real. If it is a deflection, another “let’s not put pressure on it,” you have your answer as well, and it is the same one the ambiguity was handing you all along, except now it is out loud, where you can finally do something about it.
And a deflection does count as an answer, which is the part almost everyone refuses to accept. The temptation, when you ask and get a soft non-response, is to decide you asked wrong, or too soon, and to quietly file it away and try again in a few months with better wording. Occasionally that is fair. But if you have asked clearly, more than once, and the answer keeps arriving as fog, then the fog is the answer, and re-asking becomes just a way of not hearing it. Respecting yourself, at that point, means responding to what someone is actually doing rather than to the version of them you keep hoping to talk into being. “I’ve asked, and I don’t have the clarity I need, so I’m going to step back” is a complete sentence. It is often, as it happens, the one that finally draws out an honest answer, though only if you are willing to mean it rather than wield it.
None of this is reserved for the big exclusivity conversation, either. The same directness works on the smaller needs long before you get there. “I really like you, and I’d like a bit more consistency than we’ve had” is a named need, not a demand, and how someone meets a small, clearly stated request tells you a great deal about how they will meet the larger ones. You do not have to save it all for one terrifying summit. You can simply start telling the truth about what you want, in ordinary sentences, early.
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The longer it runs, the more it costs
Ambiguity also has a way of getting more expensive the longer you tolerate it, which is exactly why it tends to last. Each month you do not ask, you invest a little more, and each new increment of investment makes the question feel riskier to raise, because now there is more built up to lose if the answer turns out to be no. So the very thing that should make you ask sooner, the growing stake, is what keeps postponing it. This is how six undefined weeks quietly becomes two undefined years. Nobody sits down and decides to spend a fifth of a decade in a maybe. They simply keep choosing, one comfortable week at a time, not to find out, until they look up and discover a sizeable piece of their life has gone on waiting for a sentence that was never going to be volunteered. And the waiting does not even buy the calm it promises. Prolonged uncertainty reliably produces more turbulence and distress, not less, so the not-asking that is meant to keep the peace is quietly manufacturing the opposite.
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Why the ache feels like love
There is one more reason the fog is so hard to leave, and it upends the usual story. We tend to read the anxious, preoccupied, checking-the-phone-again feeling of an undefined relationship as proof of how hard we have fallen. It feels like love precisely because it hurts.
But the ache has a mechanism, and the mechanism is not depth. Affection that arrives unpredictably, warm one week and distant the next, lights up the brain’s reward system far harder than affection that is steady and reliable. It is the same wiring that makes a poker machine more gripping than a bank account: the uncertainty itself is the hook. Intermittent, unreliable reward produces precisely what an undefined relationship produces, the hypervigilance, the compulsive checking, the highs that run a little too high and the lows that come straight after them. So the intensity you are reading as a sign of how right this person is may be nothing of the sort. It may only be a measure of how inconsistent they are being. Steady, secure love tends to feel calmer, and we have been trained so thoroughly to hear calm as boredom that we can mistake the very thing we are looking for for its absence.
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The thing we are really afraid of
What we are all so frightened of, when we avoid the question, is a no. But a no to “what are we” is not the loss it feels like in the moment. It is the return of your own time, and your own life, from a situation that was quietly never going to become the thing you were hoping for. The real loss is the other one, the one nobody warns you about: the months, sometimes the years, spent suspended in a maybe, mistaking the ache of uncertainty for the depth of your feeling, waiting for a clarity the other person had already arrived at and simply not shared.
You are allowed to want to know what you are to someone. Wanting it is not weakness, and asking for it is not pressure. It is self-respect with a voice. And the answer, whichever way it falls, is a mercy next to the fog, because you cannot build a life inside a question. Ask it. Then believe what you hear, including, and especially, the silence.
Sharon x
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The Relational Human is a newsletter about the skills of intimacy. The ones no generation was ever formally taught, and the ones that quietly decide whether our lives, and the lives of those who come after us, feel like genuine connection or its prolonged simulation. Written by Sharon Alexandra: psychotherapist, behaviour specialist, educator, and writer. With rigour, with warmth, and with the conviction that none of this is fixed.
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Artwork: James Tissot, A Passing Storm, c. 1876. Oil on canvas. Public domain.