Mr Lovebomb and Ms Benching together?

Honestly, fine. Two people knowingly playing chess, posh and intellectual, nobody confused about the game. They will exhaust each other, part ways dramatically, and turn it into an adda story for the next three years.

But the real tragedy is Mr Lovebomb meeting Ms Delulu, the kind that needs its own breakup playlist.

Delulu has decided she is the exception. She will stay consistently, love loudly, show up every single time, and eventually Lovebomb will look up from his phone and think, oh. It was her. It was always her. This is a beautiful story, but it lives entirely in her delulu world. Meanwhile, Lovebomb is reacting to someone else’s story with a fire emoji.

She is not holding on because she is naive. She is holding on because hope is the most dangerous word in our entire modern dating dictionary, and none of us ever thought to put a warning label on it.

Then the bomb goes off. Delulu, fully detonated, now has two choices: disappear from every social event for the next six months, or rise from the ashes as the next baddie who keeps three people on the sideline simultaneously and feels absolutely nothing. Either way, the cycle finds a new host and we all carry on, having watched the whole thing happen in real time and said nothing useful.

The above calamity is known as a situationship.

The formal definition: two people doing everything couples do, from texting constantly to getting jealous and ruining each other’s moods on a perfectly good Thursday night, everything except the one commitment that would make it official.

We all enrolled in the course called situationship, knowingly or unknowingly, without a syllabus.

Nobody warned us. Not a single person. No senior pulled us aside. No disclaimer at the bottom of the feelings we caught. We just woke up one day, three months deep into something with no name, and had to Google our way to understanding what was happening to us.

The results were not reassuring.

It is almost like we attend every class, take notes, share textbooks, and then collectively, enthusiastically refuse to sit for the exam. There was no admission form. One day we just woke up and were already three months in and emotionally invested in someone who had not updated their relationship status since 2020.

It usually starts with someone making us feel like the main character. It starts with good morning texts, daily routines memorised, calling them our favourite person. Then, approximately three weeks later, they are “going through something” and need “space”.

The space, it turns out, was from us specifically. And it turns out we were never the main character. We had the free trial, and the subscription has been cancelled without notice.

Then we wait. We tell our friends we have moved on. We post something suspiciously cheerful. And just when we have almost convinced ourselves, they return. With a “hey”. Or if they are feeling bold, a “heyy”, as if the extra letter is an apology.

It is not an apology. There is only the “heyy” and the extraordinary audacity that carried it to our inbox.

Some of us, meanwhile, are being kept warm on the sideline by someone who will not play but will absolutely not let anyone else have the ball, while simultaneously being treated like a snack someone is eating privately, making sure their friends, family and entire social existence never accidentally collide with ours.

Our older siblings called all of this a secret relationship and had the decency to be embarrassed. We gave everything a cleaner name, and now it has an aesthetic.

Now, not all of this is equally devastating.

The funniest part is that none of us think we are the problem. The one who pulled back believes he was upfront. The one keeping options open thinks it is just being practical. The one with multiple situationships thinks not letting them know about each other is simply good organisation.

We are all self-aware in our own story. We are all, somehow, the victim.

Nobody in this generation has ever done anything wrong, and the evidence is frankly overwhelming.

In the end, these situationships will lead somewhere. Some of us will become that student who wandered all year, walked into the exam on four hours of sleep, and somehow topped it anyway, annoyingly thriving and never explaining how.

Some will pass down a few unaddressed emotional patterns to the next generation like a family heirloom nobody requested. And some will show up to adulthood carrying only the emotional baggage.

And this is 2026, where we have wrapped love in an overwhelming emotional dictionary.