From Relationship to Situationship

The Quiet Reordering of Intimacy in 2026

Each Valentine’s Day now arrives with a peculiar undertone. The restaurants are full, the timelines perform romance as usual, and yet the ambient conversation carries a different frequency. More people, it seems, are single. More people are “talking to someone.” More people are in something that is neither relationship nor solitude — a condition that has earned its own vocabulary: the situationship.

The temptation is to declare a crisis. But crises suggest rupture. What we may be witnessing instead is reordering.

A useful place to begin is with an uncomfortable correction to popular perception. In many countries — including several African urban centres — young men are statistically slightly more likely to report being single than young women, particularly under 30. Women often date older men. A smaller proportion of men may date multiple partners at once. Some women date outside their immediate age cohort. The arithmetic is not as lopsided as the cultural narrative suggests.

Yet culturally, the single woman remains more visible. Marriage continues to carry different symbolic weight for women than for men. A woman being single at 30 invites commentary; a man’s singleness at the same age rarely does. Women also tend to articulate their desire for clarity more openly, whereas men are more likely to inhabit ambiguity without public declaration.

The perception and the mathematics do not perfectly align. But the underlying tension is real.

For much of the 20th century, heterosexual partnership rested on a relatively stable bargain. A

man’s social value was legible: provide, protect, lead. A woman’s social value was likewise structured around dependency, care, and domestic stability for the family. The arrangement was often unequal, sometimes unjust, but it was coherent.

That coherence has eroded.

Women’s economic participation has expanded dramatically. In many urban centres, women are not merely earning; they are out-earning. Simultaneously, the cost of living has risen sharply. Housing markets in urban cities like Lagos, London, Paris, Nairobi and New York have transformed marriage from an economic solution into an economic risk. Under such pressure, many men no longer feel financially qualified to assume the role that earlier generations considered foundational. Provision, once an entry requirement, now feels unstable.

When the basis of masculine identity shifts, hesitation follows.

At the same time, masculinity itself is undergoing a public revision. The older script — stoicism, authority, economic dominance — has been challenged, sometimes rightly. Yet the newer script is still being negotiated. Men are encouraged to be emotionally expressive but not fragile, decisive but not domineering, ambitious but not controlling. This is not contradiction so much as transition. Still, transition breeds uncertainty. And uncertainty rarely produces decisive commitment.

Women, meanwhile, have not paused their evolution. The contemporary urban woman is often financially independent, geographically mobile, psychologically literate and less willing to endure asymmetry. For many, marriage is no longer a survival strategy. It is a choice. And choices can be deferred.

A quieter friction emerges here. The traits that make women more autonomous also raise the threshold for partnership. Psychologically balanced, financially stable, emotionally available and confident without insecurity — this combination exists among men, but not in the abundance suggested by social media. Nor are women universally inclined to mould potential into readiness. The generational appetite for “training” a partner appears diminished.

Complicating this is a deficit of emotional education. Many men were raised within environments that prized endurance over articulation. Yet contemporary relationships demand fluency in emotional language. Communication, vulnerability and self-reflection are no longer optional refinements; they are prerequisites. The result is a cohort of men learning in real time skills that were never explicitly taught.

Technology has amplified every instability.

Dating applications and social media have expanded access while diluting urgency. Intimacy can be obtained without structure. Companionship without clarity. Motherhood through sperm purchase. Sex without long-term intention. The situationship thrives precisely because it lowers the cost of participation. It offers connection without the formalities of commitment.

At scale, however, this arrangement breeds fatigue. Both men and women report exhaustion from prolonged ambiguity. Yet the alternative — formal commitment — appears heavier than before. The risks are visible. Divorce proceedings are no longer discreet. Financial settlements are public. Infidelity circulates virally. Marriage has not lost desirability, but failed marriages has acquired visibility in its failures, while successful ones are protected from the public.

There is also the matter of space. Earlier generations met partners within churches, neighbourhood associations, extended families and workplaces that doubled as communities. Many of these “third spaces” have weakened. Work is transactional. Public life is increasingly mediated through screens. Serendipity has been replaced by selection. The paradox is striking: exposure has increased; embeddedness has declined.

All of this unfolds within a culture that valorises speed. Love, by contrast, demands patience. It demands tolerance for discomfort, repair after conflict, and the slow accumulation of trust. Modern life rewards replacement over endurance. A relationship that falters can be exited and substituted with minimal friction.

Against this backdrop, loneliness appears less like an epidemic and more like a by-product of systemic recalibration. Women are less economically dependent and more cautious. Men are renegotiating identity and economic footing. Technology has altered the cost-benefit structure of intimacy. Marriage remains aspirational but no longer urgent.

If there is anxiety in the air this Valentine’s Day, it may not be because love is disappearing. It may be because the institutional scaffolding that once supported it has shifted faster than new models have been built.

The question, then, is not why so many are single.

The more consequential question is whether a new architecture of partnership is emerging — one less dependent on rigid gender roles yet more demanding of mutual competence — and whether this generation is willing to endure the uncertainty required to construct it.

Singleness, in that sense, may not signal collapse. It may signal transition. Transitions, however, are rarely comfortable.