Situationships, Commitment Avoidance, and What the Fear Is Actually About

Why one person always seems to need more time, and what that tells you about the fear underneath it

Picture this scene. Two people have been in each other’s lives for nearly a year. They spend weekends together. They have met each other’s friends. There are inside jokes and late conversations and a physical closeness that feels, from the outside, unmistakably like a relationship. And yet, every time one of them edges toward giving it a name, the other finds a way around it. Not unkindly. Not with any certainty in either direction. Just a soft redirect, a little more time, a not yet that never quite becomes a yes.

If you have lived some version of this, you are not alone, and you are not imagining it. The situationship, a term now so culturally ubiquitous that it has made its way into clinical conversations, describes exactly this: a relational arrangement that has most of the emotional and logistical features of a committed partnership without the mutual agreement that it is one. And while the term itself is new, the dynamic it names is anything but.

Here is what I have learned from fifteen years of working with couples and individuals in relational distress. The avoidance of commitment is almost never about indifference. It is almost always about fear. And once you understand what kind of fear is actually running the show, everything about the dynamic begins to make a different kind of sense.

What the Research Says About Why Commitment Feels Threatening

In 1980, psychologist Caryl Rusbult published a model that would become one of the most replicated frameworks in relationship science. Her Investment Model proposed that a person’s level of commitment to a relationship is determined by three variables: how satisfied they feel within the relationship, how much they have invested in it over time, and how they perceive the quality of the alternatives available to them. What her research demonstrated, across decades of subsequent studies and across cultural contexts, is that commitment is not a fixed trait a person either has or does not have. It is a dynamic, fluid state that rises and falls in response to shifting perceptions of all three variables.

This matters enormously for understanding situationships, because it reframes the question entirely. The person who will not commit is not simply emotionally unavailable as a permanent feature of who they are. They are operating from a nervous system assessment, often entirely below the level of conscious awareness, that something in the commitment equation does not yet feel safe enough to lock in.

The research of Scott Stanley and Howard Markman at the University of Denver adds a layer to this that I find particularly useful in my practice. In their foundational work on what they call dedication commitment versus constraint commitment, Stanley and Markman found that the most psychologically meaningful form of commitment is dedication: the intrinsic, internally motivated desire to invest in one specific person and one specific shared future. Constraint commitment, by contrast, refers to the external forces that make leaving difficult, including shared finances, children, social networks, and the practical cost of starting over. Their research found that relationships anchored primarily in constraint rather than dedication are significantly more vulnerable to conflict, disconnection, and eventual breakdown.

The situationship, at its core, is a relationship in which the dedication decision has not yet been made. And in many cases, the reason it has not been made has very little to do with the person being waited on. It has everything to do with what commitment itself represents in the nervous system of the person who is stalling.

The Fear Nobody Names

In 2013, researchers Stephanie Spielmann, Geoff MacDonald, and their colleagues at the University of Toronto published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that examined what they called the fear of being single as a predictor of relationship behavior. What they found was striking and, for many people, uncomfortably recognizable. Individuals with a stronger fear of being alone were more likely to settle for relationships that fell short of what they actually wanted, were more willing to remain in unsatisfying partnerships rather than risk the uncertainty of singlehood, and were also, paradoxically, more likely to hold back from full commitment in new relationships because the vulnerability of being fully in felt more threatening than the limbo of partial presence.

Read that last finding again. The people who are most afraid of being alone are, in many cases, the ones who have the hardest time committing fully. Not because they want to be alone, but because the prospect of committing completely and then losing it feels catastrophically unsafe to their nervous system.

This is where attachment theory becomes essential. Hazan and Shaver’s foundational research, first published in 1987, established that the same attachment system governing how infants relate to their caregivers continues to operate, in recognizable form, in adult romantic relationships. Adults with what researchers call an anxious attachment style tend to pursue closeness intensely but live in a state of underlying terror that it will not last. Adults with an avoidant attachment style have learned, typically very early in life, that closeness itself is a source of potential danger, and that self-sufficiency is the only truly reliable form of protection.

The avoidantly attached person does not experience commitment as a gift. They experience it as a threat. Not because they do not care, but because at the deepest level of their nervous system, being fully known, fully relied upon, and fully responsible for someone else’s emotional wellbeing feels like standing on unstable ground. The situationship, with its ambient ambiguity and its unspoken exit ramp, feels like the only version of closeness they can tolerate without flooding. The arrangement is not cruelty. It is a nervous system doing the only thing it currently knows how to do to stay safe.

What Situationships Have to Do With Your Committed Relationship

Here is the piece I want you to hold if you are reading this inside a committed marriage or long-term partnership rather than a situationship. Commitment avoidance does not resolve itself automatically with time, shared history, a lease with both names on it, or a wedding. The avoidant attachment pattern that drives the situationship dynamic often shows up inside committed relationships as emotional unavailability, deflection whenever conversations get too intimate, a preference for problem-solving over emotional presence, and a persistent sense from the waiting partner that their person is somehow still holding something back. They are showing up. They are contributing. But the door is not fully open, and their partner feels it every single day.

In my practice, I see this play out with striking regularity between the two relational styles I have come to call the Fixer and the Connector.

The Fixer, who leads with logic and tends to pull back under emotional pressure, often carries more avoidant features in their attachment history. For a Fixer, full commitment does not feel like safety. It feels like exposure. Being fully depended upon, fully responsible for another person’s emotional world, and fully at risk of failing someone they love is an experience their nervous system registers as flooding. They step back not because they do not love their partner, but because the intensity of what commitment actually demands overwhelms the emotional vocabulary they currently have.

The Connector, who leads with emotion and processes everything out loud, often carries more anxious features in their attachment history. For a Connector, the Fixer’s emotional distance or ambiguity is not experienced as a personality quirk or an introvert’s preference for quiet. It is experienced as evidence of impending abandonment. So they pursue. They press. They escalate. Not because they are demanding or unreasonable, but because their nervous system reads the distance as danger.

What makes this dynamic so exhausting, whether it is playing out in a situationship or inside a twenty-year marriage, is that both people are operating from fear. And because they express that fear in completely opposite behavioral languages, each person’s response makes the other person’s fear worse. The Connector pushes for closeness. The Fixer, feeling flooded by the pressure, pulls further back. The Connector now reads the withdrawal as confirmation of their worst fear and pushes harder. The Fixer, overwhelmed, goes quiet or leaves the room. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, both people arrive at the same painful, private conclusion: I am alone here.

Why Ambiguity Is Never Neutral

Scott Stanley’s research on what he and his colleagues call sliding versus deciding offers one of the most practically useful reframes available for couples navigating any version of this pattern. Their finding, supported by multiple large-scale studies, is that couples who slide into deeper levels of commitment without ever making a conscious, deliberate decision to do so consistently show worse relational outcomes than couples who decide together at each major transition. The act of choosing explicitly and intentionally appears to create a meaningfully different psychological foundation than the act of simply not leaving.

This is why naming the pattern matters so much. Not to force a decision that one person is not ready to make, but to understand that ambiguity is not a neutral holding place. It is an active state with real costs. Research on prolonged relational uncertainty consistently shows that it is one of the most physiologically activating experiences a person can navigate. Both the person waiting and the person stalling are paying a price that neither of them has fully accounted for, and that price compounds over time.

Recognition is where everything starts. When you can see that what looks like avoidance is actually fear, and what looks like neediness is also fear, you stop experiencing your partner’s behavior as a personal attack or a deliberate withholding. You start experiencing it as a signal written in a language you have not yet learned to read. That shift in perception is genuinely meaningful. But perception alone does not change the pattern.

What changes the pattern is specific, practiced language that can reach past the nervous system’s protective response and speak directly to what is actually underneath it. For the Fixer, that means learning to name what commitment costs them emotionally and why, in language their partner can receive without it landing as rejection. For the Connector, it means learning to bring their need for closeness forward as an invitation rather than a demand, in language that feels safe to respond to rather than threatening to receive.

Where to Go From Here

The Fixer/Connector framework, and the deeper work of understanding what commitment actually requires of each relational style, lives at the heart of both Become One Again programs.

The Communication Course for Couples builds the foundational skills: how to identify the inner dialogue each style runs during moments of commitment pressure, how to recognize the reactive feelings that mask what is actually happening underneath, and the precise language that translates an internal experience into something a partner can genuinely receive and respond to. For couples where one partner holds back and the other pursues, this course gives both people a framework and a shared vocabulary for the first time.

The Marriage Rescue Plan goes further, into the emotional safety architecture that makes full, deliberate commitment feel possible rather than threatening, into trust rebuilding when commitment has been withheld or broken, and into what it actually means to choose each other consciously rather than simply remain together by default. The Connection Covenant that anchors the program’s first week is, at its foundation, a dedication commitment made explicit, which Stanley’s research suggests may be one of the most structurally important things a couple can do together.

Whether you are navigating a relationship that does not yet have a name or one that has had a name for years but still feels somehow unresolved, the underlying work is the same: understanding what full commitment asks of your nervous system, and building the language and the safety to meet it there.

If you would like to understand your own relational style and the patterns most likely driving your dynamic, the Fixer/Connector quiz is free and takes about five minutes. What you learn from it will reframe conversations you have been having for years.

If you are ready to go deeper, both the Communication Course for Couples and the Marriage Rescue Plan are built around this framework at their foundation. You can compare both programs side by side at becomeoneagain.com, or schedule a free twenty-minute consultation if you would like to talk through which one fits where you are right now.

The pattern is not the end of the story. It is just where we begin.

Chantel Cohen is a licensed therapist based in Atlanta, Georgia, and the founder of the Become One Again™ relationship programs, serving couples through coaching and educational resources nationally.

Research cited in this post: Rusbult (1980), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Investment Model. Stanley & Markman (1992), Journal of Marriage and the Family, dedication versus constraint commitment. Spielmann, MacDonald et al. (2013), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, fear of being single. Hazan & Shaver (1987), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, adult attachment theory. Stanley, Rhoades & Markman (2006), Family Relations, sliding versus deciding.