American Loneliness and the Rise of SituationshipTok

Why are so many young people posting about their one-sided relationships?

Americans are lonelier than ever. This isn’t an exaggeration: in May of 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General released a special report detailing the deleterious physical effects of chronic loneliness on the human body. The evidence has been slowly mounting for years, with people openly admitting to having fewer close friendships, losing touch with friends during lockdown, and attending religious services in lower numbers than ever before. Of course, participation in civic groups, clubs, and local organizations has dwindled in the last two decades, with the seminal work Bowling Alone detailing the rise of American isolation way back in 2000.

While it’s easy to blame Covid-19 for the entirety of the current loneliness crisis, it isn’t entirely the pandemic’s fault. Millions of Americans live alone, millions report having very few friendships, and the friendships they do have aren’t as close as they would like for them to be. People are clamoring for connection, and for the generation growing up in the shadow of the pandemic, loneliness is running rampant.  

Much has been made of Covid-19’s effect on Gen Z’s development: according to a survey, one-in-four members of Gen-Z feel unprepared to network or speak confidently in front of crowds. One-third state anxiety is a major factor holding them back from success. It’s not surprising that as society becomes lonelier than ever, a contingent of young people who were forced to pause their in-person studies (at either high school or college) missed out on key developmental milestones (like moving away, living alone for the first time, and attending social events) are now craving human connection.

But perhaps nothing speaks more to the loneliness crisis than the proliferation of TikToks detailing this phenomenon in explicit detail. Young people aren’t keeping quiet about their anguish: there are dozens of videos (sometimes made up of walls of text) explaining in clear-cut language exactly what loneliness is doing to them. In the last 18 months specifically, a new subset of these videos has risen to prominence among Gen Z: SituationshipTok.

A situationship is defined as an undefined casual relationship with the benefits of an exclusive romantic relationship (“hanging out”, going on dates, sex) without labels, allowing both parties to behave as if they’re single, even if one party wants to escalate the relationship. This latter half of the definition makes up the bulk of SituationshipTok: people openly expressing their desire to be close to the person they have been seeing, but feeling adrift, lost, and alone due to the unrequited nature of their feelings. 

Thanks to the TikTok algorithm, users are often sorted into silos, seeing content based on the videos they most interact with. One can easily find themselves in a feedback loop: seeking connection and solidarity based on their loneliness and further cementing their feelings of sadness and yearning simply by virtue of spending hours on TikTok.

It isn’t surprising TikTok is the app of choice for young people’s ennui. For years, TikTok has been seen as the domain of Gen Z, as the app saw an exponential increase in users 18 to 25 in 2020.  Ten years ago, young Millennials posted about their sadness on Tumblr, creating thriving communities through reblogged images of (mostly) young women crying, lying around in fields, and staring glumly at bodies of water.

Ten years before that, young people posted about their pain on LiveJournal. Seeking connection through loneliness as a practice has always existed, but on TikTok, it has a different tenor. LiveJournal was rigidly fragmented: users existed in disparate communities with little to no crossover unless one made a conscious effort. Tumblr introduced the practice of having one’s individual experience go viral, but communities were still much smaller than they are on TikTok. Videos about situationships have reached millions of viewers, with most generating thousands of comments. These videos are reaching audiences across the world, uniting Gen Z in their agony.

One can ask: what is the point of posting about a one-sided relationship gone awry? The answer could be elusive, but it seems that the loneliness is both the question and the answer. Many people are staying in one-sided pseudo-relationships to assuage the loneliness they feel in their everyday lives, and the practice could be seen as either self-destructive or generative.

Discovering that Gen Z is having trouble developing communication skills explains why so many of them are caught up in these faux relationships: if one hasn’t been taught to ask for mutuality, respect, monogamy, and care, how can they demand more for themselves when entering the dating world? Learning to be in a relationship is a skill, and one cannot flex a muscle if one doesn’t know it exists. Standing on the outside looking in, it seems that SituationshipTok is both a plaintive cry and a way to find peers: a digital message in a bottle sent out in the hope of finding other people trapped in these painful situations.

Growing up in the wake of a global pandemic is painful enough, but watching the effects of Covid-19 coincide with the new epidemic of American loneliness is frightening.  As more members of Gen Z come of age and navigate these relationships, the hope is that they can ultimately connect based on their shared experiences by posting through it. These TikToks could even be the answer to this particular flavor of American loneliness: a way to build community, learn communication tips and strategies, and eventually, emerge from the relationships that clearly ail them.