There’s a person on your mind right now as you read this. You know exactly who they are.
You talk every day. Long calls that stretch past midnight when you both have early mornings. You know their coffee order, their childhood nickname, the name of the person who broke their heart in campus. They send you memes at 7am. You’re the first person they call when something goes wrong.
But if someone asked you today: what are you two? you’d hesitate. You’d smile awkwardly and say something like “it’s complicated” or “we’re just close” or the modern Kenyan classic: “Tunajuana tu.”
We just know each other.
Welcome to the situationship. Population: more Kenyans than will ever admit it.
How Did We Get Here?
The situationship isn’t entirely new. There have always been in-between relationships: the ones that lived in the grey area between friendship and something more. But what’s changed is how normal it’s become. How deliberate. How long people are willing to live inside that grey area without asking for anything more defined.
Part of it is the economy, honestly. Commitment in Kenya today carries real financial weight. Relationships lead to expectations: meeting parents, contributing to each other’s families, planning a future that costs actual money. When you’re navigating loan repayments, a job market that keeps shifting under your feet, and a cost of living that went up and forgot to come back down, “undefined” starts to feel like the responsible choice.
Part of it is also what the internet did to romance. Dating apps gave everyone options. Social media made it easy to maintain emotional intimacy without physical presence. X, formerly Twitter, has entire communities built around the language of almost-love. Suddenly you could have all the warmth of a relationship with none of the paperwork, and a whole online culture telling you that was actually fine.
So here we are.
The Anatomy of a Kenyan Situationship
It usually starts innocently enough. A DM. A mutual friend’s party in Kilimani. A work colleague who always somehow ends up in the same lunch spot. There’s chemistry, obvious and undeniable. But instead of defining it, you both silently agree to just… let it be.
And for a while, it’s genuinely good. There’s excitement without pressure. Affection without accountability. You get the best parts of togetherness: the late night conversations, the inside jokes, the comfort of someone who just gets you, without the hard conversations about where this is going.
It feels like love. It moves like love. It hurts like love when they post something on their story and you’re suddenly aware that you have no actual claim on this person.
That’s the first crack.
What It’s Actually Costing You
Here’s what the soft lighting of a situationship hides: there is no such thing as emotional investment without emotional risk. You cannot care about someone this deeply and remain unbothered. The heart doesn’t do casual as well as we pretend it does.
It costs you time. Months. Sometimes years. Spent in something that cannot grow because it was never planted properly. Time you could have spent healing, building yourself, or finding someone who actually wanted to be found.
It costs you clarity. When you’re in a situationship, your emotional energy is occupied. You’re half-present in your own life because part of you is always waiting: for a sign, for a define-the-relationship conversation that never quite comes, or for them to finally choose you the way you’ve quietly been choosing them.
It costs you honesty. With yourself most of all. Because deep down, most people in situationships know exactly what it is. They just keep hoping that if they stay patient enough, loving enough, available enough, the other person will eventually step forward and make it real.
Sometimes they do. More often, they don’t.
The “Why” Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Ask someone why they’re in a situationship and they’ll give you the comfortable answer. “I’m not ready for anything serious.” “We’re just vibing.” “I don’t want to rush anything.”
But sit with it longer and the real answers emerge.
Fear, mostly. Fear of rejection: because asking for definition means risking a no. Fear of vulnerability: because a real relationship requires you to show up as a full, imperfect human being and hope that’s enough. Fear of loss: because even an undefined something feels better than a clearly defined nothing.
And on the other side, sometimes, is something less romantic: convenience. The situationship works for them. They get companionship, emotional support, intimacy: all without the responsibilities that come with a real commitment. And as long as you’re willing to stay in that space, there’s very little incentive for them to change anything.
That’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody puts in the 3am paragraph they never send.
When “Going With the Flow” Becomes a Current That Pulls You Under
Nairobi has a way of making situationships feel more glamorous than they are. Rooftop hangouts in Westlands. Sunday drives to nowhere in particular. The kind of easy intimacy that looks great from the outside and feels quietly hollow from the inside.
Because going with the flow is only fun when you’re both flowing in the same direction. When one person wants more and the other is comfortable with less, someone is always swimming against the current. Smiling through it. Pretending the water is fine.
It’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain. Not dramatic, not loud: just a constant low-level ache of wanting something you can’t quite name because you were never allowed to name it in the first place.
Choosing Yourself Is Not the Same as Giving Up
Walking away from a situationship is one of the hardest things to do precisely because there’s no clean break. Nobody cheated. Nobody lied outright. Nobody did anything you could point to and say this: this is why it ended. It just… was what it was, and what it was wasn’t enough.
But choosing to want more: something with a name, a direction, and a real foundation, is not giving up on love. It’s refusing to accept a fake version of it.
You deserve a relationship that doesn’t leave you analyzing voice note tone at midnight. One where you’re not performing coolness to mask how much you actually care. One where the person on the other end isn’t just enjoying your energy but actively choosing to stay in your life.
The Bottom Line
Situationships aren’t always malicious. Sometimes they’re two people who genuinely like each other but can’t quite get their timing, their fear, or their lives aligned. Sometimes they’re a chapter that needed to be lived before either person was ready for something real
But they have a shelf life. And when you’ve been undefined for longer than feels okay, when the ambiguity has stopped feeling exciting and started feeling like waiting for a bus that may never come, that’s your answer.
Have the conversation. Ask the question. Risk the no.
Because the only thing worse than finding out they weren’t ready for you is spending another six months pretending that almost-love is the same as the real thing.
It isn’t. And somewhere deep down, you already know that.
