Situationships are underrated—said no one ever. But dare I say, as much as I despised situationships IRL (despite spending much of my teens and early twenties in them), I do love them in fiction, where they indeed might be underrated. Many a novel have been written about marriage, affairs, star-crossed lovers and the one that got away, but a surprising few have hung their mast on undefined relationships born not of fate or even human conniving, but of mere circumstance. Still, situationships make for great stories, especially if you’re not the one in them, because they keep you guessing until the very end.
I should know: I built my entire debut novel, The Band, around a series of seemingly ordinary and unplanned glitches that end up upending everybody’s lives. A boy releases a viral song about a fisherman and his son, but given his geopollitical context, it just so happens to piss off not one, not two, but all three of East Asia’s superpowers. He escapes to America, where he stumbles upon a woman at an grocery store carrying the one dish that reminds him of home. She happens to be a therapist; he happens to be on the verge of a mental health crisis. The situationship that follows drives the both of them—along with everyone else in their orbit—down a rabbithole populated by revenge plots, AI, and a future neither of them see coming.
Of course, I’m not the only one who loves a good situationship gone awry. Here are seven other books that feature the kind of unconventional relationships replete with the kind of sexual tension that makes you wonder: will they or won’t they?
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
It’s no accident that my own novel starts with a quote from this book—“his desire, when it comes, extinguishes her.” In Second Place, a middle-aged woman with a striking resemblance to the author invites an artists to stay at her house. She is married with children and a career, but no matter—the most distinguishable plot in the book is her consuming desire for this man who, at best, treats like like an appliance—helpful, sure, but not something he’d take to bed. Throughout my own reading of the book, I kept on waiting for him to break and give in to her advances, but alas, in fiction as IRL, changing someone’s mind is harder than it looks.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Some readers went crazy over the fact that at the end of 432 pages, Selin and Ivan (the protagonist and her love interest) seems to have never consummated their relationship. I found it the most relatable thing I read all year because I, too, spent all my college years in the same kind of sexual repression driven by a cocktail of being the good daughter of immigrants meets excessive intellect meets nerd school. Like the elusive Hungarian mathematician that is the (potentially underserved) target of Selin’s desires, the book can come off like a giant tease—the literary equivalent of blue balls—but then again, that might be part of its appeal.
Y/N by Esther Yi
Shortly after I wrote/sold The Band, I started to hear about Esther Yi’s Y/N, the one other literary fiction centered in the world of Kpop—a topic that is apparently usually reserved for YA (likely thanks to the long-standing, albeit outdated, stereotype about Kpop fans being mostly young girls). Yi’s stark portrayal of a Berlin woman who goes to Seoul to search for a Kpop idol named Moon takes on an obsessive but undefineable edge wherein she wants the boy desperately—despite being formally attached to a German boy named Masterson—in an extreme, parasocial kind of way. Multiple detours mark the subsequent breakup with the boyfriend and prolonged surrealistic journey to find the idol, but one the constant throughout is the thoroughly ambiguous nature of the unnamed narrator’s desire for this boy about which she knows nothing and everything at once.
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
Patel’s obsessive, thoroughly modern novel also has plenty of sex—forget “spicy”; this book will burn the roof of your mouth with the searing, unflinching way it talks about the kind of intercourse that can only be called f*cking and not “love-making.” This makes it all the more ironic—and unusual—that the central relationship of the book is not between the 31-year old narrator and her roster of both official and unofficial lovers, but rather, between her and the woman she is obsessed with, the ex-girlfriend of the man she wants to be with. It’s a situationship—or “delusionship”—unlike any other and I am here for it. By all the critical accolades it’s been getting (here’s to the Women’s Prize), I’m not the only one.
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
This short story collection has plenty of conventional relationships—of the married, divorced, extramarital, and one-night-stand variety—but the central locus upon which everything else rests is between a tenuously-connected pair of protagonists, Benny Salazar and his assistant, Sasha. Benny, an aging music executive, and Sasha, his young and attractive—albeit kleptomaniac—hireling, both start and end the novel. Under normal circumstances, this might set the reader up to expect something to happen between the two of them, as is often the case when an older man with resources is in the orbit of a younger woman with looks but no money. But Egan takes us on an unexpected ride through multiple situationships where sex is frequently dangled but rarely fulfilled. In one chapter, a woman goes on safari with her boyfriend and his two children but ends up being attracted to the tour guide—a fact that is apparent only to one of the kids. In another, an actress gets to play the role of a lifetime: the real-life girlfriend of an infamous dictator.
The Cleaner by Brandi Wells
The heroine in Brandi Wells’ debut novel, The Cleaner, is an almost deity-like character who sees all and does an enormous amount of meddling, but when it comes to her own relationships with the people in her life, she resort to the kind of ties that defy definition. The cleaning woman at the center of the story doesn’t really have family or traditional friends for that matter—the people she is closest to appear to be a co-worker named L. and a woman whose desk she cleans nicknamed Sad Intern. But every time we are attempted to assume that she wants to be besties with either of these two women, the cleaner reveals something to shatter that: she’ll visualize hitting her colleague so hard she bruises and steal the intern’s laxatives. Her romantic life is no different: whether an invitation to go on a walk with the delivery person is supposed to be a date or a platonic hangout remains an open question, a trademark of every situationship.
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Perhaps the weirdest of all the situationships on this list is the relationship Mrs. Caliban has with a sea creature named Larry in Rachel Ingalls’ unforgettable novella that everybody apparently ignored when it first came out years before I was born but now is finally making a much deserved comeback. It has all the hallmarks of a regular affair, complete with a deadend relationship that primes the protagonist to meet someone new and more exciting, except in this case the meet-cute happens in her living room when a nearly seven foot tall escaped frog enters through her screen door. For a cross-species union, their romance does take a quick turn towards the physical. I’m no herpetologist, so I’m not sure if what they do together counts as sex per say—but the point is this: can a situationship get any more conventional than when a married woman has a torrid romance with a fugitive member of a different species?