Jane Austen Would Have LOVED Situationships Actually

On modern dating, marriage plots, and why we're all still writing the same story

One thing about me? I love new year’s. Deeply and truly. As much as I thrive in the liminal space between Christmas and NYE, I equally enjoy the slow crawl back to productivity that we fall into once the first of the year hits.

And… I love more than anything to make a ritual out of it.

So, every year as the first of January comes and goes I reread Pride and Prejudice. For some reason it’s the one book that gets my creative juices flowing at a time where all I want to do is mix writing, and love, and social commentary.

I usually binge-read the book in the first couple of days of the year and let the inspiration that inevitably comes from Austen’s words flow for months to come. It’s masterful. During this year’s rendition of the ritual, I came to one solid, unwavering conclusion: Jane Austen would’ve absolutely eaten up the chaos of modern dating.

Let me explain.

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She Would’ve Been FERAL About Situationships.

Austen spent her entire career writing about the psychological warfare of existing as a woman in a system designed to keep you guessing. She invented using romance as a disguise for true, deep social commentary, and for that reasons alone I know she would have wrote a killer book based on the world’s most annoying modern dating trope: the situationship.

Austen, as we know and love her, fully and repeatedly explored the economic realities masked by courtship, dissected power dynamics, and exposed how marriage was an economic transaction where women had to decode male behavior because their entire survival depended on reading the room correctly.

The situationship is the modern version of the same economic and emotional precarity she spent her entire writing career analyzing and she’d loathe it (while also writing the world’s best modern literary piece about it).

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Austen Would Hate Situationships Because at Their Root, They’re a Power Structure.

Austen was the queen of visualizing social structure through relatable, trending prose. She has an uncanny ability to observe social situations from an unbiased, logical lens and identify the socioeconomic, social, and psychological factors at play.

She would have immediately clocked that situationships benefit, and are designed for, a patriarchal world in the exact same ways that she already wrote about.

What made Austen brilliant wasn’t just that she could identify these power dynamics. It was that she could show you how they operated in real time through the minutiae of social interaction. She could use prose to illustrate the exact way a man asks a woman to dance twice versus once. In a single line she would lay out the implications of a letter received versus a letter delayed. She could showcase the difference between formal politeness and genuine regard with the use of a singular comma.

Ultimately, she understood that power doesn’t just exist in grand gestures or explicit hierarchies and she, through her work, showed that it lives in the small, everyday interactions where one person has the ability to define reality and the other person has to guess at it.

That’s exactly what makes the situationship such a perfect subject for Austenian analysis—it’s a relationship structure built entirely on withholding definition.

Same Problem, New Tech.

Women in Austen’s novels had to navigate ambiguous male attention because their economic survival depended on marriage. They couldn’t be direct about their feelings, or initiate relationships, advocate for their needs, or demand clarity. Her heroines lived in a time where they were nothing but the passive recipients of a man’s decision to take action in the marriage market. They had to wait for men to decide if they were worth committing to, all while performing the delicate balance of being desirable without appearing desperate.

Today we’ve dismantled the economic necessity of marriage. Women can own property, have careers, and survive without husbands if they choose to. That’s progress that Austen would’ve recognized as revolutionary.

But, somehow, we’re still performing the exact same psychological labor her heroines did, and she’s no doubt recognize that too.

We’re still analyzing ambiguous behavior and waiting for men to decide we’re worth defining things with. It’s just that now we’re doing so over time between texts and activity status instead of moves across as the ballroom floor.

The modern situationship is actually Regency courtship without the social pressure on men to eventually commit, which I’d argue (and believe Austen would, too) is even worse for the health and wellbeing of women.

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Did We Trade Economic Dependence For Emotional Dependence And Call It Freedom?

Elizabeth Bennet couldn’t afford to be direct with Darcy because her family’s financial security was at stake. She had to decode his behavior, analyze every interaction, try to figure out his intentions without ever being able to just ask.

We don’t have that excuse anymore. We’re (in most cases) not economically dependent on male approval, yet we’re still performing the same dance of trying to be chosen rather than choosing.

The situationship exists because we’ve removed all the social structures that used to force clarity—no more calling cards, no more chaperones, no more social expectations about courtship timelines—but we haven’t actually redistributed the power. We’ve just made the ambiguity endless.

Men still get all the benefits of intimacy without the vulnerability of commitment. Women still do all the work of trying to figure out where things stand. The power dynamic didn’t change, we just removed the structures that used to eventually force men’s hands and rebranded it as men choosing to be picky and free while women pined hopefully in a time where they were supposed to feel empowered.

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She’d HATE That We’re Supposed To Feel Empowered By Our Ability To Participate In This.

Austen would’ve absolutely skewered the way society has rebranded the same power imbalance as agency in modern dating.

Her heroines had no choice but to wait for men to propose. We, theoretically, have choice. We can leave relationships. We can demand clarity. We can walk away from what feels misaligned. But, are we actually choosing these things, or are we just accepting it because the alternative—being alone, being seen as too demanding, being “difficult”—still carries the same social penalties it did in 1813?

Austen may have wrote about women who had to marry to survive, and we may not have to do that anymore, but we’re still structuring our emotional lives around male validation.

The economics changed but the psychology didn’t.

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So, She’d Write About The Situationship As A Feminist Issue, Not A Dating Trend.

Because that’s what it is. It’s not about romance or connection or modern relationships being complicated. It’s about power.

It’s about how we’ve achieved economic independence but haven’t figured out how to stop centering male approval in our sense of self-worth. It’s about how ambiguity always benefits the person with more power. It’s about how women are still doing the majority of emotional labor in relationships while men get to just show up.

Austen understood that the marriage plot wasn’t really about love, but rather about survival in a system that gave women no other options and that in and of itself was her chosen vehicle to expose economic and social inequality.

If she were writing today, she’d do the same thing with the situationship. She’d show how we’ve traded one form of dependence for another. How the ambiguity that modern dating celebrates is actually just another way to keep women uncertain, waiting, performing.

She’d write about women who have careers and independence and choices but who still find themselves analyzing text message response times with the same desperate energy her heroines used to decode ballroom behavior because the core dynamics that were around during her time still haven’t changed.

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