Am I settling for less than I deserve?

You might be, if you’re taking late-night texts and vague plans while hoping it becomes what you actually want, and the months you’ve already put in are the main reason you stay. In a situationship, the honest test isn’t “do I deserve better?” It’s “am I getting what I want, or just waiting to?”

What does settling look like in a situationship?

Say you’re Malia, 23, and you’ve been seeing Dex, 26, for five months. He likes every story you post, usually within minutes. He texts “u up?” around 11 most weeknights. When you suggest a Saturday thing (a friend’s gallery opening, brunch, literally anything with daylight), he’s “so down, let’s see.” It never happens. Your roommate calls it “the night shift.”

Here’s that in four lines:

• What happened: five months of late-night plans, daily story likes and no weekend plans that land.
• The reading: he likes you but isn’t ready, so it’ll change.
• The fear: that asking for more will end it, and you’ll have nothing.
• The next step: say what you want once, clearly, and see what he does with it.

Only the first line is a fact.

There’s a word for steady attention with no follow-through: breadcrumbing, getting just enough contact to stay hooked without the relationship moving. In a 2020 survey of 626 adults aged 18 to 40 in Spain, Raúl Navarro and colleagues found that people who’d been breadcrumbed by a dating partner in the last year reported less life satisfaction and more loneliness and helplessness.1 Being ghosted alone wasn’t linked to those outcomes in that study.1

In other words, in that study it was the lingering, half-there version that went with feeling worse.

Why is it so hard to walk away after a few months?

Because time feels like an investment you’d be throwing out. Researchers in Portugal tested this with relationship scenarios. In one experiment with 902 people, participants were more likely to stay in an unhappy relationship when money and effort had already gone into it.2 In a second experiment with 275 people, participants were willing to put more time into a relationship the more time they’d already put in.2

That’s the sunk cost effect: letting what you’ve already spent decide what you spend next. Five months with Dex is gone either way. It can’t tell you whether month six is a good idea.

Why do I stay even when I’m not happy?

A big meta-analysis by Benjamin Le and Christopher Agnew, combining 52 studies and more than 11,000 people from five countries, found that three things predict how committed people feel: how satisfied they are, how good their alternatives look, and how much they’ve invested.3 Those three held up across genders, cultures and same-sex couples.3

Notice that satisfaction is only one of the three. You can feel pretty committed to a situationship you’re not happy in, simply because you’ve put a lot in and other options feel far away.

Hope can do the rest. A 2025 study in the journal Sexuality & Culture, reported by PsyPost, looked at why young adults stay in situationships.4 Earlier research has found situationships generally less satisfying than defined relationships, yet some people still get enough meaning, hope and emotional connection from them to stay.4 That’s the part that makes settling hard to see from the inside. The good nights are real. The question is whether they’re enough, or whether you’re staying for the version of this you’re hoping arrives.

Is wanting more the same as being “too much”?

No. Wanting a Saturday, a label or a plan with a date on it is a pretty normal thing to want from someone you’ve seen for five months. Settling isn’t about having standards that are too high or too low. It’s about whether you’ve stopped saying what you want because you’re scared of the answer.

A quick way to check: imagine your best friend sending you a screenshot of your own thread with Dex’s name swapped out. Would you tell them it’s a fair deal, or would you tell them to ask for more? If the advice you’d give them is different from what you’re doing, that gap is worth looking at. It doesn’t mean you have to end anything. It means the next move should be a choice, not a default.

What can you do this week?

• Write two lists. What you want from this, and what you’re actually getting. Keep them short and specific.
• Ask once, with a plan attached. Instead of “what are we,” try “I’d like to actually do weekends together. Want to come to the gallery thing Saturday at 7?” A plan beats a week of decoding.
• Watch what happens next, not what’s said. If Saturday keeps not happening, that’s the answer you needed, given gently.
• Separate the time from the choice. Ask yourself: if I’d met him last week and he acted like this, would I sign up for five more months?
• Get support if the fear is big. If being alone feels unbearable, or the situation is wearing down your mood, talk to your campus counseling center or a licensed therapist.

What doesn’t the research show?

• The breadcrumbing survey was a single snapshot of adults in Spain, so it shows a link, not that breadcrumbing caused the loneliness.1
• The sunk cost experiments used imagined scenarios, not people’s real relationships, and time on its own didn’t predict staying in the first experiment.2
• The commitment meta-analysis mostly covers defined relationships, not unlabeled ones, so applying it to a situationship is an interpretation.3
• The situationship study is reported here through a news story, and its sample details weren’t given there, so treat it as one study’s picture of why people stay, not a rule.4