Ask anyone under 35 to define a situationship and they won’t hesitate — it’s the person you’ve been seeing for six months who isn’t your boyfriend or girlfriend. They text every day, even spend time with each other’s friends; but none of it comes with either person ever saying what this actually is. It’s intimacy with an exit built in.
Dating apps didn’t invent the arrangement, but they scaled it fast. A 2023 poll from dating app Plenty of Fish found nearly 80% of Gen Z daters said they’d been in a situationship. Most knew within weeks the relationship wasn’t headed anywhere official; they stayed anyway.
The appeal isn’t complicated. Commitment carries risk: naming a relationship means someone can reject it, or you can fail at it. Staying undefined protects both people from having to try and lose, and it means neither has to change anything about how they live to accommodate the other. All the benefits of closeness, none of the obligations.
That tradeoff isn’t unique to romance — the same logic has quietly rewritten how a lot of people approach God.
Pew Research’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study found 83 of every 100 U.S. adults say they believe in God or a universal spirit, and more than half say they believe with absolute certainty. Weekly attendance tells a different story: only 25 of those 100 adults actually show up to a religious service in person once a week. Belief has become something people hold onto without belonging to anything that holds them accountable to it, and God gets kept in the same undefined category as a situationship: present, appreciated, occasionally texted, never fully committed to.
Scripture has a name for this: “lukewarm.” Jesus tells the church in Laodicea in Revelation 3:16, “So, because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” That condemnation isn’t reserved for people who reject God outright; it’s aimed at people who claim him while keeping one foot out the door.
Lukewarm faith today rarely looks like open rebellion. It looks like curated belief, the parts of Christianity that function as comfort or moral scaffolding kept intact while anything requiring confrontation gets quietly set aside. Grace gets embraced. Repentance gets skipped. Community gets attended when convenient and dropped the moment it demands something, and the sermon on forgiveness always lands easier than the one on surrendering control.
James 1:8 describes this condition bluntly: such a person is “double-minded and unstable in all they do.” The instability isn’t a lack of belief — it’s belief without submission, which in practice functions almost identically to disbelief, since it changes nothing about how a person actually lives.
The messy weeds of faith are specific, not abstract. There’s a Bible that says inconvenient things about sex, money, forgiveness and self-denial; a church community that will actually notice if someone disappears and ask why; prayer practiced as a discipline whether or not it feels good that day, not a mood-dependent habit; sin treated as a real category with real consequences instead of a personality quirk to be managed.
Each of those pieces requires exposure — a person has to be known, corrected, and occasionally told no. That’s the same exposure a situationship is built to avoid. Undefined faith offers the comfort of God’s presence without the vulnerability of God’s authority, the same way an undefined relationship offers someone’s company without their claim on your life.
This isn’t a critique reserved for people watching from the outside of faith; it’s a mirror for anyone who has called themselves a Christian while quietly negotiating which parts of that identity they’re willing to live out. Most people who’d never say they’ve walked away from God have still, in practice, kept him at situationship distance: interested, invested to a point, unwilling to be defined by it in a way that would actually cost them something.
Jesus doesn’t leave room for that middle category. “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me,” he says in Luke 9:23. There’s no situationship clause in that invitation — it’s full surrender or it’s something else entirely.
The corrective isn’t more spiritual intensity performed for an audience. It’s the same move that ends a situationship and starts an actual relationship: a decision to be named, known and held to something, even when that costs more than staying undefined ever did.
Revelation 3:20 offers the image most people quote out of context, Jesus standing at the door and knocking. But the verse describes more than a casual visit — “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” That’s an invitation to let someone all the way in, not just close enough to enjoy the benefit of his presence while keeping him at the threshold. Full commitment was never going to be convenient, and it was never supposed to be.
