Are you in a humiliationship?

This one's for every person currently defending a man who cannot define a relationship.

01 June, 2026

Almost every woman I know in her mid-twenties is either in a situationship, on her way out of one, or watching someone she loves stay in one, which is clearly costing her mental health.

The dating scene in India right now has a very recognisable pattern: men who want all the warmth and intimacy of a relationship without the accountability that comes with it, and women who are somewhere between exhausted and hopeful, holding on to something that was never properly offered to them in the first place.

For many women, the signs have become familiar enough to spot almost immediately.

"I'm not ready for a relationship right now."

"Let's not put a label on this."

"Why can't we just enjoy what we have?"

The most annoying part about these conversations is that they usually come up when you're already months into whatever this thing is. After you've done it all: the daily 3-hour-long phone calls, spending entire weekends together, meeting each other's friends, everything that people in relationships do. You've also talked about him to your friends often enough for them to think you're already together. And the moment you ask them where it's going, you're blamed for complicating things.

This could be one of the major reasons why the term humiliationship has struck a strong nerve online.

What is a humiliationship?

The Urban Dictionary defines a humiliationship as "a situationship that feels like a humiliation ritual without the fame," which sounds like the sort of thing the internet would come up with after one too many bad dates, except the reason it went viral so quickly is that almost everyone seemed to know exactly what it meant.

The word describes an experience many women recognise immediately. The humiliation is not loud or obvious. It shows up in smaller ways. Like the excuses you keep making for them. Or the conversations you have with friends that begin with, "I know how this sounds, but..." It's also the way you start accepting behaviour you once would have called out immediately, only because the connection still feels worth protecting. And before long, you're carrying the weight of a relationship that never fully arrives while continuing to act as though it eventually will.

Now, the humiliation has very little to do with how things ended. Most women can handle disappointment. What stays with you is all the time spent trying to understand someone who never gave you a clear answer. Before you know it, you're putting more effort into understanding their situation than they ever put into understanding yours, and somehow, that starts to feel normal.

The most frustrating part is that most women are not completely unaware of what's happening. They can see when words and actions don't match. The problem is that these men can be very convincing when they want to be. Sometimes, they make you feel understood, reassured, and excited about where things are going. Those moments are what you hold on to when things become confusing again. They're what make it so hard to walk away, even when nothing has really changed.

So why do we stay?

The thing about a humiliationship is that you can be unhappy with someone for months and still convince yourself that things are improving.

Sumir Nagar, a behavioural expert, describes this through a concept called intermittent reinforcement, where unpredictability keeps people emotionally invested. "You don't stay for who they are. You stay for who they occasionally are, and you spend the rest of the time waiting for that version to return," he says.

I kept coming back to it because it captures something many women recognise instantly. The person keeping you attached is often the same person keeping you hopeful. Every situationship seems to give you reasons to leave and reasons to stay. There are conversations that make you feel understood, thoughtful gestures, and days when everything feels right. Those moments tend to stay with you much longer than they should, which is why moving on is often harder than it looks from the outside.

For Nagar, uncertainty itself plays a powerful role. "Certainty closes the case. Uncertainty employs you as a full-time analyst of someone else's behaviour," he says. It is probably why so many humiliationships end up consuming far more mental energy than actual relationships. The connection starts existing in your head as much as it does in real life. Every text feels worthy of examination, and obviously, all the inconsistencies feel like a clue. As Nagar points out, "A clear 'no' closes the loop. A 'maybe' leaves it humming." This explains why so many women find themselves stuck in the same cycle long after they have realised it is making them unhappy.

The cost of keeping the peace

One of the less talked about effects of a humiliationship is how easily you can lose yourself in it. It often starts with good intentions. You put off a conversation because they’ve had a tough week. You decide not to bring something up because the timing doesn’t feel right. You tell yourself that being patient is the mature thing to do. But months later, you realise there are whole parts of the relationship, and yourself, that you no longer talk about at all.

Sumir Nagar sees this as a pattern that develops gradually over time. "You don't lose your identity in a single decision. You misplace it one withheld sentence at a time," he says. Very few people wake up one morning and decide they are comfortable accepting less than they want. The adjustment happens through a series of small compromises that feel reasonable in isolation and far more difficult to recognise when viewed together.

Nagar points to what therapists call self-silencing, describing it as "the systematic suppression of your own thoughts to preserve a relationship." Once you start looking for it, the behaviour appears everywhere. In the woman who constantly rewrites a text before sending it, worried she might sound too demanding. In the friend who no longer tells her closed ones the full story because she already knows what they are going to say.

Perhaps the most unsettling part of Nagar's observation comes later. "Eventually, you forget there was an unedited draft. You start mistaking the performance for the person," he says.

After reading this, it becomes difficult to ignore how many humiliationships leave people questioning themselves long before they question the relationship. Nothing about it feels particularly significant at the time. You adjust, you accommodate, you tell yourself it is temporary, and then one day you look up and realise how much of the relationship has been built around keeping the peace.

Lead Image: IMDb

Also read: Have we made love bombing dangerously easy to fall for?

Also read: Are you a placeholder partner in your relationship?

Comment