9 Years a Situationship: Why I Mistook Breadcrumbs for Love

Happy new year gang. It feels good to be back with you all.. and new year, same me.. so let’s keep the ball rolling with another deep dive into my feelings and telling ya’ll my business. HA!

About nine years ago (back when I was just stabilizing my life in Atlanta) figuring out who I was and what I wanted, I swiped right on a guy who ended up becoming a constant thread in my life. Was it Tinder or Bumble?It’s all a blur now, tbh! But that swipe led to a situationship that lingered for almost a decade. And I want to talk about how I realized that it was holding me back, truly.

He was the guy who always showed up in these small but consistent ways. Sending a gift when I least expected it, checking in on me, paying bills, putting me on a financial allowance, and making sure I was always okay physically. On the surface, it looked like care. And in many ways, it was. But the truth is, he never fully showed up in the way I actually needed. I held onto him as an emotional safety net, and for a long time, I didn’t see how that kept me from fully opening myself up to something real.

Here’s where it gets deeper. Growing up without a present father and losing my mom before entering my twenties made me fiercely independent. Somewhere along the way, my brain learned to interpret even small acts of care as something bigger than they were. Someone paying for a meal, sending flowers, covering a bill, or even checking to see if I ate. Those gestures felt monumental to me because my mindset has always been that not a single person owes you a thing in life, not even support. That mindset made those gestures feel like proof of love. Proof that I mattered. Proof that someone was thinking about me.

So when this man showed up with acts of service, I confused that with emotional availability. I mistook attention for intention. I told myself he was really there for me, when in reality, he was only showing up in ways that kept me comfortable enough to stay connected, but never enough to move forward.

There was also a fear sitting quietly underneath all of it. The kind you don’t always say out loud. The fear that one day I’d get a message telling me he met someone. That he found a woman he wanted to marry. That he was starting a family. That she was already pregnant. And I knew, deep down, that news would devastate me. Not because he was my partner, but because I had emotionally positioned him as something permanent in my life when the reality was anything but. Getting my mind right before that moment ever happens felt necessary, not dramatic. I’ve lived through enough heartbreak to know that walking into another one unprepared is not a rite of passage. It’s optional.

That realization forced me to be honest with myself. I was measuring love by small tokens instead of by consistent presence. So I started changing the rules. Quietly. Intentionally. I stopped being available for casual check-ins disguised as care. I stopped answering business questions or offering emotional labor out of habit. I didn’t announce a boundary. I embodied one. When messages drifted into old patterns, I didn’t engage. I kept it in the realm of surface-level friendship and nothing more.

I also stopped romanticizing what never really existed. I stopped building entire futures in my head based on low effort and distance. I stopped telling myself stories that made a situationship feel safer than it was. Instead of comparing new people to him, I started comparing them to my actual standards. How do they show up consistently? How do they make me feel in my body? Do I feel calm, seen, and secure, or am I filling in gaps on my own?

I’m learning to ask myself better questions. Not just what someone does for me, but how their presence affects me. I’m learning that while I can be avoidant at times, that doesn’t disqualify me from receiving real affection, real commitment, and real emotional safety. Acts of service can be kind, but they are not substitutes for presence, partnership, or intention.

This isn’t about bitterness or cutting someone off in anger. It’s about clarity. It’s about no longer accepting a version of care that keeps me emotionally tethered but relationally unfulfilled. It’s about choosing to make space for the kind of love that shows up fully, consistently, and without confusion.

If you’ve ever found yourself holding onto a safety net because letting go felt scarier than staying, you’re not alone. If you’ve had to unlearn what love looked like before you could recognize it in real time, I see you.

Drop a comment and tell me what letting go has looked like for you, or what you’re still working through. We’re allowed to grow out of patterns that once kept us safe. We’re allowed to want more. And we’re allowed to take our time getting there.