On a random weekday afternoon, after I’m done with my classes, you’ll find me at the Pearsons Library. I’ll be sitting with a friend on the table next to the window, head stuck in my textbooks, absorbed in silence.
But if you’d walked into Pearsons last Monday, you would’ve found me with my textbooks closed, chatting passionately with my friend about one thing: my situationship.
“I just don’t understand,” I told my poor friend, who was hearing me talk about this for the thousandth time. “How did I let it happen in the first place?”
When I arrived at Pomona, my upperclassmen friends had warned me about the infamous freshman-year situationship, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I told my friends I was going to college to grow academically and that I’d never been a fan of romance anyway. Besides, I had bigger worries at hand like living in another country, speaking in a foreign language all of the time, following my lectures and overall surviving my freshman year.
Looking back, I think that’s exactly why I fell victim to the situationship.
College was my first time being so far from my family, so far from home. While navigating this newly found independence — one that is exhilarating but also terrifying — I was hoping to find traces of home in someone. Be it a roommate, a friend or … a guy.
I’ve heard about freshman-year situationships that last about a month. I’ve heard about some that transform into full-blown relationships and actually manage to last for more than a semester. Mine was a short one — it lasted only about two months — so why couldn’t I move on?
“But if you’d walked into Pearsons last Monday, you would’ve found me with my textbooks closed, chatting passionately with my friend about one thing: my situationship.”
My friend tried to console me. She told me that time was relative; in our freshman semester, a day felt like a week and a week felt like a month. Two months, then, must’ve felt like an eternity. I was convinced, but I kept talking anyway, feeling like there was something else I needed to get off my chest.
As I spoke, I fell back into the dangerous cycle of going over how things between us started, how things between us ended, what I could’ve done differently and then boom. It all went dark.
The lights went out and the previous silence (except for my constant chatter) in the room was replaced by the raucous sound of the generator. Sometime later we received a notification that Pomona was having an unexpected power outage.
Before that, when we were sitting in complete darkness patiently waiting for the lights to turn back on, we heard police officers enter the building, muttering something about a room filling up with smoke. A few moments later, we were told to evacuate the building.
“It seems like the universe is telling me to shut up and move on,” I told my friend as we left Pearsons.
“Or maybe, just maybe,” she joked, “the universe is telling you to stop blaming yourself.”
I gave her a skeptical look. She rolled her eyes before speaking again.
“But imagine if the building exploded with us inside and that was the last thing we ever talked about?”
I imagined that scene: a memorial held for two Pomona students, two freshmen with bright futures and unfulfilled potential and no one would’ve known we were discussing my freshman-year situationship.
Over dinner, I told my friends about my imagined scene, and we all laughed at the thought. Sitting in the darkness of Malott’s Seal Court, I was reminded of the darkness back at Pearsons. I’d felt so guilty back then, bothering my friend to talk about a pathetic non-relationship. And now here I was, surrounded by all my friends, laughing about the whole thing.
Those moments of darkness, ironically, gave me a sense of clarity. As I heard my friends go on about their days, I realized that one, I wouldn’t get over the whole situationship thing so easily and two, I didn’t feel guilty about it.
I can’t really blame anyone who enters a situationship in their freshman year. It was lovely to be able to share my life with someone for a little while, to have someone to talk about my plans for the day in the morning and talk about how my day went at night. To find stability and routine in a moment of transition — that’s not pathetic.
Despite its ending, I don’t regret anything I did.
It’s a joy to have friends who listen to you talk about a situationship thousands of times, who take your feelings seriously yet still laugh with you. Friends who don’t judge you, but take care of you.
When the lights go out, it’s okay to sit in the darkness for a little while in hopes that the light will return. But not when the building is filling up with smoke.
When that happens, you go out and look for a place with the lights on — or you go get an early dinner at Malott with your friends. Both options are good.
Anna Ripper Naigeborin PO ’28 is from São Paulo, Brazil. Her favorite flowers are hydrangeas — the white ones.
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