The poetics of situationships: exploring the messy language of modern love songs
When you think about the most significant love songs ever penned, they’re typical statements of total and utter adoration and enduring commitment. “I will always love you,” Dolly Parton wailed. “All I ask is please, please, please love me,” Elvis Presley begged. “To lead a better life, I need my love to be here,” Paul McCartney said, staying true to The Beatles’ enduring belief that love is all you need. But ask anyone currently single, and they’ll likely tell you that doesn’t quite cut it.
Something seemed to happen in the rift of life getting back to normal in a post-pandemic world. As society opened back up and people could mix again, Gen-Z especially, having just spent formative years of their early adulthood locked away, seemed paralysed by the vast spectrum of experience waiting for them. It manifested in a selection of random ways. Gig etiquette seemed to go out of the window as excitable new crowds headed to venues and nightclubs for the first time. Trend cycles became shorter and sharper as the impact TikTok seemed to have on our attention span and interpersonal relationships, and that distracted nature is found there, too.
But it started long before that. The lessons in love provided by the writers of decades past can’t be accurately applied to today’s lovelorn listeners. Up until very recently written songs, the music of the 1950s onward to the late 2010s is devoid of the context of the current dating arena. Back then, it was all chance meetings or friends-to-lovers arcs, both of which can be easily romanticised into grand and glorious love songs. When The Beatles sang, “I’ve just seen a face / I can’t forget the time or place / Where we just met,” they weren’t singing about a new Hinge match. As our romantic lives become increasingly digital and disconnected, with dating apps now being considered as the leading way to finding a romantic partner as opposed to meeting in person or through friends, love is being shrunk to a smaller, seemingly more isolated thing that doesn’t match up to the big, universal and declarative statements of love that used to colour love songs.
In response, a new generation of artists seem to be figuring out a new language for their love songs, one that is tricky, undefined and overwhelmingly casual to fit the exact form of the dating world they exist in. Rather than singing of great and committed loves, like the forever phrases used by Presley and co, artists are singing of situationships.
The word ‘situationship’ feels trending and chronically online, but it really is the only descriptor for a specific and clear dynamic. Declared one of the 2023 words of the year, the Oxford dictionary added the term, defining it as “a romantic or sexual relationship that is not considered to be formal or established”. With courtship now so unrecognisable from the shape it distinctly formal shape it used to have, language has had to keep up, creating a suitable messy term to match the messy situation and confused feelings involved. Just as the current generation has desperately figured out a new term and is trying to clutch at new language to explain how they feel, they’ve gone looking for art to reflect it, too.
“Is it casual now?” Chappell Roan asks over and over, listing off the types of moments that any old 1950s singer would have dedicated loving ballads to. But in the era of the commitment-phobic, listeners can’t seem to relate to a seamless path between interest and adoration. Instead, they want a pop star to sing about the stress of trying to act like “the chill girl” while your partial partner refuses to pin it down. Streamed over 37 million times, ‘Casual’ is one of the songs that made Roan a new mouthpiece for Gen-Z, penning an ode for a specific yet seemingly now widely relatable sentiment.
Even over in the jazz world, a scene that invented the very idea of the universally relatable standards on love, sung over and over by decades of artists, new star Laufey knows that doesn’t cut it anymore. On her sophomore album, Bewitched, which won the Grammy in the ‘Traditional Pop Vocal’ category, she’s merging the classical form with the necessary new lexicon. “It hurts to be something / It’s worse to be nothing with you,” she sings on ‘Promise’, feeling around for the words to explain the painful midground of a lack of commitment. It’s a feeling of untethered emotion that colours so many of her songs, capturing the strangeness of feeling heartbroken over someone who never truly had your heart as she sings, “My sister said don’t be a baby / Someday you’ll have something real to lose / I can’t help the way I feel / Cause for me this was real.”
It’s a sentiment that clearly hits hard with modern ears as it leads as the predominant emotion behind so many of the biggest songs of the last few years. Sarah Kinsley’s hit ‘The Giver’ captured it starkly, singing, “He turns around when you’re naked / Says ‘We should be friends’ while you’re changing,” in a way that would have been considered brutally evil back in the past, but now feels like a relatable, passing image that so many have connected with. Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s breakout track ‘Complex’ captured it too, as did Boygenius’ fan favourite cut ‘Cool About It’.
Even stars as big as Lana Del Rey or Taylor Swift, who’s best known for writing big and clear songs about love or loss like ‘Love Story’, have readapted to a more complex, modern lexicon. “Why wait for the best when I can have you?” Del Rey sings while Swift ponders the sharpness of the short term, singing, “And for a fortnight there, we were forever.” Even in Adrianne Lenker’s newest opus, ‘Vampire Empire’, the feelings are undefined and complex, pushing the listener between classic love songs and heartbreak song sentiments till they’re stuck in that in-between, just like the situation itself. “You say you wanna be alone and you want children / You wanna be with me and you wanna be with him,” she sings, capturing the confusion of casualness.
Really, it’s tough to think of one clear, wholehearted love song that has succeeded in recent years as modern artists and listeners alike seem to be alienated from the emotion that was once a musical standard. It’s not as simple as declaring that love is dead, as the sentiment still colours countless tracks, but artists seem to be reacting to the fact that love has changed. In today’s world of divorce and dating apps, the forever that used to be promised so freely in lyrics has to be switched out. Commitment is out, and the trickiness of a situationship is in.