At 25, I’ve never been in a relationship. And confession: I’ve never really wanted one.
That was until September last year when I met someone who was due to move abroad in six weeks. He never hid this from me, and from the moment we started dating, we were open about the fact that our relationship would end when he left the country.
I know that for some, this may sound like a one-way ticket to heartbreak. The dialogue around expirationships, a term first coined by Carrie Bradshaw in season 2 of Sex and the City, is generally negative. Defined as any relationship with a fixed endpoint, there’s no doubt that expirationships can be a hotbed for commitment-phobes and should be approached with caution.
But I’m here to make the case for expirationships. As someone whose avoidance of relationships stems from a deep-rooted fear of intimacy, the pre-confirmed ending helped me to feel more in control, less exposed and less at risk of rejection: all factors which have made me run away from potential relationships in the past. My expirationship provided an important safety net which allowed me to step into the world of relationships for the first time, and ultimately has gone a significant way towards healing some of my issues around sex and body image.
Love Is Blind has drawn attention to the problematic dating trend.
Relationship Psychologist Dr Sarah Alsawy explains that while, often, the ultimate goal is to feel safe and comfortable within a long-term relationship, for someone with a fear of intimacy, an expirationship “can offer an opportunity to learn what you like and what you don’t like”, which in turn, could make a long-term relationship less intimidating in the future. She continues, “In this case, an expirationship may help you to realise that if you could have the things that you like, maybe you would want to expose more of yourself from an emotional standpoint, and could then consider a long-term relationship in the future.”
My fear of intimacy began when I lost my virginity, aged 14, to a boy five years my senior, who I met at an athletics training camp in Spain. Though it was consensual, my decision to have sex came as a result of intense social pressure. I was surrounded by a circle of friends who were meeting boyfriends, going to house parties and having sex, and I felt an overriding need to keep up and have my own stories to tell. And yet, less than a year after I’d got my first period, I was still not fully ready to be a woman. My changing body, in particular, was a point of huge embarrassment, and as I lay there in a Spanish hotel room, I felt preoccupied by my own appearance, and paralysed by the exposure of the situation.
Nothing particularly awful happened to me that evening, but it was a very overwhelming experience - and one, in hindsight, I was definitely not ready for. It occupied a lot of my headspace even after I returned to the UK, when, after missing a period, I told a teacher what had happened. Perhaps naïvely, I had no idea that this would be escalated into a formal intervention, with senior members of staff involved and my mum called in to school. What followed was incredibly humiliating, as I was pulled between meetings and counselling sessions, and made to sit down with my athletics coach to confess what I’d done. My mum was extremely angry, confiscating my phone and grounding me for six months, both of which disconnected me from my friends and made me feel as though I’d done something really bad. All this, on top of my already conflicting feelings about the sex itself, left me with a lot of discomfort, shame and confusion about my body, sex and intimacy.
Dr Alsawy explains that shame and regret are common feelings amongst young women who have consensual, yet unwanted, sex. Having sex too early is, in fact, one of the biggest regrets amongst young women, with almost 40% feeling that their first sexual experience had happened before they were ready.
A little inspiration for anyone who is so sick of swiping.
“Societally, sex at a young age has been normalised and even encouraged. If you’re not having sex at a young age, there’s this connotation that you’re frigid, or in some way less desirable, which has placed a huge amount of pressure on young girls.” The result, she goes on, “is that a growing number of young women are having sex before they are ready. This sex, although consensual, isn’t necessarily positive, and in order to cope with the experience, these women learn to practice emotional detachment. They start to have sex from a mechanical perspective, rather than recognising the emotional vulnerability that goes with it.”
Once I reached my twenties and moved to London, I found that the pressure to keep up appearances around my sex life eased, as did the drunken one-night-stands. Though I’ve dabbled in dating apps over the past four years, nothing has moved much beyond the second date.
The pattern generally goes something like this: I download the app, swipe a few times before matching with a couple of potential guys. We’d book a first date, and more often than not, we’d have a good time. In many cases, I’d work up the courage to go on a second date. It’s after this that I’d feel the sense of anxiety start to grow. By the time they’d asked me on a third date, which usually involved dinner or a movie night, I felt the demand for intimacy rising. As the pressure grew, I’d withdraw more and more, before ghosting, deleting all apps, and deciding that I was just not ready to date.
I was fully expecting this pattern to repeat itself when it came to my expirationship. We’d met through work, and had been on a coffee date and out for drinks, before he suggested a night in at his, cooking together and watching The Parent Trap. Though the familiar anxieties were there, I was surprised to find that the finite nature of our situation provided me with a new sense of safety to sit with the nerves, and continue to explore the connection between us. It might sound crazy, but I found that actually counting down the number of times we’d have to see each other before he moved away helped me to resist the urge to cancel plans.
You could call it exposure therapy, but over time, I found that my anxiety lessened. Increasingly, I relaxed, felt more present, and more able to trust him. I discovered that I actually loved staying up late talking, waking up next to each other, and skipping gym classes just so we could hang out all day. These things, which I had previously thought would make me feel claustrophobic and uncomfortable, now seemed like something I might actually want to find in a long-term relationship.
Okay, my expirationship hasn't fixed my problems long term, and I’m not careful, it could actually reinforce the issue. I’ll admit that I haven’t dated anyone else since he has left, and I’m conscious that if I don’t use our situation as a stepping towards a longer term relationship, the anxieties will likely return.
Dr Alsawy’s advice for anyone considering an expirationship? “Work with a trained therapist, who can challenge your beliefs within a safe environment, helping you to learn how to remain and show up as your authentic self. Where an expirationship may offer you short-term safety and security, true healing happens when you start experiencing somebody that accepts you, and who is still there consistently even as you show up as your authentic self.”
I may not be Carrie Bradshaw, but I do feel incredibly grateful for the confidence and emotional connection my expirationship afforded me. Have I got it all figured out? Absolutely not. But I do have hope that in the future, I will be capable of sustaining an intimate relationship. For now, that’s good enough for me.
