In the 18th century, great novels followed certain tropes. The love stories were grand and convoluted, often tragic but nearly always neatly resolved by the end. These were books about relationships which took place in grand country houses, in which communication was careful and often declared on some type of bucolic pastoral background. Marriage and babies inevitably followed. But that was then, and this is now. In 2026, nobody kisses hands over white silk gloves and promises their estate to their one true love. In 2026, we have something much worse: the situationship. 

Jem Calder’s new novel, the aptly-titled I Want You To Be Happy, follows its two protagonists Chuck and Joey over the course of an (arguably) always doomed, always poorly defined relationship. It begins inauspiciously. Chuck, a 35-year-old copywriter who dreams of writing the next great novel, has just broken off an engagement with his long-term partner when he gets drunk in a bar and chats up Joey, a 23-year-old barista and sometime poet with crippling impostor syndrome. They find kinship in the threadbare nature of their lives in London; their unfulfilling jobs, the loneliness and atomisation of trying to build a life in a city that seems, by its very existence, ambiently determined to make you broke and unhappy. But this is not, let’s be clear, a love story. 

“Let’s get it out there, it’s a cringe term”, says Calder of the dreaded ‘situationship’ badge. “But there’s room for comedy in it. These characters are always going to be at cross purposes, and not have quite the same understanding. There’s also beauty in it too. Here’s two people meeting, you’re just not really sure it’s going to turn into anything, so we kind of have to hope they’re able to enjoy it while it lasts. I think older people think that people are pursuing these kinds of relationships for the sake of it, because there’s a freedom to it, but ultimately it just ends up being the hedonistic treadmill of the dating app, and another way to make you feel completely replaceable and cog-like in this very impersonal feeling city.” 

But Calder, 34, does not want his novel to be read as ‘relationship negative or pessimistic’. “I think people can have meaningful encounters with other people that can be sustaining and creatively generative, and formative in terms of identity, but at the same time there’s a bitter irony as the novel goes on that this relationship just means fundamentally different things to these people.”

A bitter irony, the ability to find humour in painful situations, is a good way of describing I Want You To Be Happy, which has spent most of the early summer enduring the (albeit commercially useful) indignity of being called a “buzzy novel”, presumably because of how well it encapsulates millennial life. It’s all in here: the working from home, the Slack notifications, the everyday horror of a ‘you are now in your overdraft’ text from your bank, the man who shows you an Adam Curtis documentary because he thinks it communicates something deep and meaningful about his life.

“One of the things I am interested in is the formation of people’s personalities around the hard economic realities of their lives”, says Calder, speaking about the suffocation of his fictional London. “Chuck and Joey don’t necessarily want to be the way they are, but they’ve had to adapt to the circumstances around them. The suffocation is a constant theme in people’s lives, just from having the economic boot at your neck. The screen people are relying on to deliver them from like their pretty rubbish financial circumstances is also the same screen used as a cudgel.” 

“My writing isn’t a wholesale endorsement of everything that I’m writing about. I think what I find most fun in writing is revealing these kinds of ugly secrets”

What’s most interesting is the characters’ digital communication style – which is stilted and inauthentic and excruciatingly true to life. Chuck and Joey deliberately delay texting each other back in order to seem cooler, busier and more interesting than they actually are. They engage in a kind of online peacocking, trying to attract a suitable mate by advertising a glamour that doesn’t really exist in their lives. When they do check in on each other, they never admit vulnerability, anger or loneliness. They are always fine. They are always ‘no worries if not!’, even when they should very much be worried. 

Early in Calder’s twenties, he found his own social media use left him unable to even finish a short story. Now he has no social media platforms at all. He refers to the act of using social media, like the act of successfully writing, as working like a ‘reward system’, which is the title of his previous short story collection. “I try not to be too parochial or advice-giving, but I do sometimes want to tell young writers that I really think one of the bigger problems with social media is it does make people talk the same and tell the same jokes. And it delivers to people, always and pretty much immediately, the worst possible interpretation of what they could have been trying to say.”

“Some writers are so exhausted by that and made afraid and scared by it that they turn their work into a kind of apologetics for having the viewpoint that they have, and it just becomes overly self-conscious. One of my big tenets with my writing is that if people are going to have problems with my point of view, if it’s going to be problematic and if people aren’t going to like certain things, that’s completely fine. My writing isn’t a wholesale endorsement of everything that I’m writing about,” he continues. “I think what I find most fun in writing is revealing these kinds of ugly secrets. I think people are probably a bit sick of the overly simplified world that they're presented to via social media platforms.”

By the end of I Want You To Be Happy, neither Chuck nor Joey have found the magical key to making their lives instantly better and more fulfilling. The novel is not a typical hero’s journey; nobody saves the cat. But it’s a tentative moral journey, one where they both end up – for better or for worse – feeling a little bit safer and more secure than where they started out. For those who want a didactic, ethical, happy ending in which everyone becomes a better person, this might not be the book for you. This is a world in which everyone has shades of grey, and leans into them. 

Or, as Calder puts it: “Everyone has loveable and hateable traits. To say otherwise would be giving the reader a dumbed-down version of reality. I hate when people bang on about how novels are portal to empathy, or whatever. I don’t know if that's true, and I don’t think we should empathise with everyone. I think a good novel should provoke a bit, make you question how much you get on board with this character, how much you want to root for them given the things they’ve done and said over the course of the novel.” 

I Want You To Be Happy ends on an open, unfinished note. It invites the reader to imagine the possibilities for Chuck, for Joey, for every corporate drone millennial in London. It confronts us with the cold hard facts: that our capacity to imagine a world better than situationships, flat-shares, overdrafts and horrendous WhatsApp chat is up to us. Good luck.