Situationships are like Data Structures
Tags: watercooler, algorithms, tutorial, codenewbie
Published: 2021-08-11 16:53:09

* **An Array** = Waitlist
* **A List** = Love Interests
* **A Linked List** = Okafor’s Law
* **A Queue** = Friendzone
* **A Stack** = Hit and run
* **A Tree** = Multiple partners

What do you do when you are finding it hard to grasp a particular complex concept? For me, I relate with something easier for my brain to comprehend. No time have I found the topic of data structure and algorithm interesting. 

It has always been a jargon session for me when researching and reading about it, most times swaying my mind to the pizza I have been craving or the sweet pounded yam I have been dying to taste or that beautiful amala, ewedu/gbegiri and soft juicy ponmo. This day while trying to study again, my mind swayed to the situation of the various situationships I had experienced and when I finally realized I was lost, it came to me that situationships are actually like data structures.


Yes! They are. And data structures seem to be as interesting as situationships too.


Data structures are ways to arrange data to be able to make sense of it for easy accessibility and maybe presentation purposes. Situationships are also most times ways of creating a structure to a pseudo-relationship that never existed. Such similarity😊.


If you take the list data structure, for example, it is similar to what seems like the first stage of a situationship. Where the various love interests are unconsciously examined and ordered. This kind of storage concept can be truly compared to a list. A list of possible boyfriends and girlfriends.


Sometimes, there is progress, and the actors in the situationship move from a list to an array. The array is the waitlist for those that advanced from the list structure. This time the order is not necessary. Anyone can be picked from the array depending on some factors to enter another advanced stage. The array could consist of the “guys” in the DMs and “guys” calling on the phone.


The advanced stage has various variants, when some leave the array, the very “bad guys” prefer a stack where they can adopt the last-in-first-out (LIFO) principle or better still the “hit the cookie and run” principle. While some prefer to “**pop** the cherry”, others such as the “good guys” may prefer the queue and wait if someday it might just be their turn to “hit the cookie”.  In all honesty, the queue is a perfect data structure for the “guys” in the friendzone.


The various lists, arrays, stacks, and queues leave a landmark of various situationships for the actor. The actor in these multiple situations is then a root node connected to various partners to satisfy different needs. These partners in some way dependently and independently supply the needs of the root actor just like a tree data structure. Some of these needs could be sexual, financial, etc.


The tree is the ultimate representation of a situationship.
However, there is one more important data structure in a situationship. 

The Linked List!!!!


There is a popular law on the Nigerian streets that states: 

```
Once the cookie is hit, you can always hit it just some other time. 
```


And just like the linked list which allows you to traverse not just forward but also backwards, situationships can always lead you to situations where the situationship can re-occur as predicted by Okafor's law.

I hope you now easily understand data structures just like you now understand situationships and focus less on the jargons.