— A Guide to Modern Dating Terms

The way we talk about relationships has drastically changed in recent years. Here is a glossary of some of the most popular words and phrases you should know.

Picture this: You’re currently single and “cobwebbing” in the aftermath of your previous failed relationship. The attractive person you thought had “rizz” is starting to exhibit “beige flags,” so you turn to your ongoing “situationship” for attention, but deep down you hope to meet someone worth “soft-launching” on Instagram. Can you relate?

To describe yourself as single and in search of a relationship is almost too simple of a label in 2023. The way we seek romantic connections, especially with the influence of social media and dating apps, has naturally altered our behaviors and language around dating.

The fact that more people are meeting online creates an “abundance of options,” said Natalie Jones, a California-based psychotherapist who specializes in relationships and narcissism. This can make it difficult to develop a genuine connection, or can lead to toxic dating habits.

“I think that’s where these terms are coming from because now people have an abundance of people to choose from, and so different sorts of behaviors are being highlighted,” Dr. Jones said. “When you have so many people to choose from, you can ghost, you cannot call, you can hide who you truly are through online dating.”

Although there are dozens of new dating terms being used today, we spoke to Dr. Jones and Shan Boodram, a sex and relationship expert with the dating app Bumble, to help us narrow down the top dating terms that you’ll need to know.

A picture of a slice of bread and bread crumbs.

Breadcrumbing

When someone consistently checks in with a romantic prospect, dangles the possibility of a date and keeps them interested, but never follows through with what they really want: a relationship.

Cobwebbing

This act of self-love refers to purging any mementos from previous relationships (old sweaters, text threads or photos) in an effort to move on. Holding on to old phone numbers and pictures, Ms. Boodram said, “keeps someone from being fully present and invested in their dating journey.”

Cuffing

Derived from the word “handcuffed,” it’s the act of getting tied down to one partner, usually during the colder months of the year (also known as cuffing season). To be cuffed can also refer to someone in a serious relationship outside of cuffing season.

Cyberflashing

The act of sending unwanted sexual images to another person through digital means, such as on a dating app or social media platform, but also via text or another file-sharing service, like Airdrop.

Although there’s no federal law prohibiting cyberflashing, states including California and Texas introduced laws last year that give victims the opportunity to have legal recourse if they receive unwanted sexual images online. Other states are writing legislation to handle this issue.

A picture of a glass jar holding chocolate chip cookies.

Cookie-jarring

When a person seeks a relationship with someone else as a backup plan. In the same way that people might reach for a cookie when they want an instant treat, someone who is cookie-jarring pursues their backup person when the one they actually want isn’t available or has rejected them.

The Three Flags: Green, Red, Beige

Green flags are positive, compatible traits that a person possesses. Red flags are negative, potentially harmful traits. A person displaying beige flags is not necessarily good or bad. They are just dull, boring and lack effort in dating. “What we perceive as flags can vary from person to person,” Ms. Boodram said, “and though there are flags in real life, they can also be displayed via dating apps, too.”

Gaslighting

To manipulate someone into making them doubt their powers of reasoning, perceptions, memories or understanding of an event that happened. Common methods include blatant lying, denial and trivializing their feelings, which can result in an unhealthy power dynamic shift in a relationship.

Ghosting

The act of disappearing without warning or cutting off all contact with someone you’re dating, someone you’re in a relationship with or even someone you’ve simply matched with online. “Ghosting is very dehumanizing and a lot of people don’t understand that,” said Dr. Jones, who added that it can lead people to question their self-worth and value as a human being. “A lot of times it kicks up abandonment triggers.”

Love Bombing

Lavishing a new romantic partner with grand gestures and constant contact, while also keeping them isolated from friends and family in order to gain control in the relationship. Not all grand gestures of affection are red flags, which can make love bombing hard to spot.
< A picture of red, blue and orange orbits against a black background.

Orbiting

When someone has cut off communication with a person, or they have made it clear that they are not interested in pursuing a relationship, yet they continue to interact with that person on social media, usually through views and likes.

This also applies to the practice of observing potential love interests on social media, without initiating contact. Dr. Jones said that a lot of people — often women in heteronormative relationships — can mistakenly interpret this as someone being intentional about their interest, when it might not be.

“They can just be going through social media, sitting on the toilet and liking posts,” she said. “It can mean absolutely nothing and a lot of times it does.”

Rizz

This newer concept is short for “charisma” and is commonly used among members of Gen Z. It’s very popular on TikTok, Ms. Boodram said, and refers to someone’s ability to flirt with and attract a potential love interest. This can be having an engaging personality or having an unspoken allure that others cannot resist. Kai Cenat, a Twitch streamer and influencer, who coined the term, clarified that rizz originally referred to the ability to attract someone who wasn’t initially into you.

Situationship

A romantic or sexual relationship in which both parties do not communicate clearly to define their status. Unlike those who are “friends with benefits,” neither party in a situationship is certain of what the other is to them. This can be confusing and lack the consistency and support that comes with a defined relationship.

Soft-Launching

Posting a discreet photo or video of your new partner on Instagram or other social media to announce your relationship while still hiding their identity. The idea is that you don’t want to post about them on your account too soon in case it doesn’t work out. One example: sharing photos of only your partner’s hands clasped in yours. “You’re slowly trying to introduce the idea that you all can be a thing,” Dr. Jones said.

“Social media is involved in everything,” she said. “It’s like the third wheel of the relationship now.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Quarantine encourages the prosperity of sexual exploration. In the absence of consequence, there’s an abundance of freedom

By Ciara Gaffney

It’s with an almost nascent nostalgia that I recall the coining of the Gen Z “sexual recession”: a patronizing concern that our youngest generation would be rendered psychosexually stunted, unable or unwilling to fornicate due to over-exposure to smartphones, social media and porn.

To an extent, the stats affirmed this; between 1991 and 2017, the number of high school students having sex dropped from 54% to 40%. But in the nick of time, a worldwide pandemic arrived, and a budding sexual renaissance emerged in its wake.

Flinging the Gregorian calendar into irrelevance, humanity will be bisected into pre-Covid-19 and post-Covid-19, and although many will ruminate on how we have changed, one thing is indisputable: the rose-colored epoch before the coronavirus bitterly shamed the sending of nudes. They were perceived as gauche, even pathetic. In the lockdown era, however, thirst traps and nudes are not only making a glorious, unrepentant comeback, but are now a form of emboldened agency in Gen Z’s blossoming sexual liberation.

Sexual revolutions are often birthed by a narrowing of choice. Confined by the puritan values of 1950s America, the free love movement prevailed as a counterculture in which sexuality was celebrated instead of admonished. Its belief system was salaciously novel; the normalization of casual sex, porn and masturbation (all table stakes today) was bemoaned as a doomsday harbinger by the “boomers” of the time. They feared the death of convention: conventional love, conventional relationships, conventional sex.

Ironically, a deeper symmetry links the sexual revolutions of then and now, and that is pandemic. Free love met its abrupt end at the hands of Aids, but times, and the tools at our disposal, have changed. While one pandemic cut off a sexual revolution, another pandemic is galvanizing a new one.

The confines that spurred free love were morals, but the confines that mobilize the Gen Z sexual revolution are walls. Stratified by distance, Gen Z is similarly tasked with reinventing what sex looks like, in a quarantined world where physical sex is frequently impossible. As free love shattered the conventions of its time, Gen Z’s sexual renaissance is doing the same for organic sexual connection.

Is sending nudes foreplay? Are thirst traps posted to Instagram “close friends” lists modern courtship? Is mutual masturbation via Zoom sex? What separates the virtual from the real? Why is sexuality by video-screen considered lonely or isolating? If anything, we are seeing humanity at its most tender, reaching earnestly through the virtual void to “actualize” contactless sex. Filled with unfiltered longing posted with abandon, Gen Z’s sexual revolution is one that has been reconfigured and reborn for the digital age.

So, how exactly is this so fruitful for a groundbreaking sexual revolution? No one knows when lockdown will lift; we may be social distancing on and off for the next two years. Some commentators predict the “normal” we knew will never return. The mantra of the day is “nudes sent during the quarantine don’t count”. Yes, Gen Z’s sexual revolution is partly a response to the pure boredom of lockdown; what else are we supposed to do with our days besides masturbate excessively and send a flurry of nudes? But it’s more than ennui or physical stratification. It’s a seizing of finiteness.

Quarantine not only encourages, but forces, the prosperity of sexual exploration; of experimenting with nudes, thirst traps, camming and sexting for debauchery, mostly without IRL repercussions. Unlike regular life, which would encase sexual choices with all the judgmental trappings of “forever” – what will the other person think of me? What will this be like in person? – a pandemic provides a get-out-of-jail-free card. In the absence of consequence, there is the abundance of freedom.

If Gen Z are more sexually reticent than prior generations, a pandemic finally caters to Gen Z coming into their sexuality on their own terms – without stigma and pressure, and decidedly in favor of the virtual. In the end, it won’t matter whether the things that go down during quarantine happen “in real life” or not; whether the nudes and thirst traps don’t translate to everyday eternity. The Gen Z cybersexual revolution may be corporeally prohibited from morphing into free-love hedonism, but it is an uninhibited sexual renaissance nonetheless.

And in a pandemic that beseeches social distancing, a contactless sexual revolution was, quite simply, predestined.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!