The Modern Dating Dictionary: 32 Terms, Explained Plainly

The big four

If you learn only four, learn these — they cover most of what goes wrong in the first three months:

• Situationship — a relationship in behaviour with no agreed definition. Ambiguity that has lasted long enough to become the arrangement. Full guide here.
• Ghosting — disappearing without a word rather than ending things. Overwhelmingly about conflict avoidance. Full guide here.
• Breadcrumbing — just enough contact to keep you interested and never enough to go anywhere. Reactions to stories, "we should catch up" that never becomes a date.
• Benching — keeping you as a warm reserve while they pursue someone else. You are not rejected; you are queued.

The disappearing-and-returning family

Variations on going quiet, which is the defining behaviour of the era:

• Zombieing — the ghost returns, months later, with "hey stranger" and no explanation.
• Submarining — the same, but they resurface acting as though nothing ever happened.
• Orbiting — they have stopped talking to you but still watch every story. Present, unreachable.
• Haunting — the low-grade version: a like on an old post, just enough to stay in your head.
• Caspering — friendly ghosting. They fade out politely instead of vanishing, which is marginally kinder and equally unclear.
• Paperclipping — periodic, pointless reappearances purely to confirm they still have an effect on you.

The intensity ones

Speed is the shared symptom here, and speed is worth noticing regardless of intent:

• Love bombing — overwhelming affection, gifts and future-talk very early, often followed by withdrawal once you are invested. The withdrawal is the part that defines it.
• Future faking — vivid plans for holidays, homes and meeting the family that never move an inch toward happening.
• Fast-forwarding — sincere, unmanaged intensity. Not manipulation, but it burns out at the same speed it arrived.
• Cushioning — maintaining backup flirtations while in a relationship, as insurance.
• Wokefishing — pretending to hold values they do not, to appeal to someone who does.
• Kittenfishing — the small-scale catfish: real person, heavily optimised photos, five years and three inches of creative accounting.

The rest of the vocabulary

The ones you will hear in a group chat and can now nod at:

• Soft launch — hinting at a new partner online without showing them. An elbow, a second coffee cup.
• Hard launch — the actual reveal. Face, name, caption.
• DTR — "define the relationship", the conversation about what this is.
• Slow fade — replies gradually get shorter and later until there is nothing left. Ghosting on a dimmer switch.
• Curving — replying warmly to everything except any suggestion of meeting.
• Roaching — hiding that they are seeing other people, then claiming you never agreed to exclusivity.
• Stashing — you are dating, but you are kept away from their friends, family and feed.
• Pocketing — the same thing, named from the other side. You exist in a pocket.
• Micro-mancing — small consistent gestures instead of grand ones. A rare one that means something good.
• Hardballing — stating exactly what you want early, up front. Also good, also increasingly common.
• Throning — dating someone for the status they confer rather than for them.
• Fleabagging — repeatedly choosing people who are obviously wrong for you.
• Cuffing season — the autumn-to-winter urge to pair up until spring.
• Nanoship — a connection that lasts days, is intense, and ends without ceremony.
• Beige flag — a harmless oddity rather than a warning. Alphabetising the spice rack.
• Yellow flag — not a dealbreaker, but worth watching.
• Green flag — the ones that actually matter: consistency, curiosity, how they treat waiters.
• Situational chemistry — you are great in one setting and strangers in another. Worth testing before deciding.

What to do with all this

The risk with a glossary is treating it as a diagnostic manual and turning yourself into a prosecutor. A quiet week is a quiet week; a month of it is a pattern. The point of a name is not to convict anybody — it is to stop you from arguing with yourself about whether you are imagining it. Once you can say "this is benching", the only remaining question is whether you would like to keep being benched, which is a much easier question to answer. And if you want to know what the good version looks like: consistency, plans further than four days out, and someone who asks you questions. That is most of it.

Frequently asked questions