In our Love App-tually series, Mashable shines a light into the foggy world of online dating. It is cuffing season after all.
Last December, I received an email from the dating app Happn about the “popular dating terms” that their dating experts predicted would be all the rage in 2020 now that ghosting, catfishing, and cuffing “have gone mainstream.”
Here are some of their suggestions:
“Elsa’ing,” after the Frozen character, which is when The definition: when someone “freezes you out” without explanation. Then there’s “Jekylling,” when someone seems nice at first but turns. “Flatlining,” when a conversation between prospective mates goes totally dead. The list goes on and on. I’d never heard of these terms and have not seen them used outside of that email since.
Making up dating terms was once a way to help us define the confusing, maddening experiences we had while online dating. But it’s gone too far. Instead of creating new language to legitimately wrap our heads around the swiping universe, we’ve turned this practice into a farce.
Many of these buzzwords boil down to the same thing: being an asshole. And dreaming up a cutesy word for being an asshole is like spraying air freshener on a garbage heap.
Another buzzword concocted by a dating app’s marketing department that did catch on recently is “fleabagging,” which means dating people who are wrong for you (and sounds too much like teabagging). Plenty of Fish’s term probably got media buzz because of the Amazon show’s prowess, but it can really just be applied to dating in general, or if done intentionally, self-sabotage. (It’s also a sad misunderstanding of the show’s point.) Marketing folks aren’t the only ones hellbent on coining dating terms. “Whelming” is a new one created by a reporter. This is the act of being overwhelmed by your dating app matches and discussing it with your matches, aka being inconsiderate.
I contributed to this trend. In 2018, I coined “orbiting,” which came out of me being confused and bitter that someone I dated stopped replying to my texts but had the gall to keep looking at my Instagram stories. It made no sense to me, that he could be on his phone and interact in an indirect way but not muster up the gumption to actually talk to me, even if to reject me.
I did see some rejections, though, but not of the romantic nature. The piece was rejected by several publications. While it was eventually accepted by Man Repeller, I did not think it would get any traction given that many publications didn’t want to run it.
I was wrong. The piece was aggregated by many publications and “orbiting” was later shortlisted as Oxford’s Word of the Year. What was more impactful to me, though, was the reaction I received from readers. People, by and large women, were eager to tell me their own orbiting stories and I was eager to listen as it was reassurance that I wasn’t alone, none of us were.
That was almost two years ago and, at the risk of biting myself in the ass, I’m over creating new dating terms like “orbiting.” I don’t judge a writer for coining one themselves, as the content mills must churn on. I do, however, judge PR companies for doing so. It’s also not fun that Brands™ have hopped on the bandwagon, using fake dating terms to shill their product.
Many of these buzzwords boil down to the same thing: being an asshole.
The word “fuckboy” became popular in 2015 — the same year Vanity Fair published the now-famous piece, “The Tinder Apocalypse,” which is about as fearmonger-y about dating apps as the title suggests. In addition to changing the way we date and hookup, dating apps have also contributed to fuckboy culture and the actions that go along with it: ghosting, orbiting, breadcrumbing, cloaking, and so on.
I don’t say this as a naysayer of dating apps. Dating apps have legitimate benefits, like introducing you to people outside your usual type and giving you the ability to think before they message, something meeting at a bar doesn’t lend itself to. Ghosting and flakiness also existed far before dating apps and the internet — even if we didn’t use that language to describe it. Standing someone up and not calling back are dick moves of olde. My mom has told me her share of dating stories from the ’80s. The way she described getting stood up was pretty similar to a friend telling me about how she was ghosted in the past week.
But it is undeniable that online dating has bolstered some of these behaviors and fostered new ones, as technology and the internet added nuance. I was fascinated by orbiting because it couldn’t happen in a time before Instagram. People in the ’80s may have “ghosted” my mom, for instance, but there was no Instagram stories to creep afterwards.
“Online dating has not only changed how people interact with one another but also our expectations in dating,” explained Jessica Small, a licensed marriage and family therapist. Online dating gives us access to such a wide range of people that it’s easy to ghost someone if they’re not in your social circle — it’s likely you’ll never see them again. There’s a depersonalization that goes on. While there is a living, breathing person (in non-bot cases, anyway) behind the profile, it is far too easy to forget that.
“In previous generations people dated within their direct social sphere (neighborhood, job, college etc.) and seeing that person again was inevitable so the option to flake did not exist in the same way,” Small said. “Online dating has also created a culture of believing that there could be something better. Because we now have access to hundreds of potential mates at the tip of our finger, we have started ruling prospects in, instead of out.”
Dating apps give the illusion of endless matches. That means if someone is not perfect, you can dump them and find someone else by just moving your thumbs.
It makes sense: Humans strive for more. If there is a better match, hookup, partner out there — even the potential for better — then the ends justify the means in being a callous person by ghosting/orbiting/new slang of-the-day.
Fuck, how depressing is that?
I’m over being a clown for love and I’m over masking bad behavior with euphemisms.
I understand the reason why one would want to categorize sightly nuanced asshole behavior — I did it myself! And I did it with gusto, hoping that people on the other side of their screens would understand my pain and they did. I was validated.
But I’m over being a clown for love and I’m over masking bad behavior with euphemisms — at least the same bad behavior chopped up and screwed into endless “dating buzzwords.” We deserve better than to put up with behavior-turned-buzzwords the apps themselves encourage because it keeps you on the apps, searching for “the one” who will finally treat you like a human being. Don’t you understand? The call is coming from inside your phone’s Dating App folder!
Let’s just call it what it is: inconsiderate, tactless, and selfish. I’m not saying new, unique problems won’t surface from online dating. I can say with confidence that they will surface. But I’ll think twice before assigning a new buzzword to them. After enough overthinking, I tend to cast the rudeness as my own fault — something women are especially familiar with — and somehow new and fresh. In reality, it’s the same old rudeness.
If there is anything I — we — did wrong, it’s minimizing the assholery. So let’s stop spraying air freshener on these garbage heaps already.
Read more from Love App-tually:
