Relationships & Dating

Dating slang in the app era is essentially a vocabulary of avoidance — the named patterns of withdrawal, ambiguity, and managed expectation that swiping made universal. The category is unusually generative: ghosting, breadcrumbing, orbiting, benching, and dry texter all describe slightly different ways of half-disappearing. The launching cycle (soft launch, hard launch) is the social-media counterpart. Signature exemplars: situationship, the ick, love bombing, cuffing season, down bad. The category leans US and UK Gen Z and millennial, platform TikTok with strong Instagram and Twitter representation, and a heavy therapy-speak overlay — many entries are clinical or pseudo-clinical terms (green flag, red flag, love bombing) repurposed for casual dating.