The words we invent for dating tell us more about modern relationships than any survey ever could.
In 2020, TikTok users began diagnosing their exes as narcissists. By 2023, Oxford had declared ‘rizz’ its Word of the Year. And somewhere in 2025, people started ‘Shrekking’ – deliberately dating someone they considered less attractive, in the hope that gratitude might substitute for chemistry.
These aren’t just slang terms. They’re diagnostic tools for an entire culture’s anxieties about intimacy. The words we invent for dating behaviour reveal what frightens us, what we desire and, most tellingly, who we blame when love doesn’t work out.
Nothing in the history of dating advice compares to the vocabulary explosion of the past five years. Between 2020 and 2025, we generated more new dating terminology than in the previous five decades combined. The question is: why?
The lockdown language lab
The pandemic didn’t just change how we dated; it changed how we talked about dating. Confined to screens, millions of people turned to TikTok and Instagram for a crash course in relationship psychology they’d never signed up for. By early 2020, ‘attachment styles’ – a concept from developmental psychology that had existed in academic literature since John Bowlby’s work in the 1960s – suddenly became TikTok’s hottest relationship framework. ‘Anxious attachment’ and ‘avoidant attachment’ were no longer terms you’d encounter in a psychology textbook; they were captions under thirty-second videos with millions of views.
Simultaneously, Google searches for ‘narcissist’ surged. Between 2010 and 2023, searches for narcissistic personality disorder rose by approximately 250 per cent. The Depp-Heard trial in 2022 accelerated this further, introducing terms like ‘DARVO’ (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim, and Offender) into mainstream vocabulary. What had been a niche clinical concept became a weapon in everyday arguments. Competing for engagement through increasingly dramatic content, dating coaches and influencers popularised terms like ‘narcissist,’ ‘gaslighting,’ and ‘love bombing’ until they became casual descriptors for disappointing dates – a process you might call the pathologisation of ordinary romantic disappointment.
The flag factory: 2021 – 2022
If 2020 gave us the vocabulary of diagnosis, 2021 gave us the vocabulary of surveillance. In October 2021, Twitter erupted with the red flag emoji meme, generating 1.5 million tweets in a single day and a 455 per cent increase in the use of the ? emoji. Green flags followed. Then beige flags – those oddly specific quirks that weren’t dealbreakers but weren’t exactly reassuring either. By mid-2023, the beige flag hashtag had accumulated over 570 million views on TikTok.
This flag system reveals something important about the modern dating mindset: it’s fundamentally evaluative. Every behaviour is sorted, categorised, and assigned a colour code – a visual shorthand for a generation that processes information in swipes and scrolls. Dating apps train us to make rapid binary judgments, and the vocabulary has followed suit. You’re either a red flag or a green flag. There’s no room for the slow unfolding that characterises most real relationships.
Simultaneously, Google searches for ‘love bombing’ grew by 500 per cent between January 2021 and January 2022. The term – originally from clinical psychology, describing a manipulation tactic – had crossed into casual use. A partner who sent too many texts in the first week wasn’t keen; they were ‘love bombing’. The clinical-to-casual pipeline was accelerating.
The Oxford moment: 2023
2023 was the year dating language went establishment. Oxford named ‘rizz’ – Kai Cenat’s slang for charisma and flirtatious charm, popularised further when Tom Holland used it in an interview – its Word of the Year. ‘Situationship’ made the Oxford shortlist. These weren’t just slang terms anymore; they were officially recognised additions to the English language.
What makes 2023 particularly interesting is the tension between the two defining terms. ‘Rizz’ is fundamentally optimistic: it celebrates the ability to attract, to charm, to connect. ‘Situationship’ is ridden with anxiety: it describes a relationship that refuses to become one, a state of romantic limbo that has become so common it needed its own word. That these two terms peaked simultaneously tells you everything about the contradictions of modern dating: we’ve never been more articulate about attraction, and never more confused about commitment.
Also gaining traction in 2023 was ‘delulu’ – short for delusional – used both self-deprecatingly and as a genuine dating philosophy: manifesting confidence, however unwarranted, as strategy. Added to the Cambridge Dictionary in 2025, it hints at a counter-current within the dating lexicon: not everything is pathology and red flags. Some of the new vocabulary celebrates boldness, fantasy, and the refusal to be sensible about love.
The backlash vocabulary: 2024-2025
By 2024, the terminology was beginning to reflect fatigue with dating itself. ‘Boysober’ – a TikTok trend encouraging women to take deliberate breaks from dating men – signalled a generation asking whether the whole enterprise was worth the emotional labour. The term borrowed the language of addiction recovery (‘sober’) and applied it to romantic relationships, a telling metaphor.
Meanwhile, ‘looksmaxxing’ crossed over from niche manosphere forums into mainstream TikTok, reflecting a growing male anxiety about physical appearance that mirrors what women’s media has promoted for decades. The gendered asymmetry of dating vocabulary, which has long skewed toward women’s experiences, was starting to rebalance, though not always in healthy directions.
2025 has brought us ‘Shrekking’ (choosing a less conventionally attractive partner), ‘Banksying’ (a slow emotional fade, named after the street artist’s self-destructing artwork), and ‘ghostlighting’ (a hybrid of ghosting and gaslighting). Each term is a compound – built from existing slang, layered and remixed like samples in a pop song. The vocabulary is eating itself, generating new terms from the corpses of old ones.
What the words tell us
Map these terms chronologically and a clear pattern emerges. The early pandemic years (2020-21) were dominated by diagnostic language – terms borrowed from clinical psychology to explain why relationships fail. The middle years (2022-23) shifted toward evaluative language – flags, checks, and sorting systems. And the most recent period (2024-25) has produced retreat language – terms for opting out, lowering expectations, or redefining what counts as success.
From diagnosis to evaluation to retreat, this short historical arc mirrors a collective disillusionment. We pathologised our exes, built screening systems for our prospects, and finally questioned whether the search itself was the problem. The vocabulary explosion of the past five years is partly a product of collective sense-making – millions of people trying to build a shared language for experiences that previous generations navigated without any vocabulary at all.
The clinical-to-casual pipeline
Perhaps the most significant trend across these five years is the migration of clinical terminology into everyday dating discourse. ‘Narcissist,’ ‘gaslighting,’ ‘love bombing,’ ‘trauma bonding,’ ‘attachment styles’ – all confined to therapy rooms and academic journals before 2020. Now they’re hashtags, memes, and first-date conversation starters.
This matters because language shapes perception. When every disappointing date becomes a ‘narcissist ’, and every miscommunication becomes ‘gaslighting,’ we lose the ability to distinguish genuine abuse from ordinary human imperfection. The words designed to protect abuse survivors risk becoming blunt instruments wielded against anyone who falls short of expectations.
At the same time, there’s a case for the democratisation of psychological literacy. A generation that can articulate the difference between anxious and avoidant attachment is, in theory, better equipped to navigate relationships than one that couldn’t. The question is whether this vocabulary is being used for genuine self-understanding or as ammunition in a culture war between the sexes – and the evidence suggests a bit of both.
Who’s writing the dictionary now?
There’s one final shift worth noting. In the 1970s through the 1990s, dating vocabulary was generated by professionals – sociologists who studied ‘cohabitation,’ therapists who identified ‘codependency,’ journalists who coined ‘trophy wife’. These terms entered public use slowly, mediated by institutions with editorial standards and sometimes peer review.
Today, dating vocabulary is generated by TikTok users, often teenagers, and distributed algorithmically at a speed no institution can match. A term can go from a single video to global recognition in days. This is thrilling, creative, and genuinely democratic. It’s also chaotic, unvetted, and optimised for engagement rather than accuracy.
The evolutionary constant
For all the novelty of these terms, the underlying dynamics they describe are ancient. People have always ghosted – they just used to do it by not returning calls, or by moving to a different town without leaving a forwarding address. People have always love-bombed – they used to call it ‘sweeping someone off their feet’. People have always found themselves in situationships – they just called them ‘it’s complicated’.
What’s new is the naming. And naming matters. It gives us tools to recognise patterns, set boundaries and, at its best, make better choices. But it also risks turning the most human of experiences into a taxonomy, reducing the messy, irrational, glorious business of falling in love to a checklist of flags and a vocabulary of pathology.
Every generation believes it has reinvented romance. The Victorians thought their elaborate courtship rituals represented the pinnacle of civilised pair-bonding. Today’s dating app designers promise algorithmic efficiency that renders old-fashioned courtship obsolete. Yet across a century of advice literature – through every shift in technology, media, and fashion – the evolutionary imperatives remain stubbornly intact. At the deepest level, the psychological machinery is unchanged: one side signals value, the other evaluates those signals for honesty and quality, and both attempt to distinguish genuine investment from cheap display. These preferences, shaped by millions of years of sexual selection, persist regardless of technological or social change.
This is what the vocabulary explosion of 2020-25 really reveals. ‘Ghosting’ is avoidance of the costly signal, or simply the refusal to invest the emotional effort that an honest rejection requires. ‘Love bombing’ is a cheap signal masquerading as a costly one – extravagant displays that cost the bomber nothing because they’re mass-produced and withdrawn the moment real investment is demanded. ‘The ick’ is an evolved disgust response firing at low-quality signals, an instinctive recoil when something about a potential mate’s display doesn’t add up. Even ‘Shrekking’ makes evolutionary sense: if the mating market feels impossibly competitive, lower your threshold and hope for gratitude – a strategy that trades signal quality for perceived commitment.
We’ll keep inventing words to evaluate romantic and sexual value in others. Every generation does. But beneath the vocabulary – beneath the ghosting and the rizz, the red flags and the situationships, the therapy-speak and the TikTok slang – the same negotiation continues: the search for someone whose signals are honest, whose investment is real, and whose presence, in the end, is worth the cost.
Andrew King is a dating researcher and author of the forthcoming book Costly Signals: The Evolution of Dating Advice. He writes at dating-and-mating.com.
