Most of these words name something that has always happened. What’s new is that dating apps made each behaviour cheap — easy to do to many people at once, with no mutual friends to hear about it afterwards.
Naming the pattern helps. It moves the experience from something is off and I can’t explain it to this is a known shape with a known ending, which is usually enough to stop waiting.
Here are the ones worth knowing.
Disappearing Acts
Ghosting — Contact ends abruptly and completely, no explanation, usually after things seemed fine. The most common form of ending in app dating, and the least informative. Why you keep getting ghosted covers the causes and why it’s rarely about you.
The slow fade — Ghosting in instalments. Replies get shorter, gaps get longer, plans stop being proposed, and after a month there’s nothing left. Preferred by people who don’t want to feel like they ended anything. Harder to receive than a clean exit, because there’s no moment you can point to.
Submarining — Someone who ghosted resurfaces months later as though nothing happened. No acknowledgement, no explanation, straight back to normal conversation.
Zombieing — The same return, but with a light explanation: sorry, things got mad, I’ve been thinking about you. Usually arrives when their other options have thinned.
Haunting — They’re gone from your life but not your feeds. Story views, likes on old posts, silent presence at the edges. Not enough to count as contact, enough to stop you closing the file.
Orbiting — Close cousin of haunting: consistent engagement with everything you post, zero response to anything you send directly.
Keeping You Warm
Breadcrumbing — Occasional attention with no escalation. A message every ten days, warmth without plans, interest that never converts into an evening. It runs on intermittent reward, which is the most binding reinforcement schedule there is — the unpredictability is what makes it stick.
Benching — You’re kept as a viable option while they pursue someone else. Contact stays alive but never advances, and often warms up noticeably when their primary option goes quiet.
Cushioning — Maintaining flirty side-conversations while in a relationship, as insurance. Rarely acted on, always available.
Pocketing — Months in, you still haven’t met a single friend, colleague or family member. Your existence is kept in a separate compartment from theirs. Sometimes caution; more often a decision that hasn’t been said out loud.
Paperclipping — Sporadic reappearances purely to confirm they can still get a reaction. The contact serves no purpose except the response it generates.
Monkey-barring — Never letting go of one connection until the next is firmly in hand. You find out you were the bar, not the destination.
Intensity and Its Reversals
Love bombing — Overwhelming affection, attention and future talk very early, followed by withdrawal. The withdrawal is what makes it work: having experienced the first phase, you spend the relationship trying to get back to it. Distinguishable from genuine enthusiasm only by what happens next — enthusiasm stays consistent.
Future faking — Detailed talk about holidays, moving in, meeting parents, none of which is ever scheduled. The conversations are real; the intent isn’t. It buys commitment now against a future that won’t arrive.
Negging — A backhanded compliment designed to unsettle you into seeking approval. Dated as a tactic, still in circulation.
Gaslighting — Being persuaded that your accurate perception of events is wrong. The serious one on this list, and worth reading about properly rather than in a glossary entry. If you’re routinely leaving conversations less certain about things you were sure of, that’s the signal.
Ambiguity by Design
Situationship — A connection that functions like a relationship but has never been defined, and carries no commitment. The most common modern shape and the hardest to leave. The full guide to situationships covers why they bind so hard and the one conversation that ends them.
Textlationship — Months of daily messaging, near-zero meeting. Intense on the phone, nonexistent in person. Often ends the moment a date is actually proposed.
DTR — Define the relationship: the conversation that ends the ambiguity. How to have it, including what to do with “I don’t know.”
Soft launch — Hinting at a new relationship online without revealing who — a hand in a photo, a second coffee cup. Sometimes privacy, sometimes keeping options visibly open.
Roaching — Presenting as exclusive while quietly seeing other people, then claiming exclusivity was never agreed. The defence relies on an assumption you were allowed to hold.
Misrepresentation
Catfishing — Someone using another person’s photos and a fabricated identity. How to spot it before you’re invested — and it’s worth knowing that the overwhelming majority of these accounts end up at a financial request.
Kittenfishing — The mild, extremely common version: real person, optimistically curated. Photos five years old, a slightly rounded height, a job description doing some work. Not malicious, still corrosive — everyone arrives recalibrating.
Wokefishing — Performing values in a profile that don’t survive contact with the person. Surfaces around the third date.
Hardballing — Stating exactly what you want and refusing to soften it — early, direct, willing to walk. The one genuinely useful term on the list, and essentially what intentional dating looks like in practice.
Seasonal
Cuffing season — The autumn-to-winter rise in dating activity and short relationships that thin out in spring. What it is and how to use it well.
Freckling — The summer inverse: someone who appears in June and is gone by September.
What the Vocabulary Is Really For
Two traps come with a list like this.
The first is using the words as diagnoses. Someone taking a day to reply isn’t breadcrumbing you; someone enthusiastic in week one isn’t necessarily love bombing. Every term here describes a pattern over time, not a single data point, and applying them to individual messages produces a lot of anxiety and very little accuracy.
The second is more subtle. A rich vocabulary for being treated badly can normalise it — if there’s a word for it, it’s just a thing that happens, and you can name it instead of leaving.
The value is in the recognition, not the label. Almost every behaviour on this list produces the same underlying situation: someone is giving you enough to stay and not enough to build on, and no conversation has happened about it. The response is the same too. Ask the direct question, treat a vague answer as an answer, and spend your time on people who are straightforward about what they want — the green flags are considerably less well-catalogued than the red ones, and much more useful to learn.
Love Dating was designed to make most of this vocabulary unnecessary. People state their relationship goals before they match, every profile carries a voice introduction, and the whole format pushes toward saying the direct thing early rather than five months in.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is breadcrumbing in dating?
Sending just enough contact — an occasional message, a story reply, a like — to keep someone interested without ever moving toward meeting or committing. The defining feature is that the contact never escalates. It works because intermittent attention is more binding than consistent attention, so the person on the receiving end often stays engaged far longer than a clean silence would have allowed.
What's the difference between ghosting and the slow fade?
Ghosting is abrupt and total: contact stops with no explanation. The slow fade is gradual — replies get shorter and slower over weeks until the conversation dies without either person naming it. The slow fade feels gentler to the person doing it and is often worse to receive, because there's no clear moment to react to and you spend weeks wondering whether you're imagining it.
Is love bombing always manipulation?
No. Some people are genuinely intense early and stay consistent — that's not love bombing, that's enthusiasm. Love bombing is defined by the pattern that follows: overwhelming affection and future talk very early, then a withdrawal that leaves you working to get the first phase back. The intensity isn't the warning sign; the cycle is.
Why do so many dating terms exist now?
Because apps made two things easy that used to be hard: maintaining low-effort contact with many people at once, and disappearing without social consequence. Most of these terms name behaviours that were always possible but rarely practical before everyone had a hundred open conversations and no mutual friends to answer to.
