Attachment Style

The recurring pattern — secure, anxious, avoidant, or fearful-avoidant — that shapes how a person handles closeness, conflict, and distance in relationships, formed in early bonding and carried into adult dating.

Beige Flags

A personality quirk that's neither a warning sign nor a virtue — specific enough to prove a profile wasn't copied from a template.

Benching

Keeping someone as a warm backup — enough contact to stay on the roster, never enough to actually play — while you keep looking for someone better.

Breadcrumbing

Feeding someone small, irregular crumbs of attention — a like, a late reply, a plan that never lands — to keep them on the hook without intending to follow through.

Catfishing

Building a fake identity — stolen or invented photos, a false name, a backstory built to survive a few casual questions — to draw someone into a relationship they'd never start if they knew who was actually writing back.

Chemistry

The immediate, mutual pull two people feel around each other — built from easy rapport, reciprocal honesty, and physical arousal — that no bio, quiz, or algorithm can reliably predict in advance.

Cookie-jarring

Keeping someone as a deliberate backup while actively pursuing someone else — the person in the jar is insurance against a preferred option falling through, and is never told that this is the role.

Cushioning

Keeping one or more backup options warm while you're already seeing someone, so there's a soft landing prepared in advance if the real thing ends.

Emotional Availability

A person's current capacity and willingness to be open, present, and responsive in a relationship — distinct from attachment style, which is the deeper, more stable pattern that shapes how they handle closeness over time.

Friendfluence

The influence your friends exert over your romantic decisions — vetting matches, weighing in on dates, and shaping who you pursue or pass on.

Ghosting

Ending all contact with someone abruptly and without explanation, leaving them to work out on their own why the conversation stopped.

Hard Launch

The deliberate, unambiguous public declaration of a relationship — full name, full face, a plain statement — instead of a soft launch's partial, deniable reveal.

Intentional Dating

The practice of knowing why you're dating, what kind of relationship you want, and what you'll politely refuse — and using that frame to direct attention.

Kittenfishing

Presenting a real version of yourself dressed up past the point of accuracy — older photos, heavy filters, a rounded-up job title, a few borrowed hobbies — so the person who shows up is recognizably you, just not quite the you they were expecting.

Love Bombing

Overwhelming someone with affection, attention, or gifts early in a relationship to accelerate intimacy before they've had time to actually get to know you.

Love Languages

The five categories — words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch — that Gary Chapman proposed as the ways people prefer to give and receive love, drawn from his pastoral counseling rather than research, and only partly upheld when relationship scientists later went looking for evidence.

Manuscript

A long-form personal essay that serves as a dating profile on Anketta. The matching algorithm reads it instead of looking at photos.

Matchmaker

A person — or, increasingly, an algorithm — whose job is to introduce two people likely to suit each other, based on a read of who they are rather than a profile they filled in themselves.

Microcheating

A set of small, usually secretive behaviors — a flirty message, a profile kept live, an ex added back without mention — that stop short of physical infidelity but cross a boundary the relationship was built on, whether or not either partner ever said the boundary out loud.

Orbiting

Stopping direct contact while continuing to watch someone's stories, likes, or posts — present enough to be noticed, absent enough that nothing is ever said.

Pocketing

Dating someone while they keep you out of the rest of their life — no friends, no family, no social media, no public trace of the relationship.

Sapiosexual

Someone whose primary spark of sexual attraction is intelligence — vocabulary, reasoning, and how a person thinks — rather than physical appearance; a measured psychological pattern in a minority of people, not a formally recognized sexual orientation.

Semantic Matching

Text comparison by meaning rather than by surface words. Two people writing about the same thing in different vocabulary still register as compatible.

Situationship

An undefined romantic connection that has the intimacy of a relationship but none of its agreements — no label, no exclusivity, no stated direction.

Slow Dating

A counter-movement to infinite-swipe dating: fewer candidates, more attention per candidate, and deliberate decision windows that replace feed scrolling.

Slow Fade

A gradual withdrawal from a conversation or relationship — replies arrive later, get shorter, and lose their warmth — until contact thins out completely, distinct from the abrupt stop of ghosting.

Soft Launch

Introducing a new relationship on social media through a deliberately partial reveal — a hand, a silhouette, a caption with no name — rather than a clear, face-forward announcement.

Swipe Culture

The set of interface decisions — binary judgment, an effectively infinite queue, unpredictable rewards, and a match inbox that functions as a scoreboard — that shaped modern dating-app behavior, kept in place by the business model built on top of them.

The Ick

A sudden, involuntary feeling of disgust toward a romantic interest, usually set off by a small or trivial behavior that flips attraction into aversion.

Zombieing

A ghost from the past resurfacing — usually casually, always without explanation — as if the silence that came before it never happened.