Anketta Glossary — Text-Based Dating Concepts Explained

Glossary

|

Anketta Glossary

Plain-language definitions of the core concepts behind text-based, intentional dating.

Experiencing little to no romantic attraction to another person — a separate axis from sexual attraction, and a separate one again from asexuality.

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.

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

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.

A boundary is a limit on what you'll do or accept in a relationship — not a rule you hand someone else, and not a threat used to force their hand.

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.

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.

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.

A relational pattern where one person's sense of self, moods, and choices organize around another person's — first named in addiction-treatment families in the late 1970s, and still defined at least six different ways by researchers today.

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.

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.

Define the Relationship (DTR)

The conversation where two people trade the ambiguity of an undefined situation for an actual label — exclusive, casual, or something they name themselves — instead of letting it drift.

Short, low-effort replies from someone still active in a conversation — 'lol,' 'yeah,' 'same' instead of the back-and-forth that used to be there — and a pattern that signals fading interest sometimes, and a busy week, a different rhythm, or an anxious mismatch just as often.

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.

Emotional Intelligence

The ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotion in yourself and other people — tested as a real skill by one model of it, and self-reported as a trait by another.

A dating-app category built on one real, unprompted piece of writing about yourself — not a photo grid, not a short answer to somebody else's question.

Boasting conducted over text early in dating — a salary figure, a job title, a travel tag, a personal-record time — deployed as a substitute for the harder work of being interesting.

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

The use of vivid promises about a shared future — a wedding, a move, a life redesigned around you — to change how someone behaves today, without any real intention of following through.

A pattern of denial and reframing that makes someone doubt an accurate memory instead of accepting what actually happened — named for a 1944 film about a husband who dims the gaslights and swears they haven't changed.

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

A signal — in behavior or in writing — that a relationship is heading somewhere good, the confirming opposite of a red flag's warning.

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

An ex's push to restart contact after a real breakup — an apology, a staged crisis, or a promise of change — aimed at pulling you back into the relationship you both already left.

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.

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.

Left on read is a message that was opened, confirmed by a read receipt, and never answered — a real signal, but a far narrower one than it feels.

An involuntary, obsessive infatuation with one person that rises and falls with their attention — a term coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1979, not a clinical diagnosis and not simply another word for love.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

An assumed sexual and emotional exclusivity between two partners that most couples never put into words until something tests it.

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.

A periodic, low-effort reappearance from someone who has already dropped out of your life — spaced out just enough to keep themselves in your notifications, with no intention of ever resuming anything.

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.

Multiple simultaneous romantic relationships that everyone involved knows about and has agreed to — a structure defined by disclosure rather than by a number of partners.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Refusing to engage during conflict — going silent, turning away, giving no verbal or facial response — the withdrawal pattern John Gottman identified as one of four behaviors that predict divorce.

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 undefined phase between meeting someone and calling them a partner — ongoing contact with no label, no promises, and no agreed direction yet.

A relationship-shaped bond sustained only by text messages — regular, sometimes daily, contact with no call, no date, and nothing confirmed outside the phone.

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

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

v0.99.0