Talking Stage
Say you've been texting someone for three weeks. Good morning messages, a joke that already has history behind it, one almost-date that got rescheduled twice — and if a friend asked what this actually is, you'd shrug. That shrug is the talking stage: the stretch between meeting someone and either becoming a couple or drifting apart, carrying no label while it's happening. 56% of online daters have deleted a dating app because of a bad experience in a stretch like this, according to a 2022 survey of 1,000 U.S. online daters commissioned by the dating platform CanWe. It matters most to whoever is in one right now, reading a reply for the third time trying to decide what it meant.
This isn't the same thing as a situationship — that's a settled, ongoing arrangement two people actively choose to keep undefined, not a phase on the way to something. The difference between the two is worth knowing early, because confusing them is how people stay stuck in either one for months longer than they meant to.
Write the manuscript that gets you past the guessing partBecause researchers who actually asked college students found there isn't one shared answer to what it means. A 2024 study out of Binghamton University's Human Sexualities Lab surveyed 403 participants at a mid-sized public university, then ran follow-up focus groups with 37 more students, and found "just talking" meant something different almost every time it was asked about — exclusive to some, open to others, physical for some pairs and not at all for others. The phrase survives precisely because it never has to mean one specific thing.
"In hookup culture, emotional attachments are taboo (though they do occur); just talking allows students to form emotional intimacy while downplaying the significance of such intimacy – they're just talking." — Melissa Hardesty, researcher, PsyPost (2024)
Because it isn't just social awkwardness — it's a specific, studied kind of doubt. Communication researchers Leanne Knobloch and Denise Solomon split relational uncertainty into three sources: doubts about yourself, doubts about the other person, and doubts about the relationship itself. Inside that third category sits one question in particular — relationship definition. The talking stage is that exact question, stretched out and left open on purpose, by both people, at the same time.
Direction is the whole difference. A talking stage is understood, by at least one side, as temporary — a runway toward something else, whatever the pace. A situationship is the plane that decided to stay on the runway. It can run for months without complaint from either passenger, because staying undefined isn't a delay in that case. It's the actual arrangement.
| Talking stage | Situationship | |
|---|---|---|
| Feels like | An audition still being decided | A settled, if unnamed, routine |
| Typical length | Weeks, until it resolves one way | Open-ended, sometimes years |
| The unspoken agreement | "We'll see" | "Let's not ask" |
Mostly it's contact, repeated until it deepens or stalls. Texting frequency climbs first, then a private vocabulary forms fast, then someone starts keeping score without saying so out loud — small behaviors that build a version of intimacy before either person has agreed to call it that.
- Daily or near-daily texting — not urgent, but constant enough that a missed morning gets noticed by both people.
- Inside jokes forming fast — shorthand that would mean nothing to anyone else, arriving well before either person would call the other a partner.
- One tentative meeting, maybe two — often rescheduled, because neither side wants to be the one who seemed too eager.
- A running mental tally — of reply speed, of who texted first today, kept by at least one person and almost never spoken aloud.
It removes the option to leave things undefined by accident. Each match on Anketta opens a 48-hour window: walking away ends it early, and letting it sit in silence lets it expire on its own. There's no third setting where a conversation just continues without either person committing to it. A match becomes permanent only once both people have actually written to each other inside that window — at which point the app locks browsing to that one conversation, and the guessing is over either way.
Other apps solve the same ambiguity by making the talking stage the entire product, not a phase to get through — worth reading if the endless-runway version is the actual complaint, since it's a different failure mode than an app that expires a conversation on purpose. Open your own manuscript, and the undefined stretch has a deadline built into it, instead of a shrug that could go on for months.
Three ways, roughly, and the person in it rarely gets to pick which one happens. It resolves into something real once both people stop avoiding the definition question out loud. It calcifies into a situationship if neither wants to name it and neither wants to leave. Or it fades — not with a conversation, but with replies that stretch further apart until they stop, which is its own answer, delivered without a single sentence of it being spoken.
Volume alone answers nothing. Two people can text forty times a day and still be avoiding the one question that matters, or text twice a week and mean every word of it. What tends to track with an actual relationship forming isn't frequency — it's whether replies engage with what was specifically said, instead of restating a safer, more general version of it back. A talking stage full of texts can still be a talking stage full of nothing.
What is the talking stage, in one sentence?
The undefined stretch between meeting someone and either becoming a couple or drifting apart — ongoing texting or hanging out, with real emotional stakes, but no label either person has agreed to yet. It's a phase, not a category people plan to stay in.
Is the talking stage the same as dating?
No. Dating implies both people have agreed, even loosely, that this is headed somewhere and are treating it that way. The talking stage is what happens before that agreement exists — sometimes for weeks, sometimes never, depending on whether either person says the unspoken part out loud.
How is a talking stage different from a situationship?
Direction. A talking stage is a runway — understood by at least one person as temporary, on the way to something else. A situationship is a destination two people have agreed, without saying so, to stay at, sometimes for years, with no plan to leave and no plan to arrive anywhere further.
How long should a talking stage last?
There's no agreed answer, and that's not a gap in the research — a 2024 study found the phrase means different things to different people, some treating a few weeks as plenty and others letting it run for months before either person names it.
Why do people stay in a talking stage even when it's frustrating?
Because naming it risks the thing outright, and staying vague risks nothing yet. Asking "what are we?" invites a real answer, including a bad one — so plenty of people would rather keep texting inside the question than hear it answered wrong.
Does Anketta have a talking stage?
Not an open-ended one. Matching opens a 48-hour window instead: a match becomes permanent only if both people actually write to each other inside it, and silence lets it expire rather than drift for weeks with neither person deciding anything.
The reply came in at 11:40 that night — three words, nothing more — and she read them four times before she understood that they were, in fact, an answer.
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