Love Isn't Easy When Everyone Has Their Phone: 9 New Words for Dating Now

We want to tell you about the 9 “new normals” of how young people date today.

Handling love — the more romantic sort of human relationship — is far easier for young people now than it was a decade or so ago. A love letter that once had to pass through several pairs of hands now takes a few seconds to send as a message. Eligible young men and women who once turned up only through family connections, old friends, or sheer luck now arrive by the hundreds or thousands, courtesy of a few apps.

But that hasn't made dating any simpler.

Match.com, the largest online dating site in the US, has published a report on single young people. Of the 5,500 American adults surveyed, 57% of millennials (born between 1980 and 1995) already had at least one online dating account — yet they were 22% more likely than other age groups to say that finding true love has gotten harder in the age of technology.

Data from the Pew Research Center says much the same: most American teenagers would look for a partner online, but only 8% actually end up in a romantic relationship with someone they met there. China isn't quite the same, but fairy-tale stories of people who chatted on WeChat, scrolled Weibo, or played games together and ended up married are hardly common here either.

The trouble caused by communication being too easy is no smaller than the trouble of “lost touch for years, nowhere to be found.” Reaching someone you like has gotten easier. Knowing what they feel has not.

The QDaily Research Lab ran a survey called “How Do Shy People Like You Express Your True Feelings Now?” and got 3,045 responses. Only a small share said they would come out and say it. Unable to face the person directly, most people reach for stickers and memes instead. Leaving a message brings its own worry — “what if they don't reply, how humiliating would that be?” — so sometimes the only move left is a one-way show of affection: liking every single post on someone's timeline, without fail. And when the moment comes to confess, people get so awkward they can't manage it even in their own language...

On the receiving end, technology has closed the distance but also turned up the volume on the feelings. A message that doesn't get an immediate reply is enough to set off the spiral: “Why hasn't ‘typing…’ appeared yet — does she not care that much about me?” Or a daily streak of likes breaks just once, and it starts: “What happened! Does he think I'm not interesting enough? Or did he pull back because I wasn't giving enough in return? Or was I overthinking it from the start, and he never meant anything by it — he just wanted to be a quiet, like-only acquaintance.” And so you set off down the road of no return, swinging between missing every signal and imagining ones that were never there.

Social networks have added new rituals to courtship as well. Confirming a relationship now means not only introducing your partner to your flesh-and-blood friends and family, but announcing it to the world on social media. The discreet ones post a photo of some small object the two of them share; the outgoing ones can't wait to publish a heartfelt 100-day statement — “100 days! Here's to the next hundred! Heart heart heart.” Day to day you are also expected (under mild duress) to like and comment on your partner's posts, and to repost sickeningly sweet couple stories, tagging your other half, so the parade of public affection never stops.

Even the reasons couples fight have kept up with the times. Take Netflix cheating, which we've written about before: in an age when streaming services drop a whole season at once, a couple who agreed to watch a show together can hit a small emotional crisis if one of them can't restrain the binge-watcher within and sneaks two episodes ahead.

In short, the conditions under which a romance begins, the ways people send and receive affection, the small print of how couples treat each other, and even the reasons it all falls apart in the end — every one of them keeps taking new forms.

The QDaily Research Lab has collected 9 new words about love and marriage. Drawing on research from abroad and our own surveys, here are the 9 new normals of how young people date today. We hope these ideas — not yet in any dating guide — can be of some use to young people who occasionally want to step out of the clean, fresh air of single life and take a whiff of love's decadent sweetness:

1. “You watch this show too?!”

Netflix ran a survey on watching shows and romantic relationships with 1,008 American users aged 18 to 29. The results:

58% of respondents list their favorite shows or films on their social media or dating profiles to attract a potential partner; 25% find someone more attractive because of what they watch; and 27% insist that “viewing compatibility” matters a great deal to a relationship.

The Match.com singles survey found the same warmth toward people who watch the same shows: millennials are 270% more likely than other age groups to find someone attractive simply because that person is binge-watching the same series they are. This very modern yardstick has a name — Show Goggles, making friends through shows.

Every old-fashioned dating guide preaching that true love conquers all tells you to find someone with “shared interests.” But what does that mean in practice, and how do you go about it? Getting to know someone offline always involves the slow mutual dig: “What do you like?” “I like films, and you?” “I like films too, what kind?” — a bashful back-and-forth that drags on until, half a year later, you discover with delight that the only actor your two favorite casts have in common is Fan Wei.

Online, much of the time, a profile picture, the photos someone posts, and how often they share screenshots of melancholy song lyrics in their Moments are enough to size them up — you judge at a glance, like a teacher who has graded a thousand essays, whether this person is worth knowing better. And the point that decides it may be something as shallow as matching Show Goggles, the same taste in music, or even the cruder, blunter question of whether you use Android or iOS.

Once you're actually together, though, you find that even the best-matched couples can't agree on what to watch every time. Among young people already in relationships, 65% have had to negotiate over “what are we watching tonight” or “what do we binge next,” and 35% of them resort to a show trade — as in, I'll agree to start Game of Thrones, but you have to sit through The Advisors Alliance with me to the end.

2. Breadcrumb Flirting

Young people today measure affection with numbers. The QDaily Research Lab ran two surveys on this, “What Real Expressions of Affection Have You Noticed These Days?” and “Under What Circumstances Do You Feel Someone Likes You?”, and the standards people kept naming included how fast someone replies, how many words they use, and how often they visit your profile. In fact none of that takes much real affection to pull off. Sometimes it is nothing more than the irritating practice of breadcrumbing.

You know the pattern. They type “hahaha” under a Weibo post you reshared, they're first to like your latest landscape photo, they ask out of nowhere what you've been up to, they reply to messages in seconds — and nothing ever moves forward. It's exactly like scattering breadcrumbs: testing the waters, never declaring anything, and possibly doing the same to several people at once. This sly behavior — meant to make someone “overthink it,” with no intention of building anything — has a name: breadcrumbing.

Bustle, a women's community site, ranked it the worst dating behavior of all in a piece on how to catch a breadcrumber.

3. Where Did You Go?

A buzzword that dating apps gave a new meaning: vanishing from someone's social network. You've been chatting well with a date, you've met a few times and had a good time, and then, suddenly, nothing — the person disappears into thin air. Call it the modern variant of the early online-dating curse, “dies in daylight,” and, like breadcrumbing, a common and graceless move. It also covers people who can't face saying they want to break up and end the relationship by going cold, blocking, and unfriending instead. That is a form of ghosting too.

What's more infuriating than ghosting is its offshoot, zombieing — social resurrection. After a total blackout, the person mysteriously reappears, says hello as if nothing happened, likes things at random, leaves comments, as though your missed calls and unanswered messages had never existed.

There have always been plenty of people who are bad with words and run from anything hard. Dating apps have magnified the type, and lowered the bar for acting on it.

4. Too Much Drama

The dating app Sapio analyzed the plots of the 150 top-rated romantic comedies on IMDb, then surveyed 1,000 Americans about their views and experience of love based on what it found. Falling for someone who doesn't love you back, or loving someone who never returns it, happens in only 6% of romantic comedies — while 78% of real people say they have been through it. Slowly turning from friends into lovers has happened to 72% of real people, and happens in 7% of rom-coms.

All told, 85% of people think romantic comedies are nonsense, nothing like real life.

The part of a relationship most warped by rom-coms is the confession. In our survey “What Kind of Dating Moves Do You Think Are Cringey?”, 5,923 readers voted, and the top two are both stock scenes from film and television: shouting up at a dormitory window, “Hey you! I love you! Be my boyfriend/girlfriend!” (839 votes) and going down on one knee in public (734 votes).

Behavior this badly misled by the screen leaves normal people feeling love-aggressive — a word for the sense of being trespassed on by an excess of affection. Any passionate display made before you know how the other person feels risks coming across as love-aggressive. Lay out a ring of candles, kneel in public, shout that she is your princess — if her drama levels aren't as high as yours, you are unlikely to get the tearful, sworn-forever reaction you had in mind. More often it ends with the other person keeping as far away from you as life allows.

5. What Are We, Exactly?!

Liking someone is a “crush.” Sex without romance is “hooking up” or “friends with benefits.” Dating seriously is a “relationship.” But what do you call the thing between the last two — further along than friendship of the mind or of the body, yet with no defined status?

Carina Hsieh, a writer at Cosmo, says a friend of hers coined the fitting word for it: situationship, a catch-all for the nameless stage between friends and lovers, a state so finely balanced that one probing question — “what exactly are we?” — is enough to knock the whole thing over. Hsieh says she used to eat with a situationship of hers, stay at his place four nights a week, even help him pick a full-length mirror for his apartment, and yet it never turned into a defined couple. A situationship admits that feelings are involved. It isn't as cleanly divided as a purely sexual arrangement (which, in truth, is rarely clean either), and it may be one of the most common emotional states among young people today.

It has more than one name. Urban Dictionary has an entry for “casual relationship.” Katie Hakala, a writer at Mic, a publication aimed at millennials, calls it a “dating partner.” The New York Times's Modern Love column calls the two people in one “Jeremies.” And Isabelle Teissier, writing in the Huffington Post, sums it up as “I want to be single — but with you.”

True-love romantics and old-fashioned types may think a relationship like this isn’t “normal” enough. But once a thing starts being defined again and again, once people keep trying to put words to it, that means it has already become a normal of its own.

6. Social Network Relationship Certification

FBO, short for Facebook official, is the couple-certification ritual of announcing your status on a social network like Facebook once you've defined the relationship. The full set of steps: change your relationship status to “in a relationship,” post a photo of the two of you or a declaration that you're together, and tag your partner.

In a QDaily quiz called “Test Your Drama Index,” we got 33,297 responses, 70.8% of them saying they were fine with themselves or their partner showing off the relationship on social media while in the throes of love. For most people, certifying each other on social media is the last step in making a relationship official.

Not everyone, of course, holds themselves to FBO's slightly precious rules. But when a couple nobody had much faith in shows no sign of surfacing online, friends and family will draw their conclusion: “No interaction at all — so they really aren't serious.” Your social network friends do genuinely enjoy a relationship announcement. A report from the marketing company Wishpond found that when Facebook users change their relationship status, engagement on their posts rises by as much as 225%.

Against the jubilation of announcing a relationship, clearing away the mountain of loved-up posts after it ends is devastating.

Changing the relationship status is the first test. Different timings and methods make for different drama shows. Some people use the status change itself to tell their partner “we're finished.” Some are ruled by the silly little thought that whoever switches to single first wins, and change it the second the breakup is spoken, while the other person is still in sight. But most people stay “in a relationship” for a while after a breakup, let things go quiet, and then quietly change the status later, to show they have “let go.”

And if you kept your social media updated all through the relationship, interacting constantly with your partner, it is nearly impossible to pull yourself out of those digital records afterwards. In our survey on “The Internet Skeletons You Wish You Could Destroy With One Click,” “every Weibo interaction with my ex” came third, behind only “Qzone posts from my angsty teenage years” and “profile photo albums from the Renren days.”

7. A New Kind of “Hookup”

In Netflix's survey of young people, 72% of respondents with partners said watching shows and films together was one of their favorite ways to spend an ordinary date night. Data from OnePoll says 37% like watching with their partner, and of those, 73% think binge-watching has deepened the relationship.

Whether you share a video-site account has also become a subtle gauge of how deep the feelings run. 51% of respondents believe that reaching the account-sharing stage is proof enough that both people are taking it seriously, and 17% wouldn't share a video account until after they were engaged.

Binge-watching matters so much inside intimate relationships that young people invent and use a whole vocabulary of relationship slang built on the streaming service Netflix — Netflix cheating, mentioned above, or “Netflix and chill,” which is a proposition.

Eight years ago Netflix and chill still meant a solo activity: watch a show, unwind. From 2014 on, inviting someone you liked over to watch shows became a common way to go on a date, and “chill” gradually came to cover two-person activities like going to bed. Today it is the up-to-date version of “would you like to come up for coffee?”

8. Spending the Wedding Cash Where It Counts

Now that the wedding trip is a trend, a honeymoon is no longer a honeymoon. It might replace the ceremony outright. It might last nowhere near a month — a simple mini moon squeezed into marriage leave plus a long weekend. It might not even be a trip for two, but a group moon with friends along.

Young people working in China's first-tier cities usually hold the wedding back home, while their colleagues are in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou and their close classmates are scattered across the country. Inviting them to a wedding can cost them half a month's salary once round-trip fares and the cash gift are added up. The travel site Priceline.com says nearly 40% of American millennials have skipped a wedding because travel was too expensive, and that wedding guests spend an average of $600 on wedding-related costs.

American young people who want close friends to witness their sweetest moment, and who are also considerate about the bill, have started choosing the group honeymoon, or buddy moon: inviting good friends along on the honeymoon trip. The invited friends still pay their fares, but they get a holiday out of it, which is far better value than attending a ceremony. In Priceline.com's survey, 12% of respondents said they had been on a group honeymoon in the past five years, and two-thirds of them spent more than $800 on the trip.

9. Digital Divorce

A sharp piece of wordplay — device plus divorce — for a relationship broken by addiction to electronics. If you had to name the biggest problem facing young married people now, it might be this: two partners half a meter apart, each conducting an open, inseparable affair with a device.

In the QDaily Research Lab's survey on why young relationships end, “What Does Your Partner Do That Makes You Feel Disillusioned?”, we got 11,403 responses. First place, as usual, went to the single person's declaration “never had a partner, wouldn't know” (1,195 votes), and second place to “we talk less and less, and play with our phones more and more” (893 votes).

Love isn't easy when everyone has their phone. Couples without the largeness of spirit to coexist peacefully, each doing their own thing, have probably already broken up over “the condition of having to touch the phone even in a single spare second.”

Cover image and illustrations by: Lin Xiaoyao

The QDaily Research Lab**is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for discussing all sorts of lifestyle questions. It may be about shifts and trends in how people live, or about a particular brand's service. Here you can vote, vent, and say where you stand.