Every Terrible Dating Trend You Need To Know, Ranked From Bad To The Absolute Worst
It seems like just about every day, there are a bunch of new dating trends popping up, making life so much more confusing than it needs to be. But there is also both some satisfaction and relief knowing that the annoying and oftentimes bizarre dating trends of 2017 aren't just happening to you. The good news is that none of us are immune to any of these cringeworthy dating practices, so just like they say in High School Musical... we're all in this together.
The bad news is thanks to a whole bunch of convoluted reasons, millennials insist on spreading our unique brand of non-communicative hoopla until not a single one of us is left untainted by someone who low-key has crap leaking out of what is surely a diaper. For many of us, 25 is on the horizon, and in order for us to get the most our of our quarter life crisis, it's absolutely key that we pretend to get our lives together and stop subjecting our hearts to carelessness. Then again, almost every guy I've ever dated has been over 30 and they were still serving up the same brand of McSketch-muffins, so we actually might be totally screwed.
Here are the dating trends responsible for destroying any hope we have at quasi-romantic futures, ranked from worst to seriously should have been stopped yesterday.
6. Benching
Can I just take a moment to point out the one cool thing about annoying dating trends? At least their names totally indicate exactly what they mean, you know? Putting someone on the back burner is known as benching them. The high school sports implications totally makes sense, considering anyone who is so confused in their dating life that they have enough people on their "might call roster" to fill an entire sports team must be a child. If someone is benching you, your "relationship" probably exists mostly via text with little to to no IRL action.
5. Breadcrumbing
Unfortunately, these aren't the cute breadcrumbs that lead you out of the woods. Quite the contrary actually — they lead you so deep into the woods that you're going to wish you had left a separate trail of carbs to GTFO and find your way back to sanity. A sinister breadcrumber is probably a bored kinda-sorta baby who isn't really interested in having a real relationship, but likes the ego boost of having someone around who's fawning over them. They basically treat you like a cactus, giving you just enough attention every now and then to keep you hanging on to hope, but never actually take any action to build a real connection.
4. Ghosting
LOL, we all know what this feels like. Everything's going great and then bam, a day goes by and... crickets. Then two, then three, then poof — the person who you were straight up dating has vanished into thin air without so much as a it's not you it's me (aka a "pity pep-talk"). Luckily for you, people who are too cowardly to communicate their feelings or lack thereof would probably make a lousy partner anyway, so they kind of did you a favor.
3. Cushioning
Things with a partner have been on a steady decline and you both know the end is nigh'. So what do you do? Well if you're a decent person who can muster a bit of empathy for the person who you used to love, then you talk it out and try to separate amicably as soon as you realize things aren't gonna work out. If you are, for example, a cheater, but don't like the dark cloud of a relationship label hanging over your head, then you let the relationship continue while grooming a couple of promising rebounds to cushion your fall.
2. Love Bombing
This lesser known dating trend is actually kind of psycho. It's basically when you start dating someone who convinces you they are so freaking into you by pulling out all the stops — and I mean all the stops — and just when you think it can't get any better, they pull the rug right from under you by doing a complete 180. If things are moving way too fast and something about their speed with which they "fell in love" seems too good to be true, then it probably is.
1. Zombieing
Of course, it's only fair that we saved the best-worst dating trend for last. As we know from how oversaturated the film industry has been with zombie apocalypse films, becoming a zombie is a two-step program. First, they ghost you, and just when you've managed to come to terms with the fact that the person you were dating dropped you, then they rise from the dead and hit you up out of nowhere as if nothing happened.
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