Questions about the vocabulary

No list of twelve is authoritative — the number comes from listicles, and no two of them count the same way. What the vocabulary actually holds are names for arrangements: monogamy, ethical non-monogamy, open, polyamorous, monogamish, throuple. Each names who is involved and what has been agreed, not a rank on a scale.

Non-monogamy is the plain descriptive term: any arrangement involving more than two people romantically or sexually, including ones nobody agreed to. Ethical non-monogamy narrows it to arrangements everyone involved knows about and consented to. The word ethical is doing the work of marking that consent, which is why speakers keep adding it.

Mostly an arrangement, with one common exception. Open, monogamish and throuple describe a setup that can change next year. Polyamorous is the word people most often use about themselves rather than about their current situation, closer to a disposition than a schedule. Which sense is meant depends on the speaker, not the word.

A single person, most often a bisexual woman, sought by an established couple to join them. The word is half-joking and pointed at once: it names someone the couple treats as rare and available on their terms. The matching phrase unicorn-hunting describes the couples doing the looking, and is rarely a compliment.

A style of polyamory in which everyone connected through a partner could comfortably share a meal — figuratively, all of them at one kitchen table. It names a preference for openness between partners and metamours instead of parallel relationships kept apart. The phrase describes a texture, not a rule anyone enforces.

Recreational sexual activity with people outside a couple, usually undertaken together and usually with the emotional side deliberately left out. The word is older than most of the vocabulary around it and carries its own subculture. It names an activity rather than a whole arrangement, and it keeps the couple as the unit.

Because ordinary language ran out first. Limerence, enmeshment and codependency were all coined inside psychology or therapy, then borrowed by people who wanted a name for something conversation had no word for. Borrowed terms keep their clinical shape and lose their clinical use: in dating talk they are description, not diagnosis.

The person the feeling is aimed at, in the vocabulary of the psychologist who coined limerence. The phrasing is deliberately cold: the term was built to describe the state of the person experiencing it, so the other person appears as its target rather than as a character. Outside that literature almost nobody says it.

Both, and the two uses pull in opposite directions. Said about yourself it is a self-description borrowed from recovery literature. Said about someone else it usually works as a complaint — a way of naming another person’s care as excessive. The word carries a judgement that the speaker almost never states outright.

The same shape at a smaller scale. The term describes boundaries between people thinning until where one person ends is unclear. It was first used of parents and children, and gets borrowed for partners whose moods, decisions and time have stopped being separable. In dating talk it names that blur and nothing more specific.

Age and precision. Infatuation is old, general and quietly disapproving — it implies the feeling is foolish and will pass. Limerence is a coined technical term for a specific involuntary state: intrusive thought about one particular person, and acute sensitivity to any sign of reciprocation. One word judges; the other describes.

Because they name a pattern rather than a person or a stage. Breadcrumbing, stashing, cushioning, banksying: the -ing ending turns each one into something being done, repeatedly, by somebody to somebody. It is a grammar of complaint, which is also why these words spread quickly and why most of them date quickly too.

A pattern. One late reply is not breadcrumbing; the word needs repetition — enough contact to keep someone attentive, never enough to arrive anywhere. That is why no single message works as evidence of it. The term describes a rhythm over weeks, and the rhythm is the whole content of the word.

No, and the plain word is much older. A catfish is a fish, and the verb carries earlier senses with nothing to do with romance. The dating meaning — inventing a person and conducting a relationship as them — arrived through a documentary and the television series that followed it. Search results still mix all of these.

Yes, and that meaning is by far the more common one: monkey bars are playground equipment, and monkey barring is what children do on them. The dating sense borrows the picture — never releasing one bar until the next is in hand — for someone moving to a new partner without a gap. Two unrelated meanings, one phrase.

The prefix marks scale and doubt at the same time. Micro-cheating names small acts — a kept flirtation, a saved message, a photo never deleted — that would not meet most definitions of cheating but that somebody in the relationship reads as a breach. The word exists precisely because whether those acts count is contested.

Usually the pattern of attraction, not the activity. Demisexual, asexual, pansexual and sapiosexual each describe when attraction happens, toward whom, or that it seldom happens at all. None of them states what a person does, and several describe people whose behaviour looks unremarkable from outside. The suffix names a shape of attraction.

Ace is the community short form of asexual, used as an adjective and as the name of the wider spectrum of people who describe little or no sexual attraction. It works as a self-description: people apply it to themselves rather than having it assigned. The parallel short form aro comes from aromantic, and concerns romantic attraction instead.

A self-description for somebody mostly straight but not exclusively so. It marks a small opening rather than a balance, which is what separates it from bisexual, and it puts the weight on where the person usually sits. Whether it counts as an orientation or as a hedge is argued about, including by people who use it.

A relationship carrying the commitment usually reserved for romance without being romantic — shared homes, shared decisions, a named partnership outside the romantic frame. The word came out of aromantic and asexual communities, which needed a term for bonds that ordinary vocabulary keeps filing under friendship. People who use it choose it for themselves.

A self-description for attraction to people of all genders in which gender is still noticed and forms part of the attraction. That last clause is the whole point of the word. It is usually explained beside pansexual, more often described as attraction where gender is not the deciding factor; speakers differ on how sharp that line is.

There is no single one. Depending on the stage and the speaker you will hear seeing each other, talking, hanging out, courting, or simply together — each carrying a different degree of commitment and of deniability. The vagueness is the function: these words let people describe something without having to define it out loud.

Less a fixed list than a moving one. The words most often filed under that label — ick, delulu, sneaky link, thirst trap, banksying — arrived through short video and group chats rather than through any publication. Several are already dated. A dictionary can only record where each one sat when it was last checked.

The newest tend to be single coinages that spread from one post outward: banksying is a current example, alongside delulu and sneaky link, which are slightly older. New here means recently attested rather than established — most coinages of this kind fade well before any reference work catches up with them.

A description, although people use it as a status. The word marks the absence of romance in a relationship, not the presence of any particular arrangement or degree of closeness. Two people can both call their bond platonic and mean very different amounts of intimacy by it. It says what the relationship is not.

Borrowed. The phrase is much older in reporting on war and crime, where it means the number of dead. The dating sense — how many people somebody has slept with — is a later slang use that reached wide circulation through short video. Search results for the bare phrase still mix the two meanings freely.

Because slang has a shelf life, and a dictionary that hides it misleads. Rising means a word is spreading and its sense is still settling. Current means it is in ordinary use. Dated means people still understand it but rarely reach for it. Every entry also carries the date it was last checked.