The Date of the Union 2026: The Great Dating Recession

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome to the 2026 Ace Couple Podcast Date of the Union Address. My name is Courtney, I’m here with my spouse Royce, and today we’re here to tackle the hard questions such as: are we in a dating recession?

Royce: I feel like that’s one of the more acceptable types of recessions.

Courtney: If I had to pick a type of recession, dating recession isn’t the worst one. I have been hearing this alarmist, “We’re in a dating recession,” for I’d say the better part of a year at this point. And I’ve just been seeing more and more articles talking about it, and it’s really upsetting when we see it paired with all this tangential rhetoric. I mean, we’ve talked about the Scott Galloway and how men need to get their shit together by pursuing women better and making more money. And we have the Heritage Foundations of the world who are trying to tailor every ounce of our public policy in the name of incentivizing not only a larger dating culture, but specifically increasing of cis hetero and procreative marriages. But let’s see what some of the recent commentaries and studies have to say. Now, I feel like they’ve kind of stolen our bit here, but we’ve got the Institute for Family Studies who just recently, February 2026, put out a State of Our Unions: The Dating Recession.

Royce: So close.

Courtney: It’s so close. They– they took our ideas. If they have been doing this longer than we have, please don’t tell me because I would like to think that they took our idea. How bad is it? And what can we do? A View Through the 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey. So this survey sampled 5,275 unmarried young adults ages 22 to 35 in the United States. And overall, they claim to have found evidence that these young adults are experiencing a dating recession during their prime dating years. I hate that phrase. What makes something a prime dating year?

Royce: I assume they’re talking college-ish or just after ages because that’s where people are expected to date around a lot.

Courtney: But it’s all societal expectations, right? Unless they are going the full family angle where, you know, biological clock is ticking, you know, gotta– gotta settle down and start having kids by a certain age. But I suppose their admitted focus is single young adults who do expect to marry. So this isn’t just any and every unmarried young adult. These are people who expect to marry someday. But what they found is about only 1 in 3 of that sample of young adults is actively dating. And that does include either casually or exclusively. When asked how often they were dating, only 31% of young adults reported that they were active daters, which they consider dating once a month or more. The fascinating thing to me is when you break that out by men and women, it’s 26% of women and 36% of men who consider themselves active daters.

Royce: Okay, do they define active?

Courtney: Yeah, they considered active to be dating once a month or more.

Royce: Oh, okay, I see. I was at first thinking it was the person themselves defining what active dating meant, and I thought that might just be how the whole attention model works, where one demographic is— has to be more active in reaching out than another. But no, if it’s just going on dates, that’s interesting.

Courtney: Well, it’s also because so much of the dominant cultural narrative right now is men are so lonely. Men are not dating enough. And it– it is kind of all young people aren’t dating enough, but all of a sudden it’s a crisis when men are not dating enough. And you have very, very prominent outspoken people who are consistently saying, you know, women are okay without a relationship, women might even be happier without a relationship, but men, they need a relationship to be a functioning human. Which is baffling that this has become a widely accepted thing to think.

Royce: It is a— I mean, it’s a self-awareness problem, like being able to be happy by yourself or with friends, like not being able to do that, is more about knowing yourself and what you need. But the 10% difference on that active dating is interesting because for that to be the case, like, either there were a statistically significant number of gay men in this pool of people that they studied, or there are some like serial dater situations going on. Like, something has to be skewing the demographic if it’s just, have you been on more than one date in a month?

Courtney: Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know, because it’s not that large of a study. It’s slightly over 5,000 people. And to carry that line through, it does say nearly three-quarters of women and nearly two-thirds of men reported that they had not dated or dated only a few times within the entire last year. They consider this to be noteworthy because, of this sample, 51% of the adults in this survey expressed interest in starting a relationship. So what they’re seeing is that more people want a relationship than seem to be taking what they’d consider to be active steps towards achieving that goal. And this is– [chuckles] This is so interesting to me because the Scott Galloway-esque narrative has become so prominent in this last year especially. And of course we have the even more overtly harmful right-wing misogynistic version of essentially saying the same thing.

Courtney: But one thing everyone says is like, oh, men don’t know how to talk to women anymore, they’re just in the basements playing video games, they’re not putting themselves out there and they don’t even know how. But according to this, only 1 in 3 young adult men express confidence in the fundamental skill of being able to approach someone they were romantically interested in. But that number was 1 in 5 for young adult women. So women are less confident putting themselves out there according to this survey. And I’m not going to get into it today, but in a near future episode. There is another voice, another guy who is very loudly outspoken about very terrible ideas about men and women and dating and relationships, who is just like, properly become a nemesis of mine. And we almost accidentally ended up on the same podcast series as this guy. That’s a wonderful story. Can’t wait to share it. It’s the same nonsense though. And we’ve got plenty to talk about today in terms of general dating trends for the year.

Courtney: This survey does report that young adults desire a dating culture that’s aimed at forming serious relationships. They say that while it is true for both women and men, they largely want to focus on forming serious relationships, there’s still a bit of a percentage difference between men and women where it’s 83% of women and 74% of men. So that is interesting because that 10% difference, give or take a point, does kinda say that the demographic who is slightly less interested in serious relationships is attempting to date more often. That’s why I almost think that dating as a general term is almost not even helpful in studies like this. Because neither one is incorrect or better than the other. You should be able to pursue whatever type of relationship you want, whether it’s serious and monogamous, whether it’s casual, but just setting expectations amongst people you’re dating to curate your pool of people correctly so that everyone is on the same page and comfortable and whatnot.

Royce: Yeah, I’ve struggled with that a little bit because the way that I tended to date was different than most people. And I think that’s just coming from me just having a, I guess, lower than average reserve of social energy. Like, it always threw me off when someone would be talking about going on several different dates with several different people, like, all in the same week.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: Like, that is just not how I operate. But I was thinking about that with the 10-point differential on who is an active dater. I did wonder if some people were dating more frequently with shorter-term ideas in mind, and if some people were just like maybe talking more upfront before actually going out on a date. And if something fell through, giving a little bit of time before trying again. And just, you know, if you space things out a month for each person, well, then you’re not really an active dater by that definition, because it was more than one a month.

Courtney: Right. And the fact here too, that they said like, this is single young adults, but there was room for someone who is dating the same person continuously. So this isn’t, like, I think the word single, and I think you are not in an ongoing relationship, like you are not in at least one ongoing relationship, whether that means you are just completely unattached, or everything you have right now is explicitly casual. But like those folks, like maybe someone has been dating the same person for a year and they just aren’t married. If you’re considering them single and lumping them in with the same survey, they’re going to answer these questions differently too. So I do think there are different types of dating. And that is not something that you ever hear discussed or broken down in the broader narratives. Because the broader narratives, even if they’re trying to say, like, “I’m trying to reframe the way you’re thinking about relationships,” or the way you think about, you know, single men, or the way you think about marriages, it’s really still very reductive and breaking it down to very traditional, conservative-in-nature ideas.

Courtney: But limited though this sample and questions like this may be, something that they deduced was that money worries, self-confidence, and past dating experiences are all big barriers in the modern dating landscape. That doesn’t surprise me. That sounds very normal. Then they also say that there is dating resilience as a concept. Which is interesting, I don’t think I’ve heard it phrased that way before, necessarily. But they believe that dating resilience is low among young adults. Because only about 28% of young adults report that they can stay positive after a bad date or a relationship setback. And more than half, 55%, agreed that their breakups have made them more reluctant to begin new romantic relationships. But isn’t that also kind of normal? Like, that doesn’t seem like a new phenomenon.

Royce: Yeah, I feel like people have been saying that for forever. It just maybe hasn’t had statistics put to it very often.

Courtney: I also don’t know if I like calling it resilience, because maybe taking a little break is what you need. Especially after, like, a really bad relationship breakup, especially after, you know, what if there’s a situation where that relationship was abusive and ended really, really poorly? It’s actually advisable that you take a little time to yourself before getting back out there. So, I don’t think that shows a lack of resilience. But of course, the folks who are actually putting out surveys like this are the ones who want to see more marriages. That is their goal here. And so when they read this data, they say that this gap that they’re seeing calls for a concerted effort to teach young adults healthy dating skills. They think young adults have the desires to build relationships and marriages. They just— yeah, they, they just don’t know how. They have a bad breakup and they don’t get right back out there again. That’s a problem. They do at least admit that when it does come to marriages, that the good news is that marriages are significantly more stable today than they were 4 or 5 decades ago. It’s a little refreshing to see an article like this actually admit that.

Royce: Yeah, that’s something that if you dig into it, people have known for a long time now, but the ‘half of marriages all always end in divorce’ line has just stayed a part of, I guess, common knowledge.

Courtney: Yeah. And they do say here, they quote, “Granted, much of this stability bonus is a result of who is marrying. Couples with riskier profiles for marital breakup have become a decreasing portion of all marrying couples.” Why is that granted? Like that– That should maybe be a good thing. Maybe, maybe what that indicates is that marriage in this form that you are envisioning and advocating isn’t for everyone. Maybe? Maybe! Or maybe it would be easier for everyone if we actually had better systems in place to help support the middle and lower classes. Because they’re presenting this as a paradox. They even use the word paradox. [reading] “Hidden in this encouraging trend is a paradox. Increasing marital stability exists alongside a strong trend of fewer adults getting married.” Why is that a paradox?

Courtney: It’s only a paradox if you’re coming at it from a lens of ‘all marriage is good, there should be more marriages, and those marriages that are created should not end’. So they’re looking at this and their brains are just breaking going like, “We like that there are fewer divorces, that is good. But there are fewer marriages in the first place and that’s bad. I don’t understand!” Like, this whole paragraph: [reading] “If our only goal is to promote marriage stability, then a falling marriage rate, with couples who possess riskier divorce profiles opting out, is not a concern. But if marriage itself is a crucial social and personal good, then a substantial decrease in the number of adults who marry across the life course is a discouraging counterweight to the good news of increasing marital stability. It is hard to celebrate stronger marriages when fewer and fewer young people are entering them. Socially, this is ambivalent news.”

Royce: Well, what it proves is that that second point is incorrect and you should drop that thought process.

Courtney: Yes!

Royce: When you have to jump through hoops to defend something that you want to believe in, that is a good indication that it isn’t worth believing in. There’s something flawed about it.

Courtney: Well, the exact same flawed logic we have seen been playing out with all of the iterations of pronatalism right now. Because everyone’s saying, like, oh, women have more autonomy and freedoms and career prospects and more money and all of these things that should be very good things. And they’re like, but when women get more rights, they have fewer babies! And we can’t have that. We want more babies. So it kinda sucks that women have to have fewer rights to have more babies, but mm, hear me out, more babies? Like that, that is literally the conversation all the pronatalists have. And they’ll even talk at more global scales. They’re like, “Yes, in all countries where women have a higher quality of life, the birth rates go down. Can’t have that.” Like just stop it. Maybe there are lots of different ways to have a healthy, satisfying, fulfilling life, and we should care predominantly about all existing humans to have their own lives and relationships and kids or lack thereof that they want.

Courtney: And maybe everyone can be happier and every type of relationship that they choose to form or not can be stronger and better and healthier and happier as a result. I think that should be a net positive for literally everyone, but folks like this are like, “No, that’ll ruin the world.” So, I’m not gonna go through this entire report because it is long and it could be a whole episode in and of itself, but we’ve got other dating trends and commentary to get to because this is not just an episode on the Institute for Family Studies, this is the Date of the Union Address, but— I will put the links in all the usual places if anyone wants to read it yourself in the entirety. But I do want to point out that when you scroll down quite a ways, they do start having recommendations based on their findings. And they do say, “Recommendations for relationship educators teaching dating skills.” I’m really, really, really gonna need conservatives to take the word boot camp out of their vocabulary. They really need to stop.

Courtney: We had the marriage boot camps, which we talked about in our recent report from the Heritage Foundation. Now the Institute for Family Studies wants to offer creative dating boot camps for young adults who need skill practice and confidence boosts. And I don’t like that. So, and mind you, everything we reviewed and everything that is written in that Heritage report on marriage is horrifying and bad. The little marriage boot camps, I think, got an outsized backlash just because it sounds so horrifying and there was one little line in there that was like, “Completion of these boot camps should mean that each couple is ready to walk down the aisle in a communal wedding ceremony.” And like, that’s horrifying. Communal wedding ceremony, like, that is cult shit. Straight up. But a lot of people have been saying like, oh, they want to send single people to camps. Which I guess if your definition of single is not married, sure. But in the context of that report, they were saying like established couples who are not yet married.

Courtney: And potentially even couples who, like, have kids but are not married, like let’s send them to a marriage camp. So saying boot camp is just terrifying and bad and just maybe don’t. But that paired with this is terrifying. If you have boot camps for like properly single people who are not even dating to go to a boot camp for the purpose of dating and then funnel them into a marriage boot camp? Absolutely fucking not. Don’t do it! If I have to sit here a year from now for the 2027 State of the Union Address and say that they really did it, they’re sending people to dating and marriage boot camps, I’m gonna be so mad. Don’t make me do it. Don’t make me do it! Although, here’s a shocking bullet point, because this is under all of their, like, “What do we do about this?” They start with “offer dating boot camps.” But near the end of the list, they say, “Understand that differences in dating experiences for women and men are minimal. There is little need to accentuate gender differences in instruction.”

Royce: Oh, okay.

Courtney: Somebody get Scott Galloway on the phone. What– what? Also, that sounds, like, counter to everything people in this, like, camp of ideology tends to say too. Because they’re always like, “Men and women have fundamental complementary differences!”

Royce: Yeah, I feel like that’s something we haven’t read before, but at the same time, if what they’re actually doing is taking the stereotypes and saying, “No, hey, all the men, you need to date more like how women date,” like, that might be an improvement.

Courtney: [laughs] So utterly fascinating. I’m done for the day on the Institute for Family Studies, so we are moving on to a much lighter topic. I mean, hey, Valentine’s Day was recently. Not as exciting as, you know, Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week to follow shortly thereafter, but apparently the kids these days, those being Gen Alpha now already, are still exchanging Valentines in school sometimes. And that does kind of surprise me because I feel like even while I was in school, they were starting to take away fun holiday celebration things in school. And I kind of suspected that that was just gonna keep happening more and more. Like, we still absolutely had the little, like, make a Valentine’s Day box out of, like, a shoebox or something, and everyone goes around and, you know, delivers little Valentine’s mail to everyone.

Courtney: Which is a cute, fun little thing. But like, while I was in school, they started taking away, like, Halloween activities. And I started school being able to wear costumes to school on Halloween, but then they totally took that away at one point. So I was a little surprised to hear that these school Valentine’s cards are still a thing, at least in some places, at least in some schools. But my goodness, when I had a conversation with someone who has kids recently who was looking through these Gen Alpha Valentine’s cards, was I ever disappointed. I’m sure the Valentine’s cards we had when we were kids were also corny and cheesy that adults didn’t understand, but I remember so many of them just being, like, based on TV shows or movies.

Royce: Or just having some very simple, like, puns.

Courtney: Yeah, but now it’s like we’re verging on the, like, second or third generation wave of, like, absurd internet meme nonsense, and it’s just getting weirder and weirder all the time.

Royce: I just had a thought. Do you think you could make a pop-up card that basically, as it unfolded, was like the flipbook version of an animated GIF?

Courtney: Oh gosh, it’s— listen, when there are kids who are giving Valentines to each other that say, “You’re so 6/7,”

Royce: I still feel like that one’s maybe a stealth insult that is just going underneath the adults in the room’s eyes, but maybe I’m wrong.

Courtney: I mean, some of the, like, some of these things are just like slang, right? And they were slang that were from more niche minority communities but leeched into the mainstream and then got watered down. Like, that is a thing that happens with slang from the Black community, from queer communities. Like, that stuff— like, that happens all the time. So it doesn’t surprise me to see Valentines that are like: Valentine, you are so fire, or you’re the goat. Like, okay, I guess that is what I would expect from a Gen Alpha Valentine. But then you’ve got ones that are like, “You’ve got rizz, no cap.” And this one, I don’t want any of you in the comments to explain Skibidi Toilet to me. I really don’t.

Courtney: I’m aware that it exists. I’ve got a visual in my head for what that technically means, and that is the end. I don’t want to go any further. But when there are Valentines that say, “Have a Skibidi Valentine’s Day.” But I, I really couldn’t get over the, like, “You are so 6/7.” I did find one, and this, this is what is funny. So everybody, I– Do not explain Skibidi to me, but I do need everyone right now, right now, without looking it up, without googling it, just search inside your soul. What does sigma mean to you, and what do you want me to think sigma means? I want you— I want all of you to comment if you are listening on a platform where you can comment. Like, Spotify has comments? I forget that sometimes.

Royce: Yes, Spotify has comments.

Courtney: But I do check those sometimes. Or if you’re on YouTube, go to the comments and tell me what you think Sigma means, please. Because this Valentine says: “You’re so sigma.”

Royce: I think Apple Podcasts has comments too. We just never log into that.

Courtney: Oh, Apple has— oh, maybe we should look at those. That’s terrifying. Sorry if you’ve been commenting at us on Apple. I haven’t seen any of those. So I did find myself in a situation many months ago where there was an 11-year-old who throughout the day kept saying, “I feel so sigma.” And I did have to ask her, “What do you think that word means?” To which I just got a prolonged, like, “Uh… I don’t know.” So I— that, that person could not explain it to me. However, ever since, instead of logging in to the social media accounts that I have sworn off, instead of googling it, I have been just sampling, like, soliciting opinions, if you will. Soliciting definitions from other people in my life, but only people that I have real-life, face-to-face, in-person conversations with.

Courtney: And it has been such an illuminating experience because everyone who thinks they have a definition of sigma, it’s like a little bit different. So I’ve gotten this enormous array of definitions about sigma and whether or not it’s a good thing, whether it’s a bad thing, if it was a good thing but then became a bad one, or it was bad but then it became good. And I think this is so much more entertaining than being incredibly online and knowing the online discourse about this. So I just got new definitions of sigma from new people. This is— this has been months I’ve been soliciting these definitions. I just got new definitions a couple nights ago from adults who have teenage kids, which are completely different from any of the other opinions I’ve been soliciting lately, so.

Royce: So that aside, I’m really tempted to talk about Skibidi.

Courtney: Do you know anything about Skibidi?

Royce: Yes!

Courtney: Why!? [laughs]

Royce: I think–

Courtney: When did this happen?

Royce: This is why I wanted to talk about it, because I think it’s interesting. It’s– it’s an example of basically like retro forms of retro media coming back. Do you remember back in like the— oh, I don’t know if it was the early mid-2000s, something like that?

Courtney: Of course I do.

Royce: Uh, Red vs. Blue. Do you know what machinimation is, or machinima? It’s— So Red vs. Blue was a series put out, I believe, by Rooster Teeth, who has grown into a bigger animation studio company now.

Courtney: Oh, I know Rooster Teeth.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: I don’t know if I know that specific one.

Royce: So it was entirely made using the Halo engine. So they positioned the figures in the Halo engine and the vehicles and the maps and the cars as a setting and then voice acted over the recordings of things with that engine. And things have done that periodically throughout time. A lot of things have used the Source engine, which is Half-Life. Occasionally you’ll see some animations come out that use World of Warcraft. And that style of animation is a portmanteau of machine and cinema, machinima or machine animation. That is a kind of— it was a thing that was very big back then, and I feel like there has been a big gap where we hadn’t seen it a lot. The whole Skibidi thing is someone recently, whose YouTube and TikTok channels blew up, they got enormous, they’re using Valve’s source engine, the Half-Life engine, to make a story using the models and figures and things.

Courtney: I don’t even think it’s that recent anymore. I think this was years ago now.

Royce: I mean, it’s ongoing.

Courtney: Oh dear. Well, [sighs] okay, that’s all fine and well and good.

Royce: It started at the beginning of 2023. So I feel like there is a gap from the early machinimation to this incarnation of it.

Courtney: So what does it mean to say “Have a Skibidi Valentine’s Day”?

Royce: I don’t think it does.

Courtney: It doesn’t mean.

Royce: I don’t think it means.

Courtney: It means nothing. You get nothing! Well, damn. So I guess when I wasn’t looking, Royce figured out what Skibidi Toilet means.

Royce: Oh, I’ve seen a lot of the videos. It’s just been a while.

Courtney: I also liked that when I asked you, you had a definition for Sigma, but your definition doesn’t match everybody else’s.

Royce: I have the most basic definition [Courtney laughs] and I’m sticking to it because I think it’s funny. But no, the whole Skibidi thing is just an animation thing that is inherently absurdist in its concept and has just continued to grow more and more absurd.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: And in, like, grander scale, like, they found a plot line that’s going on. There are like threads devoted to people trying to deconstruct the lore that’s present in the animation because it— there aren’t a lot of spoken words. Like, it’s, it’s a whole thing.

Courtney: So it’s like Gen Z’s Salad Fingers?

Royce: Maybe. Sure, let’s go with that.

Courtney: [laughs] So yeah, I mean, I’m– I’m sticking to: we’re just on third generation internet nonsense. I will say these goofy little Valentines, the nonsensical “You’re so 6′7”, “Have a skibidi day”, the things that don’t mean. Adults who are actually dating also have words.

Royce: They do still have words.

Courtney: They do still have words. I have here a list of words that mean almost nothing to me, so let’s see if we can figure them out together. Let’s see if Cosmopolitan magazine can explain these words to me. Chalance.

Royce: What?

Courtney: Chalance.

Royce: Can I get the spelling? [Courtne laughs] Can you use it in a sentence?

Courtney: C-H-A-L-A-N-C-E. Chalance. It is the opposite of nonchalance, used by daters to signal they’re seeking a partner who puts in effort. So it’s like, uh, the opposite of playing hard to get. And for word number two here, we have a portmanteau: ghostlighting. A combination of ghosting and gaslighting. Ghostlighting is when someone effectively ghosts/slow fades on you only to randomly pop back up later to reinitiate conversation as if nothing happened, all while acting like you’re crazy if you call them out on it. So this one, we’re actually going to need to get into the weeds here a little bit because I have been intentionally putting off learning what cuffing season is. But I did have someone in my real life, actual day-to-day world use cuffing season recently, and I was like, yep, I guess it is time. I do have to look up what this is. Word number three here is called sledging, and it says a variant of cuffing.

Royce: So do you have— you have definitions for these via Cosmopolitan? Because if cuffing season isn’t a part of BDSM culture, I have no clue.

Courtney: It is not from what I understand. Let’s see if we can suss this out together. So a variant of cuffing, sledging, refers to getting into a cuffing season relationship with the intention of breaking things off by spring. It’s generally considered a more toxic approach to cuffing season.

Royce: By spring— so is cuffing season winter?

Courtney: That would make sense with the context clues based on the conversation I had recently about cuffing season.

Royce: Is it like everything’s going to slow down during the winter, so you better find yourself someone to chain to so you’re not alone?

Courtney: Is this the opposite of ring by spring?

Royce: Well, sledging was the intentional choice to break it off by spring. Cuffing was not correct.

Courtney: Yeah, cuffing is a cuffing season relationship, but sledging is doing it with the intention of breaking things off by spring.

Royce: I guess what’s the term for, like, a short-term summer relationship? Because that’s a thing that’s been around.

Courtney: Oh, like a– like a spring fling.

Royce: Yeah, but I said summer.

Courtney: Summer fling. [laughs] So the reason why this is considered more toxic is due to the fact that the other person, the one, quote, ‘getting sledged’, has likely not been made aware that this romance has an expiration date.

Royce: So are you going to define cuffing, or is— does Cosmopolitan assume we already understand what that is?

Courtney: It has provided a link. So I’m gonna click on the word cuffing season to get to a new article. “6 cuffing season trends to know this winter.” But that’s from last— oh well, December 19th, 2025, so. Oh my gosh, so many words. This is just– this is just a slang dictionary. I might as well just be on Urban Dictionary at this point.

Royce: Yeah, I guessed correctly. It’s just when people search for a short-term romantic partner for the colder months in the areas where it gets cold, usually from October through March.

Courtney: Why?

Royce: Um, avoid getting too lonely when it’s cold out, to have someone during the holidays.

Courtney: All right, well, we’re gonna move on to the next word then. Friendfluence. [reading] “2026 is the year we merge our social lives with our dating lives. Data from Tinder’s Year in Swipe report reveals that 42% of singles cite their friends as a major influence on their love life.” Okay, but why do they call it cuffing season? Are they like, you’re shackling yourself to someone else? Like, that sounds terrible.

Royce: Yeah, pretty much.

Courtney: It’s very old ‘ball and chain’ of them. I hate everything.

Royce: I’ve closed the page I was reading, but I thought I saw there were some slang origins where cuff was an alternative to hook up. But I also saw that there were some trends, some data where like, for example, an analysis of Facebook relationship status.

Courtney: Oh gosh, do they still have those?

Royce: They would find that, you know, relation— a significant number of people would say that they were in a relationship as the season started to get colder and then would be single again once it started to get warmer again.

Courtney: Is there still an option to put, and/or do people still put, “it’s complicated” on Facebook relationship statuses? That was the goofiest thing I think I’ve seen on social media as a phenomenon that everyone just widely accepted as a normal thing to do. Moving on to zip coding. [reading] “Can refer to either of two things: one, restricting your location range on dating apps to a very small radius and only dating people who live very close, i.e., within the same zip code as you. Or two, having a location-dependent relationship in which you’re only together with someone when you’re in the same zip code and consider yourself single when you’re apart.” Those are two different things. Why are they using the same phrase? Monkey barring: when someone lays the groundwork for a new relationship before ending their current one. Which luckily they explain because I didn’t realize why it was called monkey barring.

Royce: So you can just swing over to the next one?

Courtney: Yeah, like dangling between two monkey bars, you’re still gripping one hand on your current partner while reaching out for someone new. See, I don’t monkey bar. As a kid, I was always terribly afraid of monkey bars because I was never strong enough to get all the way across from one side to the other. So I would always have to drop down and the shooting fiery pain that would go through my weak-ass EDS ankles when I jumped down onto the ground and all the way, like, up through my knees, hips, back. Awful, awful pain. No monkey bars for me. Absolutely not. Okay, Shrek-ing.

Royce: What’s that one gonna be? Wallowing in a swamp? [Courtney laughs] Having a best friend who’s a donkey?

Courtney: Yeah, it’s when you use— when you practice friend fluence, but the friend is a donkey. Yes. Um, no, it is dating someone you consider to be below your standards with the assumption that because you’re out of this person’s league, you’ll automatically have the upper hand in the relationship and be less likely to get hurt. I don’t think that’s a good definition of that word. [reading] “To get Shrek’d is to strategically date down only to still wind up getting rejected or heartbroken.” Oh no. Did they see the movie? Did they watch the Broadway musical? Okay, now I’ve heard of golden retriever boyfriend. But I have not yet heard black cat boyfriend or black cat girlfriend. Apparently it’s a mysterious, slightly moody counterpart to the golden retriever boyfriend. So we’re talking intellectual, artsy, cool, standoffish, people who are introverted and value their alone time, aloof and intimidating but draws people in.

Courtney: I don’t think any of these are dating trends. This article is called “The Top Dating Trends to Know for 2026.” But finally, last one on our list is the avoidant discard. “A shady breakup maneuver in which someone distances themselves emotionally from a relationship without directly ending it.” All of those were terribly depressing. This one from Times of India is called “Dating Lexicon 2026: Stop Wildflowering, Start Freakmatch.” Freakmatching is apparently just dating someone who has the same niche quirks and unconventional interests as you do. Where wildflowering is apparently just avoiding rigid expectations, explore connections at your own pace.

Courtney: Okay, so at the risk of just making this episode largely about words that I don’t ever hear in my social circles. I do have to talk about an ad that I have been getting so often online lately. Part of the Date Those Who Donate campaign apparently put out by the New York Blood Center. It is a melodramatic commercial with a series of people on dates where one person is asking the other, presumably, if you’ll go donate blood with me, and the other person is just turning them down repeatedly. And it’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m busy that day.” And then a guy’s like, “I didn’t tell you what day it was.” And then they just wave a red flag in increasingly dramatic ways. Like, the flags start small for the first one, and then they get bigger and bigger. And finally at the end someone agrees to donate blood with the person they’re dating, and then the red flag disappears and then they walk into a blood donation center together.

Courtney: And it’s kind of goofy and quirky enough that I do hope that it is making more people aware of and thinking about blood donation. But from the actual dating standpoint, I can’t tell if it’s trying to be real or cringey or not. Because one of them is like, a woman asking another woman to donate blood with her and she’s like, “I can’t. It’s– it’s just not my love language.” And the other woman’s like, “It’s literally an act of service!” And I don’t know, maybe it’s just– maybe I can chalk it up to the mere exposure effect. Maybe it’s really rubbing off on me because I have now seen it so many times. But the first time I thought it was just so corny and unbearable. But now I kind of actually love it and I think it’s brilliant. And I would love to know if they have any statistics on whether or not they’ve seen an increase in blood donations since putting out this campaign.

Courtney: But also just thinking literally about how incredibly unusual that would be to be on, like, a first date with someone and be like, “Want to go donate blood with me?” But on the other hand, that’d be a really memorable first date, actually. So maybe they’re on to something. Maybe, maybe. But yeah, other than just what the internet tells me and what I’ve been keeping an eye on in terms of politics and widespread social commentary, which has been an ongoing conversation on this channel, of course. People I know in my real everyday day-to-day life who are interested in dating, there’s very little hope. There’s very little hope that I perceive from people. And I don’t know if people who are a bit younger have that same overwhelming sense of dread. According to the internet, they do.

Courtney: But the number of people I know right now who would like to date, but have experienced dating being so fundamentally miserable, that they just don’t even think that it’s worth it, or they haven’t figured out a way to do it that works for them, it’s pretty universal. And almost all of them I know are fully, fully swearing off the apps. Like, “Oh God, I do not want to be on the apps again.” And really trying to find more in-person ways to meet people and connect with people, which I do personally think is great. But there does seem to be a much more difficult culture of meeting people in person than there used to be. Because people by and large are not falling back on the same kind of, like, bar culture that there used to be in terms of meeting people. Which, let’s be very clear, has never worked for everybody. It’s just been an easy, dare I say lazy, default to fall back on.

Courtney: But I really feel like through the pandemic years, so many not even just bars, but bars, restaurants closing, a lot of people’s favorite go-to places are either completely gone or fundamentally changed in culture from what they were once used to. Things are extremely expensive. It is very expensive to go out, and just about everything you can go out and do costs some amount of money. Even if you do take up sort of, like, classes to try to meet people. Like, taking classes are a great way to meet people, but you do have to usually pay the instructor to do it. That is getting harder and harder for a lot of people to be able to do. Maybe that’s what cuffing season’s all about. Because I was just talking lately, obviously not for the purposes of dating, but just leaving the house, I was like, I would like to go out and explore, but I don’t want to spend money. I don’t want to be in, like, busy enclosed spaces. But it is 0 degrees outside, so I’m also not gonna just go hang out at a public park.

Courtney: There aren’t an abundance of indoor comfortable temperature-controlled places that don’t cost money that you can just go and hang out with people. Which is really disappointing. I think the world in general, not only for dating but just for community, and even platonic relationships, would be so much better if we structured our communities around low barrier to entry socializing. Imagine. So that, everyone, is our 2026 date of the union. Once again, please, please, please do not make me come back here next year to talk about the camps. I don’t want to do it! I will if I have to, but I will be sobbing the entire time. But for today, we are going to leave you off, as always, with today’s featured MarketplACE vendor: School’s Out Crochet, where you can find crochet patterns based on Pride flags and characters from children’s books designed by a queer asexual woman.

Courtney: And these patterns are so, so cute. I got some of my own since I’ve been learning how to crochet the last couple of years. You can get Pride Turtles. They’re little turtle-like amigurumi plushes, that the shells have different Pride flag colors on them. So you can get the Ace flag, you can get the Trans flag, Intersex flag, and so many more. Very, very cute. Also, I adore a lot of these children’s book character patterns. They have the mouse from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and he’s got a little cookie in his hands. It’s so cute, I’m gonna die. You’ve also got the caterpillar from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I love it. Adorable. Wonderful. We’ve got Anne of Green Gables. We’ve got Bluey. If you’re not as old as I am and have newer references to children’s media. Or if you’re my age but do have kids of your own, you’ve got your childhood and your kids’ childhood all in one shop. If you are a crocheter, please check them out. Very, very cool, cute patterns. Links, as always, are gonna be in the show notes on our website as well as the description box on YouTube. As always, thank you all so much for being here and we will talk to you all next time.