The internet is an unprecedented vehicle of quick, widespread communication—a tool with the capacity to connect loved ones, spread information, and of course, popularize silly dating trends. For example: Have you heard of “sledging”? It’s a recent dating practice where people stay in relationships throughout the holidays, like coasting down a hill on a sled, up until the new year. Social media has oversaturated dating trends and definitely impacts the way we approach relationships.
But how did people talk about relationships before social media hashtags? Slang and cultural trends have always influenced the dating world. Here’s a timeline of popular phrases and trends about dating over the last century.
1920s
We all know what blind dates are, and that speaks to the longevity of the term. The phrase was coined in the Roaring Twenties, when culture was shifting away from the strict moral codes of the Victorian era. People got set up with each other by their friends rather than their parents, enjoying independent and casual dating for the first time.
If someone told you they liked you and you didn’t feel the same way, you would give them the icy mitt, which is essentially the old-fashioned version of friendzoning.
1930s
Gold diggers are people who get into relationships just for financial gain. The idiom came from a Broadway play, “The Gold Diggers,” about cunning young women seducing rich men. The term is technically gender-neutral but is often a misogynistic word used against women.
Women who were companions of the Depression-era gangsters were referred to as gun molls. Over time, gun molls also became a euphemism for female sex workers–which reflects the sex-negative attitude prevalent in the 1930s.
1940s
World War II disrupted many relationships and Dear John letters became a common way to break up with a partner enlisted in the military. Often, the letters would confess to finding a new love interest in their partners’ absence. People have never not been messy–but we still think a Dear John letter is a step above being dumped over text.
1950s
As cars started growing in popularity, a new way of getting it on was born. Passion pits–which usually meant a drive-in movie, but could technically be any place to park with low lighting–were big in the ’50s. These secluded make-out spots were also referred to as lovers’ lanes.
1960s
The sexual revolution turned dating on its head. Before the ’60s, sex was pretty much uniformly viewed as a means to procreate. Women having sex for pleasure was unthinkable, but when the birth control pill was invented, it became possible. The stigma was still there, but newfound sexual liberation empowered many women to have control over their own wants and have (gasp) sex before marriage.
1970s
Singles ads had been around for a while, but they made a resurgence in the ’70s. Instead of swiping on dating apps, people would flip through newspapers to read short bios of different women interested in joining the dating game. These ads could include what that person was (or wasn’t) looking for, descriptions of physical appearance, and practical information (such as their employment or if they had kids).
1980s
Giving your crush a mixtape that you made was the best way to get their attention in the ’80s. Mixtapes were physical media, and took much more work than making a playlist on Spotify, so it was a very special gift to receive. People would choose songs that reminded them of their love interest, which made it a very romantic gesture.
nothing will ever top THE MIXTAPE as a method of crush confession. a Spotify playlist is cute but nothing says I LOVE YOU like spending three hours finding a song that contains all the right feelings AND fits perfectly into the tape’s final 3min 13 seconds
— ely kreimendahl (@ElyKreimendahl) June 29, 2023
1990s
The rise of the flip phone was a huge game changer in the dating scene. Now, people were accessible at all times. This sped up the process of getting intimate with someone–and hence, the booty call (asking someone to come over for sex via the phone) was born. Even though dating apps weren’t yet a thing, the presence of cell phones alone was enough to boost casual sex. Friends with benefits, or when two people had sex but just stayed friends, became a new relationship trend alongside the growing hookup culture.
2000s
Up until the 2000s, anyone who wasn’t heterosexual was excluded from the general conversation around dating. But at the turn of the century, queer people had popularized dating slang such as U-Haul lesbians. That term played on the generalization that lesbians fell in love and progressed in their relationships very quickly, including moving in together right away (hence the U-Haul). There were also phrases that had to do with identifying other queer people, such as describing someone who is “obviously” queer as a 100-footer. There’s nuance to these terms–while they can be used by those within the LGBTQ+ community, they can also be weaponized by homophobic people to be derogatory. When it comes to this vocabulary, it’s important to understand who is using it and why.
2010s
Social media has changed the way that relationships work, and as it grew in popularity in the 2010s, people were reckoning with it by coming up with new expressions such as sliding into DMs and catfishing. Sliding into the DMs can literally mean flirting with someone via direct message, but is also used more loosely to describe other kinds of romantic initiation. MTV’s Catfish started running in 2012, and it exposed a more dangerous “trend” of catfishing someone–which is flirting with someone online but using fake pictures, pretending to be somebody completely different.
2020s
We’ve made it to today, where new slang and trends in dating are being invented every day. For that reason, it’s hard to pinpoint a defining concept of dating in the 2020s, but situationships seem to be the most widespread trend of the decade so far. Situationships are relationships that don’t have an explicit label. Typically, one person in the situationship wants to be an official couple but the other person wants to keep it casual. They cause a lot of emotional pain to the one who wants more–pretty much the definition of “strings attached.”
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