Personality Disorders and Relationship Trends

Love bombing, ghosting, the ick, and more.

A handsome man in a suit carrying a huge bouquet of red roses.

Ghosting, benching, orbiting, being in a situationship, being friends-with-benefits, getting the ick.

Breadcrumbing, love-bombing, micro-mancing, future-faking, zombie-ing, haunting, and pocketing.

You might not know what half of those words mean, but for chronically online young people, I promise you they make sense. These are dating trends. They reflect the choices and behaviors that people not only engage in but also obsess over. In a culture obsessed with red, green, and beige flags, everything means something, but are our interpretations of those trends always accurate?

Every time a new relationship or dating trend emerges from the bowels of the internet, plenty of people jump in to either explain it or validate it (or both). We immediately take the trend du jour seriously as if it were a new sociological discovery that reveals deeply ingrained behavior and valid cultural patterns in our ever-evolving society.

The more we validate this new invention by discussing it in neutral or even positive tones (that’s just how young people relate these days), or even by blaming it all on technology (these darn smartphones, what are we to do?), the more we incentivize the behavior in real life. We take a behavior that only a handful of people might engage in and turn it into a valid option for the masses, and we mistakenly believe that everyone has an equal likelihood of engaging in those behaviors. We forget how personality traits and even personality disorders drive some people to ghost, love bomb, get the ick, etc, more often than others.

It might be time to look at these trends and how we talk about them in a new light. It might be time to look not at what these trends say about us as a society but at what they reveal about the people who are more prone to engaging in them — and who likely originated these trends, to begin with.