A Glossary of Exhaustion: The 2026 Guide to Modern Romance
Monday, April 13, 2026. This is for Fran.
There was a time, not so long ago in the grand scheme of human history, when the English language was utilized primarily to write novels, declare wars, and order a dry martini.
We used words to describe things that actually existed.
If someone behaved poorly, you called them a cad, a bore, or a sociopath, and you moved on with your life.
You did not, under any circumstances, sit around a brunch table inventing hybrid nouns to categorize the precise flavor of their mediocrity.
But we are living in 2026, and the youth of today have decided that what the world really needs is not better art, cleaner air, or faster walking speeds on the sidewalks of New York, but an entirely new vocabulary to explain why a twenty-four-year-old aspiring DJ forgot to text them back.
I recently had the profound delight of reading Cosmopolitan’s latest dispatch on the dating trends currently "taking over our DMs."
A DM, for those of you who still possess a shred of dignity, is a direct message, which is essentially a letter sent by someone who doesn't know how to spell and is probably multi-tasking with the attention span of a fruit fly.
What I discovered is that it seems that folks are no longer dating.
They are instead engaging in a highly bureaucratic sorting system, armed with a psychological dictionary entirely made up by unemployed people on the internet.
Let us examine this new lexicon, if only to understand the sheer volume of time we are wasting.
Chalance
The youths have decided that the opposite of nonchalance is "chalance." This is meant to describe a person who actually puts effort into a relationship.
They show up on time, they ask you questions, and they perhaps remember that you are allergic to shellfish.
In my day, we did not have a word for this. We called it "being awake."
The bar for human interaction has been lowered so drastically that we now require a fresh linguistic invention to describe the radical act of simply acknowledging another person's existence.
If you must announce to the world that you are seeking "chalance," you are admitting that you have spent the last five years dating people who are essentially in a medically induced coma. Stop dating the comatose. You do not need a new word; you need higher standards.
Ghostlighting
This is a portmanteau of "ghosting" (disappearing without a trace) and "gaslighting" (a term plucked from a 1944 Ingrid Bergman film and subsequently beaten to death by modern therapy enthusiasts).
Ghostlighting occurs when someone vanishes from your life, pops back up six months later, and acts as though you are entirely insane for noticing they were gone.
This is not a dating trend.
This is just a person who is exceptionally rude and assumes you are exceptionally stupid.
The solution to ghostlighting is not to label it and discuss it with your peers.
The solution is to ignore them, change the locks, and perhaps move to a different town. Giving a clever name to bad manners only encourages the people exhibiting them.
Sledging
Apparently, the seasonal desperation previously known as "cuffing season"—the act of finding a warm body to sit next to on a sofa from November to March so you do not have to pay for your own heating—has evolved.
Sledging is when you enter one of these winter arrangements with the strict, secret intention of dumping the poor fool the moment the cherry blossoms bloom, like a romantic hit-and-run.
They call it sledging because it’s like you are dragging someone along through the snow.
I call it an incredible waste of time.
If you do not actually like a person, why on earth would you invite them into your home during the most depressing months of the year?
Friendfluence
This trend suggests that in 2026, single people are letting their friends entirely dictate their love lives.
They are polling their friends, going on group dates, and looking to their friends' relationships as a blueprint for their own.
I cannot think of a worse idea.
Your friends have terrible taste. Have you seen the shoes they wear?
Have you listened to the music they like? Why would you outsource the most intimate decisions of your life to a committee of people who still do not understand how to split a dinner check without a calculator?
Furthermore, group dates are not dates. They are town hall meetings. Romance is entirely incompatible with a peanut gallery.
Zip-Coding
Zip-coding is the practice of restricting your dating app radius to your immediate geographic vicinity, refusing to date anyone who does not live in your exact zip code.
Finally, a trend that makes a lick of sense.
New Yorkers, for example, have been doing this for decades, they just didn't feel the need to give it a name.
If you live on the Upper West Side, a boyfriend who lives in Brooklyn might as well live in Nebraska.
You are never going to see him.
You are certainly not going to take the subway for an hour and a half just to find out he has three roommates and sleeps on a mattress on the floor.
Zip-coding is simply the pragmatic realization that sometimes geography is destiny.
Monkey-Barring
This is when someone lays the groundwork for a new relationship before ending their current one, gripping one person while reaching for the next.
This is not a new trend for 2026.
This is the entire plot of human history. We used to call it "cheating," "hedging your bets," or simply "being a coward."
The insistence on turning every human flaw into a playground metaphor is infantilizing.
If your partner is shopping around for a replacement while you are sitting next to them at a diner, they are not on the monkey bars. They are just a jerk.
Shrekking
This is the act of deliberately dating someone you consider to be vastly inferior to you in looks, intellect, or status, operating under the delusion that they will be so grateful for your presence that they will never hurt you.
To "get Shrekked" is to date down and still manage to get dumped.
The arrogance required to engage in "Shrekking" is truly staggering.
If you look at another human being and think, "I am so vastly superior to this troll that I will use them as a shield against my own emotional fragility," you absolutely deserve to be dumped by the “troll.”
It is poetic justice.
Golden Retriever Boyfriends and Black Cat Girlfriends
We have reached the point in societal decline where we are no longer comparing humans to other humans.
We are now categorizing adult men and women as domestic pets.
A "Golden Retriever Boyfriend" is a man who is loyal, energetic, and uncomplicated.
A "Black Cat Girlfriend" is aloof, mysterious, and only affectionate on her own terms.
If you want a golden retriever, go to a breeder.
If you want a black cat, leave a bowl of tuna on your fire escape.
Do not date human beings and expect them to behave like domesticated animals.
A man who is endlessly positive, trusting, naive, and completely uncomplicated is not a catch; he is, most likely, a low IQ individual.
A woman who is inclined every now and then to utterly ignores you, but occasionally demands you scratch behind her ears is not mysterious. She is simply not worth the effort.
The Avoidant Discard
The piece de resistance of 2026 internet psychology.
The avoidant discard is described as a "shady breakup maneuver" where someone gradually withdraws communication and effort without actually doing you the courtesy of a formal breakup.
It has existed since the invention of the telephone.
But because everyone today fancies themselves a licensed psychiatrist, they must dress up common cowardice in the clinical language of attachment theory. "He didn't just stop calling me," they cry. "He executed an avoidant discard!"
No, he just stopped calling you.
He met someone else, or he got bored, or he realized you spend too much time reading Cosmopolitan articles about dating trends.
The Exhaustion of the Modern Romancer
If you take a step back and survey this landscape of chalance, ghostlighting, and monkey-barring, you realize that modern dating is no longer about romance, passion, or even base physical attraction. It is entirely about data processing.
People are reading their personal lives the way a Wall Street quant reads a spreadsheet.
They are categorizing, labeling, and diagnosing every single interaction, terrified of experiencing a single unfiltered human emotion.
They have built an elaborate vocabulary to protect themselves from the very simple, very unavoidable truth: other people are difficult, unpredictable, and largely disappointing.
No amount of trendy terminology is going to save you from getting your heart broken.
You cannot outsmart human nature by giving it a catchy name on the internet.
My Advice for 2026 is Simple
Stop speaking in psychological jargon.
Stop categorizing your suitors as livestock.
If you find someone you can tolerate for more than forty-five minutes, consider yourself incredibly lucky.
And if you cannot find such a person, I highly recommend acquiring a library card.
Books are far better company, and they will never, ever ghostlight you.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.