Dating has never perhaps been as breezy as it is always made to sound like. And fiction of course is to be blamed for this. Throughout our countless brushes with literature and cinema and arts and the like, dates have had this aura of magic built into them that left us naturally fawning over that perfect first date we would someday live our ardent desires in. A prince charming to swipe us off our feet and have us blushing under their smoldering gaze as we struggle to keep the butterflies in our stomach from flapping their love wings a bit too fast, first dates are supposed to be some scene enacted straight out of a fairytale. But despite the many magical settings of the dating world, playing courtship in real life is far from being a cakewalk, let alone an enticing lore of all things grand and gracious. Particularly today, in the age of online dating and virtual relationships where it is as easy to profess about falling in love as it is to fall out of it, the whole dating scene is one conglomerate of such whimsical terms and patterns that is bound to make anyone wince at the mere thought of it.
The language of love might be one scripted to have you enamored with as much their mere utterings, even when it expresses the emotion in such words that while are hitherto untranslatable in their foreign dialect, still speaks pretty much that universal language of which there exist no barriers. The same however cannot be said about the lingo of dating, that which comes across so much as a fling of the casual that all magic, and of course all love, is essentially lost on all of it. From purely digital shunning of love in such words as phubbing and texting to seemingly more emotional yet nevertheless complicated beckonings of situationship and the like, dating in the modern world is no less than an exercise in brainwreck as it is a cautious yet risky embarkment upon heartbreak.
Source: Grapevine Gossip
Despite however the many myriad words through which the nomenclature of dating has come to be through evolution especially in the times of the present, there is something still very interesting about their mention. And that relates essentially to the portmanteau basis of them. In a whole lot of such linguistics, the focus is more on how amusing they sound rather than how conflicting a perspective of romantic relationships they present themselves as. Take for instance the very bamboozling notion of paperclipping. Deriving from the Microsoft assistant Clippy that which pops up now and again in what is quite obviously an irritating, unasked for ‘advance’, paperclipping as a word in the dating horizon refers to a person who likewise pops up in your life sporadically, often months or even years after things clearly have ended between the two of you. Making often for a random appearance in your life, specially when you least expect it and probably do not even care anymore to even be expecting anything anymore, paperclippers however are no any modern a phenomenon even when the term indeed is. In fact, paperclipping has never been rare though, what with the tendency of a certain section of homosapiens to forever keep their ‘options’ open, by attempting to rekindle such flames of the past that might be dormant or even well on the path of being extinct. In sustaining therefore their consistency in being inconsistent with their emotions to the effect that they would not let you rub off their existence in your lives and persist with it through a pattern that is annoying, paperclippers indeed would be one of the worst breed of dates you would have had the bad fortune of pairing up with.
But while paperclipping sounds quirky even when the implication of it isn’t anything even uniquely and remotely desirable, it is not half as enticing as what kittenfishing comes across as, at least in its sounding. The encompassing idea is equally ‘modern’ as well, in being a stemming from the world of online dating. Excessively deceptive though, kittenfishing can indeed be much like scamming, except that it does it through something as superficial yet as effective as looks and the physicality. Essentially, the term refers to the practice by lovers of the internet when they present their physicality as quite different than what they are. The deception can come in many forms, from putting up a profile picture of a decade in the past when they had the physique to die for but are not even a faint shadow of their former self now to perhaps even editing their pictures heavily so that they come off as impressive enough, kittenfishers can seriously fish you out with their cute kittensque like looks and cunning technique!
Not as amusing however in the very name of it is another of the linguistic stemmings native to modern day dating. Rather common in occurrence and more widely encountered than most of its counterparts, ghosting is the rather scary prospect of being cut off by a potential love interest, especially without warning. It’s like that bolt out of the blue when you are all happy and cheery about the special someone in your life until when they unexpectedly abandon you on all platforms, not just online but in the real world as well to leave you a helpless and forlorn lover, dazed and confused. Though not exclusively a romantic encounter and one that is fairly encountered also in other aspects of personal relations including friendship, ghosting undoubtedly does justice to its naming as a horrifying dilemma to find oneself in.
Ghosting however may not always be so apparent as in cases when you have to deal with what is known as soft ghosting. In cases of the latter, the tendency is one exclusive to relationships thriving and budding on social media where real conversation gets cut off with such available options of liking their texts instead of replying to them. More infuriating perhaps because it is not as direct as what ghosting is despite all its ‘cruel’ nature, soft ghosting offers you quite the digital ‘reactions’ but alas not the way you wanted it to.
Which brings us to another related form of ghosting, that which goes by the name cloaking. Perhaps a reference adapted from the invisibility cloak courtesy of course Harry Potter, cloaking is even more ‘intense’ in manifestation than ghosting. Cloaking is when your date or a prospective romantic partner does not just ignore you but rather outright ‘reject’ you wholly by blocking and muting and unmatching and barring you on and from all apps. Rude!
Source: Head Topics 
Source: Cosmopolitan
The ‘versatility’ of ghosting surprisingly tends to be such that it refuses to die down despite its no any admirable premises, continuing through other furtive namings. In steps therefore a rather daring ghoster who resorts to zombieing instead! In however ghosting you not once but twice, coming back after the initial audacity to ghost, zombieing however would also bring notoriety to the zombied since they have been naive enough to let their past experience not teach them enough valuable lessons!
With ghosting making already for such an array of explanations, imagine therefore the expanse of what a ton of other words that define modern dating would sump up to in all their ‘profound’ meanings. From the partial dreamy sounding facade of mermaiding and love bombing to deceivingly ‘delicious’ propositions of caking and cookie jarring to miscellaneous incorporations of pocketing and orbiting and so on and so forth, there is no end to the world of the verbs that can come to be the defining characteristic of your virtual dating experience. Being well versed in the language of love is no more just a matter of the reds that the heart harbours, it is a play as much rooted in the greys of your brain!
