The Modern Dating Glossary

The modern reader has been given new words for very old categories. Love bombing, ghosting, situationship, the ick, breadcrumbing, the talking stage, twin flame — these are the present hour’s vocabulary for patterns the older tradition catalogued centuries before the dating app existed. The glossary below names each term, gives the working definition, and points to the older reading that the site preserves elsewhere. Where a deeper page exists in the Dating Discernment cluster, the cross-link follows.

The editorial position: the modern vocabulary describes real categories. The older grammar names them more precisely and prescribes the protection. The reader who knows both reads the present hour with both eyes open.

Love bombing

The modern definition. An overwhelming flood of affection, attention, and declared feeling early in a relationship, designed (consciously or otherwise) to bypass the patient discernment that ordinary attraction would have admitted.

In the older grammar. The philtre. The Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 catalogued the love-philtre as a category of operation against the soul, distinct from honest attraction by its speed and its insistence. The site treats love bombing as the philtre in modern dress.

Where the protection lives: The Love-Bomb in the Old Grammar — the Philtre, Reframed. The standing remedy: the Tobias three days of slowed pace; the novena to St Raphael; the discipline of refusing the third yielding.

Ghosting

The modern definition. Disappearing from a relationship without explanation — the messages stop, the calls stop, the channel closes without ceremony.

In the older grammar. The unreleased bond inverted. The Catholic tradition has always held that the encounter between two souls, however brief, requires a deliberate closing to be fully ended; the cut without closure leaves a wound on both sides. The ghoster has not, in the older reading, escaped; they have closed the channel from one side while leaving the bond intact on the other.

Where the protection lives: the Severing the Tie cluster for the ghosted; the inward discipline of the Mary Undoer of Knots devotion for the ghoster, who carries the unresolved knot whether they acknowledge it or not.

Breadcrumbing

The modern definition. The bare minimum of attention and contact — just enough to keep someone hoping, never enough to constitute a real relationship. The maintaining of expectation without the fulfilment of it.

In the older grammar. The bait without the meal. The Malleus describes the witch’s familiar who walks past the marked door at varied hours, leaving small signs of attention without ever closing distance — the maintenance of the marked person’s expectation as itself the harvest.

Where the protection lives: The Message at the Vulnerable Hour. The standing remedy: the marked-hour discipline, the morning reply if any, the closing of the marked channel.

Situationship

The modern definition. A relationship that includes the activities of a committed partnership without the title or the commitment. Often, one party is more invested than the other.

In the older grammar. The bound attraction, often. The site distinguishes the situationship of mutual undecidedness (a known interval, both parties aware) from the situationship of unilateral suspension (one party kept indefinitely without resolution). The second is a category the older tradition treated with care — the bond formed under refusal of definition is harder to loose than the bond formed under clear commitment.

Where the protection lives: The Pull You Could Not Explain. The standing remedy: the nine-day novena, the deliberate definition of where things stand, the refusal of indefinite suspension.

The talking stage

The modern definition. The period of regular contact and getting-to-know-you that precedes a formal relationship. Often digital-only, often months long, often ending without escalation.

In the older grammar. The pre-encounter discernment — the territory the Book of Tobit treats in the days before Tobias and Sarah’s marriage. The Catholic and the older folk tradition both honour this period as real and necessary; the older grammar adds that prayer accompanies it, particularly the Raphael invocation. The talking stage that is prayed-through is the talking stage that becomes a real encounter.

Where the protection lives: The Match That Was Too Easy, and the standing Raphael devotion at the Dating Discernment hub.

The ick

The modern definition. A sudden unpleasant feeling toward a potential or committed partner, often arising from a small action, statement, or trait that “turns off” the affection.

In the older grammar. The body’s testimony. F. T. Elworthy’s Evil Eye (1895) catalogues the principle: the eye of the body knows things the conscious mind does not. The ick is, in the older reading, the body’s discernment system asserting itself, often before the mind has assembled the reasons. The site is direct: icks should be taken seriously, not overridden.

Where the protection lives: The Creepy Vibe You Overrode. The standing remedy: honour the first alarm; do not negotiate with the alarm in the room with the alarm.

Twin flame

The modern definition. A spiritual claim that two individuals are halves of a single soul, destined for one another, the connection between them transcendent and inescapable.

In the older grammar. This term carries a specific occult lineage and the Catholic tradition has identifiable concerns with it. See the dedicated page: The Twin Flame, Examined. The site treats the strong felt-connection seriously as a real human experience; it treats the twin-flame doctrine with the discernment the doctrine’s spiritual lineage requires.

Gaslighting

The modern definition. A pattern of psychological manipulation in which the manipulator causes the manipulated to doubt their own memory, perception, and judgment.

In the older grammar. The site holds the modern term as accurate for what it names. The older tradition recognised the same operation under different names — the witch’s denial of what the marked household clearly remembered; the demon’s standing tactic in the discernment-of-spirits literature of inverting the soul’s perception of itself. The clinical and the spiritual readings converge here; the protection is the same.

Where the protection lives: the diagnostic threshold itself, throughout the site, and the standing rule on How to Read This Site: do not isolate the work; tell one trusted person; do not negotiate with the operator in the operator’s room.

Micro-cheating

The modern definition. Small digital or interpersonal acts that fall short of physical infidelity but cross the line of fidelity in spirit — the lingering message thread with an ex, the flirtatious DM, the saved photo, the maintained ambient connection.

In the older grammar. The small breach of the threshold. The medieval household-magic tradition (and the Catholic moral theology in parallel) recognised the small consent as the door by which the larger operation enters. Micro-cheating is the doorway, not the operation; but doorways become operations when they are not closed.

Where the protection lives: Ambient Presence Indicators. The standing remedy: the small-door audit, deliberately, once, of all the open ambient channels.

Slow fade

The modern definition. Disengagement without announcement — gradually slower replies, fewer dates, vanishing without the explicit ending.

In the older grammar. The unfinished severance. The older tradition’s view: the slow fade is a refusal of the formal close that the encounter requires for both parties’ healing. Less dramatic than ghosting, more cowardly. The remedy for the receiver: name the fade aloud, ask once for clarity, and if not given, perform the close yourself.

Where the protection lives: Severing the Tie. The standing remedy: the deliberate inward severing the other party would not perform; the Mary Undoer of Knots novena for the unfinished close.

Zombieing

The modern definition. The return, often months later, of someone who previously ghosted — the message, the like, the “hey stranger” that reactivates a closed channel.

In the older grammar. The unreleased bond re-asserting itself. The site reads zombieing as a category of operation in which the original party tests whether the channel is still open. The remedy is firm: the closed channel stays closed, regardless of the warmth of the re-approach.

Where the protection lives: The Burner Account That’s Probably Them (the related pattern) and the general discipline of the Severing the Tie cluster.

Soulmate

The modern definition. A deep, mutual connection — the sense that one’s partner is the person one was “meant for,” the missing half, the destined companion.

In the older grammar. The Catholic tradition has carried language for deep, providentially-given love within marriage for two thousand years; the experience the term names is real. The site’s caution is narrower than the term itself: the strong felt connection is not, by itself, evidence of divine destiny. Many strong felt connections are real. Some are the bound attraction of the philtre. The discernment is what tells them apart. The soulmate language, used without that discernment, can be the philtre’s own self-description.

Where the protection lives: the Dating Discernment hub, the Tobias three days, the discernment-of-spirits framework. The strong connection that survives the discernment is the strong connection. The strong connection that the discernment dissolves was always the bound attraction.

A standing note

The modern terms above will age. Some will be replaced by next year’s vocabulary; some will persist. The older grammar that the site holds underneath does not age — it has been steady since the Malleus of 1487, the Book of Tobit of the 3rd century BCE, the discernment-of-spirits literature of Cassian in the 5th century AD. The reader who learns the older grammar will be able to translate the next decade’s slang into it without needing a new glossary. The site teaches the older grammar; this glossary is the present hour’s temporary bridge across to it.

Sancte Raphaele, comes itineris, ora pro nobis.
The names age. The grammar does not.
— The Editors