woman bumble dating app panic freak out

Photo via HBRH/Shutterstock (Licensed)

‘Submarining’ is the new dating trend that’s as awful as it sounds

It's a cut worse than ghosting and 'zombieing.'

 

Blank Author

IRL

Posted on Sep 30, 2017   Updated on May 22, 2021, 3:46 pm CDT

BY LAKEN HOWARD

If you naively hoped that, as a society, we were done with the whole “giving cutesy names to bad dating behaviors” thing, I regret to inform you that yet another example has surfaced: the Metro has cleverly coined a term for a new dating trend: submarining. So what the eff is submarining? If you couldn’t guess from its name, submarining is when someone you’ve been seeing/talking to vanishes without a trace (much like a submarine when it sinks to the depths of the ocean), then without warning, they “resurface” and slide back into your inbox like nothing ever happened. Infuriating, right?

It’s actually pretty similar to another rude dating behavior called zombieing — aka when a person disappears, then comes back from the “dead” months later with some lame excuse justifying their prolonged absence. Unfortunately, submarining comes with an added layer of awful: after resurfacing, they’ll offer no explanation whatsoever for their disappearance. That’s right — no acknowledgment of their absence, no apology for leaving you hanging, not even a halfhearted attempt at an excuse (“sorry, I was in the shower!”).

“People who submarine you either want to hide the reasons for disappearing or gloss over it,” Jonathan Bennett, Dating/Relationship Coach and Owner of The Popular Man, tells Bustle. “I’d guess that, in most cases, they were dating or spending time with someone else and that fell through. Since they don’t want to admit the truth, whatever that is, they resort to submarining instead — and hope you fall for it.”

Share this article
*First Published: Sep 30, 2017, 6:30 am CDT