Lexicon ·
cushioning
noun, also verb
- Stated meaning
- Keeping a few other people in light contact while in a relationship, so that a breakup would not leave you alone.
- Operating meaning
- Insurance against a breakup, paid in attention taken from the relationship it insures.
- Origin
- Defined on Urban Dictionary on February 6, 2017, and taken up by dating sites that spring as benching for people already in a relationship.
The first definition (opens in a new window) went up in February 2017. Along with a main partner, a person keeps several cushions, “other people you’ll chat and flirt with to cushion the potential blow of your main break-up.” YourTango (opens in a new window) credits the word to a post the following day on a site that has since closed, which kept the cushions on the back burner with “just enough attention” that a breakup would not leave anyone “out in the cold.” By April the New York Post (opens in a new window) was calling it newly coined.
The trend pieces filed it beside its relatives. Elite Daily (opens in a new window) separated it from benching: cushioning happens when someone is already in a relationship, and the article called it emotional infidelity “normalized with a way cuter name.” In 2025 a New York TV station’s dating dictionary (opens in a new window) still defined it by benching, as keeping someone else around “just in case.”
Under load, a cushion is a policy written against a relationship by one of its parties. The premium is attention: a message answered, a conversation kept warm, each small enough to be described as nothing. The policy pays out only if the relationship ends, and the attention that funds it is drawn from the relationship it covers. The other party is not told the policy exists, which is the one term every cushion has in common.