Lexicon ·
princess treatment
noun phrase
- Stated meaning
- Being treated with consistent care and courtesy by a partner, as the standard to expect.
- Operating meaning
- A list of courtesies kept as a standard, so that each one done is a line delivered and each one missed is a line outstanding.
- Origin
- In circulation on social media before 2025, and made a subject in June 2025 by a video in which a married woman described being walked into restaurants and spoken for by her husband.
- Antonyms
- the bare minimum, low effort
August 6, in a couples app. Across the day she made several remarks about what a girlfriend would be getting from me, which I did not keep. I asked “are you my girlfriend?” She replied “no”. The phrase was not used.
The phrase had been circulating on social media for some time (opens in a new window) before June 2025, when one video made it a subject. In it, a married woman described dinner out. He opens the car door, walks her into the restaurant, opens that door, and she stands and waits (opens in a new window). She did not make eye contact with the hostess and did not talk to her. The most-liked comment asked whether this was princess treatment or prisoner treatment. The video passed 7 million views in under two weeks (opens in a new window), and the account was deleted.
The phrase outlived the account as a format. In a game covered by Dazed (opens in a new window), one partner reads out an act and the other sorts it into princess treatment or the bare minimum, and a wrong answer is corrected with a garden hose. The press filled in the first column: a favourite coffee or flowers brought regularly, bags carried at the airport, car doors opened, gas and parking paid, food ordered on her behalf. A dating coach quoted beside that list called it codependency.
Under load, the treatment is a ledger with one column. Each item is small, specific and repeatable, which makes it countable, and anything countable can fall behind. A door opened on Tuesday clears nothing on Wednesday. The game exists to show that an item sorted as princess treatment this week can be argued down to the bare minimum the next, so the list does not stay where it was written. What it records reliably is who was expected to open the door, and that is settled before the evening starts.
I answered that in that case she gets none of those things yet, and appended the word yet myself. By then the list had been delivered without the title. There were 16 cards in a glass box, written on July 2 and 3, and the couples app, bought on August 3 and paid through August 2027. Each item was entered on a form, with its cost and its date, before anyone had asked for it. The treatment was running ahead of the status it is supposed to come with, and I was the one keeping the column.