Lexicon ·
the talking stage
noun phrase
- Stated meaning
- An early getting-to-know-you phase before anyone commits to dating.
- Operating meaning
- A holding account where attention is deposited daily at low interest, with withdrawals permitted at any time and no obligation to disclose the other accounts.
- Origin
- Emerged from app-era college slang in the mid-2010s and was adopted by adults who needed a name for texting someone for 6 weeks without having seen them in daylight.
April 20 to August 9. The texting was daily throughout and 0 of the 11 dates were agreed while both of us were in the room. Every one was settled afterwards, by message.
The talking stage is a phase of a relationship that exists so that the relationship does not have to. It sits before dating the way a waiting room sits before an appointment, and like a waiting room it has no fixed duration and poor seating.
Its defining activity is messaging. Two people send good morning texts, voice memos about their commutes, and photographs of whatever they are eating, and they do this on a schedule more reliable than most leases. What they do not do is meet, or when they do meet they are careful to describe the meeting as part of the talking.
The term solves an inventory problem. Apps supply more options than a person can evaluate at the speed of dinner, so the evaluation moves to the phone, where it can run in parallel. The talking stage lets a person be in several of them at once while being in a relationship with none, which is efficient in the way a call center is efficient.
The assumption underneath the term is that the talking is preliminary and the meeting is where things get decided. This file records the opposite. Across 111 days the texting has been daily and the meetings frequent, and every single arrangement, all 11 of them, was agreed by message afterwards rather than at the table. 1,800 minutes in person have produced 0 decisions. The talking stage was not the phase before the relationship. It was the medium the relationship was conducted in, and the dinners were the part that ran in parallel.