winter coating

All the signs you’re a victim of ‘Winter Coating’ a new cursed dating trend

It’s like cuffing season, but toxic


To use professional meteorological terminology: it’s fucking freezing right now. You get in bed, cold. You wake up, cold. You walk home alone from the club at 2am, really cold. And cold feet and goosebumps are leading many people to ask the same question: “Do I want a relationship or am I just freezing?”. 

Yup, doing the winter months alone is a sad little slog when most of us just want a cup of tea and a hug. And our reluctance to hibernate solo has spawned another new dating trend doing the rounds alongside beige flags and future fishing: Winter Coating. 

What is Winter Coating? 

Essentially, Winter Coating is like cuffing season but way more cursed. The dating term denotes when someone slides back into an ex’s life for an easy seasonal relationship that they can sack off by spring and have already nearly forgotten by hot girl summer. Ruthless. 

And it doesn’t even have to be a serious relationship you rekindled. It could be a situationship, a friend you got with a few times– ease is really the only criteria. But, obviously, these types of relationships fizzle fast and, often, people get hurt. 

The trend is called Winter Coating because, much like your North Face puffer, you’re pulling this potential partner from the back of  your wardrobe of past flings, snuggling into their security from October through to March, only to shove them right back where they came from by April. 

To put it simply, it’s nasty and definitely constitutes as using someone. Yet, SO many people are doing it. According to experts at dating app Inner Circle, who surveyed 1,157 “actively dating” single people, and coined the most recent dating trend to add to our never-ending glossary, more than half of them have been contacted by an ex (most frequently in winter), with a massive 71 per cent of the romances failing further down the line. 

Signs you’re being Winter Coated: 

They don’t want to talk about their intentions 

This person has just popped back into your life, potentially after years apart, and suddenly wants to settle down with you again. Well, settle down in the sense that they want to get off and watch films together – they haven’t actually said what the goal is after that.

They’re sort of love bombing you 

Your ex has only just come back into your daily routine and already they want to see you all the time, stay over every night, text 24/7, bombard you with compliments and it means the whole thing just feels like it’s moving very quick – even though you don’t really know what they want. 

They don’t want to set boundaries 

There might be old wounds you both need to process before continuing with the second shot at your relationship – but they don’t want to work on anything they just want to have fun and jump right back in were you left off. Like they never went away. Scary. 

You already feel like an old married couple 

Dating? No. Too cold for that. You’ve immediately entered your Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Bucket family era together and rarely leave from under your nest of blankets. It might seem cute and wholesome – but really it’s just letting them make minimal effort. Tbh, run. 

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