The Hilarious Dating Term I Never Knew Existed
Dating in the modern world is basically like signing up for a part-time job with no benefits, no training manual, and a boss who changes the rules every five minutes. Just when I thought I had a handle on the lingo—ghosting, breadcrumbing, orbiting, catfishing—I stumbled across a dating term so bizarre, so oddly specific, that I nearly spit out my coffee: “zombie-ing.”
Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking this sounds like the start of a Halloween party gone wrong. But no. Zombie-ing is when someone who ghosted you suddenly comes back from the dead, sliding into your DMs with a casual “hey stranger” as if they didn’t vanish mid-conversation six months ago. It’s the dating equivalent of watching your leftovers come back to life in the fridge. Startling, confusing, and not nearly as appetizing as you remembered.
The first time I encountered this phenomenon, I didn’t know it had a name. I just thought, Wow, bold of him to disappear faster than my paycheck and then reappear like nothing happened. He didn’t even acknowledge the disappearance! Just popped back in with, “You up?” Sir, I was up, down, and around the block waiting for a reply that never came. Now you’re back like a Netflix reboot nobody asked for? That’s zombie-ing.
The funniest part is how universal these terms are once you learn them. Suddenly, my friends and I were diagnosing all our dating disasters like we were doctors with a very silly medical chart. “Oh, he ghosted you? Classic. Wait—he texted again? Yep, zombie-ing. You should quarantine.”
It made me realize that the ever-expanding dating dictionary is less about actually navigating love and more about surviving it with humor. Because honestly, if we didn’t laugh at these situations, we’d cry—or worse, text them back. Giving it a name makes it easier to process. Ghosting hurts. Zombie-ing? That’s comedy.
And of course, this isn’t the only ridiculous dating term floating around. There’s “benching” (keeping someone on the sidelines just in case), “cushioning” (flirting with backups while in a relationship), and “kittenfishing” (the baby cousin of catfishing, where you just slightly over-edit yourself into oblivion online). It’s a jungle out there, and the animals are wild.
But zombie-ing will always hold a special place in my heart, because it was the first time I realized how perfectly these silly words capture very real frustrations. Dating is messy, unpredictable, and often disappointing—but slap a funny label on it, and suddenly you’ve got a group chat full of laughter instead of tears.
So yes, the hilarious dating term I never knew existed made me feel seen, validated, and slightly horrified all at once. But it also reminded me of the most important rule in modern love: if they ghost you, don’t let them come back from the dead. Zombies belong in horror movies, not your dating life.
