With all the dating trends in the world it's hard to keep up with all of them, never mind recognising that someone's doing one of them to you.
One among the many, many out there is the trend of 'stack dating', or 'date stacking' or whichever combination of words gets across the sentiment most effectively for your liking.
As you might have guessed, this one is where someone has multiple dates in a row and it's growing in popularity thanks in no small part to TikTok, which is basically like concentrated jet fuel for a dating trend.
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The idea behind stack dating is that people are increasingly broke and short on time in their personal lives so if they want to get themselves out there, they'll need the most effective way to do it.
Statistically speaking, most people you go on dates with won't turn out to be 'the one' or even someone you'll get into a proper relationship with.
Since your time is precious and you're not make of money, 'stack dating' allows you to schedule a bunch of dates for the same day and just have them in sequence in the hopes of saving a bit of money and a lot of time.
Obviously, this requires you to be a sufficiently hot commodity on the dating market to have multiple dates to schedule on the same day, but if that's proving to be a problem then your dating life isn't really going to make that big of a dent in precious reserves of time and money.
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On the other hand it could be happening to you without even realising it, or perhaps worse is if you do twig that the person sitting across from you at the table has got two other people to see before the day is out.
While you might save time and money by stack dating, there are also some big drawbacks.
If you really hit it off with someone but have another date all planned in half an hour, you've got to decide whether to ditch the date that's going well or tell someone else at humiliatingly short notice that you're not going to turn up.
On top of that, juggling the various emotional states you can go through on a date might be tricky.
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If you get stuck in a really bad date, which puts you in a bad state of mind and you've got another one right around the corner, you might not be up for more dates that day, once again presenting you with the difficult decision whether to tell someone it's not happening.
Plus juggling all of those different timings can be tricky as you want to avoid the sitcom-esque situation of your dates bumping into each other and figuring out what's happening.
Other dating trends you might want to be on the lookout for include 'vulturing', where one person hangs around a relationship and then swoops in following the breakup.
There's also dating trends like 'ghostlighting', 'masterdating' (not as dirty as it sounds) and many, many more.
Topics: Sex and Relationships, TikTok, Dating trends
Joe Harker