What Is "Cuffing Season" Asking of You?

Thoughts on the annual push to couple up for the cold winter holidays, Feeld and listening to the fluctuations in our own desires.

photo courtesy Feeld

Cuffing season begins before your Halloween hangover has even worn off on November 1st. Every store is already covered in tinsel, and most of the dating apps have begun to remind you that you will be alone this holiday season if you don’t act now.

It’s not just the dating apps: even DoorDash has its own cuffing season campaign this year, with a report saying that 94 percent of single respondents surveyed plan to participate in the act of cuffing, accompanied by a spike in weekend orders for toothbrushes and clean sheets.

I’m not shy about my affinity for holidays and annual rituals, even when they’re basically just an opportunity to sell us something. Who cares if Valentine’s Day was invented by candy companies? I like candy! And so if companies want to use this transition into winter as an impetus to put love on the brain, that should be fine.

Cuffing season is, after all, a natural occurrence, maybe even a biological response to our shifting desires and expectations as cold creeps in. We want someone to keep us company in a season so centered on connection. We want someone literally to keep us warm.

It’s as though we’re all tuned in to this emotional weather system. In the winter, we feel a call to couple up. In the summer, an easy-breezy fling beckons. And like the commercial candy campaigns, all that is fine — until something like “embracing the seasons” starts to feel like an emotional pressure system we’re no longer navigating on our own terms.

With that pressure, of course, comes anxiety. It makes all of this feel less like a fun reason to cozy up with someone for Christmas and more of an existential dread over whether you’ll be alone forever. And so if you do decide to “participate” by looking for dates, the desperation is already dripping off of you. You’re not doing this because you want to, you’re doing it because you feel obligated — not just biologically, but culturally.

For the last several years, though, this anxiety over the season has been paired with fatigue. The concept of “dating app fatigue” has been dissected to death, especially by me. Even as tons of new apps try to re-work the dynamics that brought the fatigue on in the first place, from swiping to messaging to never actually meeting IRL, there remains a general sense of, why bother? All this together, in a time of year where we should be enjoying ourselves and the company of others, strikes me as a particularly nasty example of the general malaise that defines this current moment. We’ve taken all the fun out of it.

But this is supposed to be fun. And I think, actually, having fun is still possible — with some careful reframing. One strength of cuffing season is that it asks us to be in touch with our instincts. It itself is a reflection of them. It’s obvious, though, that not all of us quite know how to do that. We not only don’t know what we want, we’re moreover unable to interrogate the uncertainty of it. Part of why so many people are experiencing dating app fatigue, I think, is because they so often expect us to frame up and box our desires without much introspection into what they are, leaving us disappointed with the results. Cuffing season has often been treated the same: you’re told to settle in and settle down, without much introspection on whether that is your own instinct or one that’s been pushed upon you.

I’ve always been an advocate of people finding love, sex, connection — whatever it is they actually want — but the critical component is that it’s on their own terms. It’s easy to see how much of the cuffing season rhetoric is a distortion of that, encouraging you to pursue not what you yourself want but what is currently convenient.

Feeld is one of the many dating apps engaging with the cuffing season campaign cycle, but, somewhat predictably, their messaging differs from others in the space. Rather than emphasizing this one season of connection, they’ve been underscoring this period as one of many fluctuations in the aforementioned emotional weather system. And maybe if we’re actually a bit more attuned to our desires or even just the fact that we’re unsure of them, navigating these fluctuations becomes a bit less exhausting.

I’ve been critical of Feeld in the past, just as I have every dating app. I’d prefer a world with less technological intervention in the course of our personal lives, but what I’d prefer even more than that is a world where people are capable of pursuing connection and fulfillment (whatever that might mean for them!) and actually getting it.

In a time when we’re circling around discourse about whether having a boyfriend is “embarrassing,” there’s something respectable in both a full-throated acknowledgement of one’s desires and confidence in one’s ambiguity surrounding them. Maybe they’re using it because they want to add to their polycule, maybe they’re using it because they want monogamy, maybe they’re just using it because they want to peg someone this weekend. At very least, they are concrete in wanting something. A lot of us have become so jaded that we can’t quite say the same.

Whether you’re on an app like Feeld or any other, whether you’re actively calling it cuffing season or not, there is something about this time of year that calls upon us to connect. However we do that, let it be on our own terms.