talking stage

The talking stage is the waiting room of modern dating. Two people text all day, call at night, and flirt like a couple, but the question of what they are has not been asked. It sits before "seeing each other," which itself sits before "together."

Its defining feature is that nothing is defined. There are no agreed rules about exclusivity, so nobody can technically be in the wrong, and that ambiguity is exactly what people complain about. The stage is supposed to lead somewhere. When it drags on for months, it starts to look like a situationship, which is the version of this that never resolves.

The name is newer than the thing. People have always had a getting-to-know-you phase. What changed is that texting made it constant, visible, and long enough to need a name of its own.

The exact origin of the phrase is unclear. No coiner, date, or platform of coinage is documented.

The parent expression is much older and has a documented home. "Talking to someone," meaning dating or courting them, is recorded in Green's Dictionary of Slang as Black American and campus slang, with citations reaching back to 1953. The talking stage simply names the period that kind of talking covers.

The compound was in print by early 2016. An American student paper ran a piece asking what the talking stage actually is. It described the usage as already universal among teenagers. The earliest Urban Dictionary entry follows in 2017. TikTok made the phrase inescapable in the early 2020s, mostly through complaints about how long the stage lasts.