Do internet terms help or hinder healthy romantic relationships?
IMAGINE THAT YOU’VE just had your nails done but fancy eating an orange. Would your partner peel it without being asked, to save you from sullying your fresh talons?
Aptly called “orange peel theory”, this is one of the latest relationship tests doing the rounds online. It’s meant to suss whether your partner does enough small acts of service for you, which apparently indicates if they’re a keeper.
Thanks to the deluge of folks sharing and asking for relationship advice on the internet, we’ve got a whole new lexicon for standards you could hold them to. For instance, you might reflect on their red, pink or beige flags instead, which are traits or behaviours that are dealbreakers, have the potential to become problematic, or are quirky or off-putting but not necessarily an issue, respectively.
At the time of writing, posts tagged with #orangepeeltheory on social media app TikTok have been viewed 52.9 million times, while #beigeflag boasts 1.4 billion. This new arsenal of ways to assess our partners allows us to express higher standards for what we’ll accept. But will our relationships be better for it?
To an extent, probably. Everyone should expect a level of care and attention, and there’s an argument that having new words to express whether a match is up to par can empower us to spot issues and walk away. For example, seeing a perpetual unwillingness to compromise pointed out as a red flag might make you realise that it’s not something you need to put up with.
But there’s a tipping point where high standards become unrealistic and superficial. This can prompt us to scrutinise people unfairly.
Take beige flags, for instance. These aren’t dealbreakers, but are things you might find irksome. The Guardian gives some examples: hating the word “moist” or debating whether pineapple is an appropriate pizza topping. While these may offer a window into someone’s personality, are they a helpful way to gauge what kind of partner they are?
And when the bar is set so high, behaviours that could be considered normal
