This time of year has a lot of names. Winter, most obviously. The Holidays. The Season of Giving. Happy Honda Days for those who celebrate can’t-miss deals on 2025 CR-Vs. One you may not be familiar with unless you’re a fervent user of dating apps is cuffing season.
Cuffing season is a generalized term for dating during the colder months—a time when people are more willing to temporarily “handcuff” themselves to someone just so they have a warm body to snuggle beside.
When is Cuffing Season?
Running roughly between October and whenever things start to warm up again in the spring, Cuffing season, as a term, was popularized way back in 2008 by Musa Murchison. Murchison is an artist who used to host a student radio show called Because We Said So Radio while attending Brooklyn College.
Speaking with Vox, Murchison insists that they didn’t coin the term. They claim that it had been floating around New York for years before they used it on their radio show to describe settling down with a partner if only for the short term to have a reliable someone by your side to make it through cold winter months.
Vox writer and host of the podcast Explain It To Me, Jonquilyn Hill, dug into the science to find out if cuffing season is more than just a fun phrase. And to find out if people were actually willing to hook up a little bit more during the winter to have a warm body companion. It turns out there might be some truth to it after all…
Is This Whole Thing Legit?
According to Alison Gemmill, a prenatal epidemiologist at the Hopkins Population Center, there are routinely a whole lot of births around August and September. This means that those kids were conceived in November and December, the fold winter months when having sex has the added benefit of being a full-body version of rubbing your hands together to keep them warm.
Dating apps also see a big spike in activity from October to December. People unconsciously searching for a short-term partner to make it through the cold may not realize that they are actually looking for a long-term relationship rather than a casual encounter, as is often the case for people using dating apps in the winter.
Just a heads-up, Dating Sunday—the busiest day of the year for online dating—is on January 5. So if you’re looking for love, or a warm buddy to snuggle up with, make sure you’re on those dating apps in a few days.
The post Cuffing Season Is Real—and ‘Dating Sunday’ Could Be Your Ticket to Finding Love appeared first on VICE.
