It was only last summer that women declared they were looking for a man in finance, 6-5, blue eyes.
The goal posts appear to have shifted since then. Now, some social media users are extolling the virtues — with varying degrees of sincerity — of settling for a partner to whom they’re not initially attracted. Such a person, the thinking goes, will ultimately treat you better than someone who is more obviously desirable.
The practice itself isn’t new, but “dating down” has traditionally been an unspoken strategy, or an external (and, to state the obvious, impolite) assessment of an unlikely pairing. This being 2025, however, the phenomenon has been freshly branded on social media, where it’s taken on a sharper edge.
In short, people have found a way to make dating down even meaner, using terms like “Shrekking” or “intelligence-gap relationships” to describe what they see as mismatched romantic partners.
Camila Cuesta has been down that road before. After several months with her ex-boyfriend, she concluded that dating men who are less attractive than her, which she said wasn’t intentional on her part, was not a foolproof way to avoid foul play.
“It honestly ended up in a lot of cheating and disrespect,” she said in a phone interview, “so it has not been effective for me.”
Ms. Cuesta, 26, who lives in Miami and works in health care administration, said that she and her ex met on social media and began dating in 2022. She quickly assessed that he wasn’t her type: She likes tall, muscular men with hair; he was the opposite. Still, she wanted to try something different, so she gave him a chance based on his personality. Their relationship ended a little more than a year later, after what she described as constant betrayal.
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