On your next date, show up as you are
All animals play the mating game differently: Peacocks fan out their tail and dance and male nursery web spiders present fly carcasses as gifts. Fortunately or not, humans do not have the luxury of a predetermined script. So, playing the dating game takes work. The World Wide Web’s entry into the chat has further complicated the picture. The most recent experiment is goblintimacy: In an era of curated dating profiles, where it is hard to tell the real from the fake, daters are finally demanding nothing short of radical authenticity. Goblintimacy is a second-generation trend. In 2022, its predecessor, “goblin mode”, was Oxford’s word of the year. It meant being “unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy”, or simply being a “goblin”, no shame. Its popularity reflected a cultural fatigue caused by the constant need to present a curated version of oneself. Sometimes, people need to just slouch around, gorge on junk food, be a couch potato. That fatigue born out of the pressure to constantly perform is not limited to the self. Dating, too, has changed in the digital age. Romance has become spectacle: Think “launches”, soft and hard; Instagrammed proposals; selfie corners at weddings. And yet, real connection seems more elusive than ever. Thankfully, young people seem to be rejecting the new code. Their answer, instead, is: Come as you are. Meeting offline and being vulnerable is unlikely to solve today’s intimacy crisis, but it can be part of the answer. If nothing else, being goblins together makes the process of finding connection more fun.
- 1While this editorial focuses on cultural trends rather than policy, it connects directly to governance discussions about digital regulation and data privacy. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs how platforms including dating apps collect and process user data, and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 require intermediaries to address fake profiles and misleading representations. The ease with which curated, potentially false personas proliferate on dating platforms raises unresolved questions about the regulatory responsibility of these intermediaries and the adequacy of India's current legal framework for protecting users from digital deception.
- 2The goblintimacy trend is a global cultural response to performative social media pressures, with clear relevance to India's digital landscape. India has approximately 462 million social media users as of 2024, among the world's largest such populations, making the psychological effects of platform-driven performance culture a significant domestic public health issue. Several European countries and the United Kingdom have enacted digital wellness frameworks—the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, 2023 is a notable example—requiring platforms to assess user harm, including mental health harm. India's National Education Policy 2020 addresses digital literacy but has not yet responded systematically to social media's documented effects on youth mental health and relationship formation.
- 3The article's theme of fake versus authentic digital personas intersects with Section 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which criminalises cheating by impersonation using computer resources, and Section 66C, which penalises identity theft. India's Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 also prohibit misleading representations by online service providers. Legal scholars have debated whether dating apps, as platforms that facilitate social and quasi-contractual interactions, bear any duty to verify user authenticity—a question that goblintimacy's cultural emphasis on radical honesty implicitly presses regulators and courts to address.
- 4Research in social psychology consistently finds that authentic relationships are the strongest predictor of long-term health and happiness. Harvard's decades-long Adult Development Study concluded that the quality of close relationships is the most reliable determinant of life satisfaction and physical health in later life. The United States Surgeon General's 2023 advisory identified loneliness as a public health crisis comparable in mortality impact to smoking 15 cigarettes daily. India's National Mental Health Survey 2015-16 found that 9.8% of adults met diagnostic criteria for mental disorders, with social disconnection as a major risk factor—placing cultural trends like goblintimacy in a medically significant, not merely entertaining, context.