'Stashing': A new term for an old dating dilemma

Stashing is "a super fun dating trend in which someone is dating someone else, but has decided to hide them away from everyone in their life." Photo / Getty Images

By Kerri Sackville

When I was a teenager, back in the eighties, there was one word for dating behaviour. OK, three words: "Going round with".

If you liked someone, and they liked you back, and you wanted to hang out together and pash and maybe shag, you were "going round with" them. If not, you weren't.

These days, there are dozens of words to describe dating behaviours. And we need them, because there are new behaviours specific to the internet age. Zombieing, for example, when an ex-lover pops up on your social media feed. We didn't have zombies back then, because we didn't have social media.

Ditto breadcrumbing, when a potential love interest sporadically texts, but won't commit to an actual date. Or ghosting, when a person drops out of media contact entirely.

Or Netflix and Chill, which wasn't possible because we were barely getting used to VCRs.

But the latest term, "stashing", describes a trend that has been around for decades. We've just never had a name for it.

Metro news, who coined the term, explain that stashing is "a super fun dating trend in which someone is dating someone else, but has decided to hide them away from everyone in their life."

Well, it's not super fun (as they well know), but it's not actually a trend either. Any teenager who has hidden a relationship from their parents will know that stashing is hardly new. And stashing has been around in the adult population since the dawn of time.

An early episode of Sex and the City dealt with stashing, though they called it "secret sex".

And even I've been a victim of stashing. A couple of years back I was dating a man who had recently left his wife, and though he wanted me to be his girlfriend, he wanted to keep our relationship hidden. He didn't want his daughters to know about me, or his friends, or his ex-wife. He wasn't ready to come out as a person who was dating.

So, no social media posts. No family dinners. No parties. I didn't meet any of his friends, though he met a couple of mine.

Happily, by that stage of my life, I knew the behaviour was wrong. And I'd been dating long enough to have some pretty clear boundaries. I am no-one's little secret, I told the man. Be out and proud with me, or don't see me at all.

Eventually, he agreed.

Despite my ultimatum, we didn't last long, as the recently-separated man was exing pretty badly. Still, I exited the relationship with my dignity intact. In an age of ghosting, zombieing, breadcrumbing, and Netflix and Chill, that is increasingly hard to do.

Relationships have changed a lot since I first went round with a boy, all those long decades ago. But - as Facebook suggests - one thing has stayed the same.

It's Complicated.