New Dating Trend: ‘Shrekking’ Dating Down & Settling For A Partner! Is It Toxic?

As a dating term, ”Shrekking” refers to dating someone you consider below your standards, with the assumption that because you’re out of this person’s league, you’ll automatically have the upper hand in the relationship and will be unlikely to get hurt. To “get Shrekked” is to strategically “date down” in this manner, only to still wind up getting rejected, heartbroken, and/or otherwise screwed over by someone you deemed inferior. As one TikToker put it, “We’ve all been there: We give the guy we’re not attracted to a chance, thinking that he will for sure know what he has and treat us well. And then we get traumatized by a whole troll.”

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“Shrekking.” Yes, that’s Shrekking as in Shrek, the famed ogre himself. And while we all love Shrek (or, at the very least, I think we all love Shrek 2, which is obviously among the greatest films of the 21st century), I’m afraid this dating trend is not using his namesake in a particularly flattering manner. While I’m usually one to side-eye the “toxic” label we seem to automatically slap on any and all dating behaviors, I’ll be the first to admit that this sure sounds like a whole lot of toxic! That said, I do think this mentality, while unflattering, speaks to some very real frustrations of modern dating that have left many daters justifiably jaded. Let’s unpack, shall we?

Not unlike hypergamy (aka “dating up”), which made the rounds on TikTok a few years back, the concept of Shrekking rests on the notion of a kind of dating pool caste system in which individual daters have a certain “market value” determined by their looks, age, income, and other superficial factors. This perceived value informs the conclusion that someone is dating “up” or “down” or within or out of “their league.” To say that you were “Shrekked” by somebody is to imply they fall beneath you within this dating hierarchy—which is, in a word, icky! (The Shrek of it all seems to more specifically imply that you find them aesthetically inferior, which is particularly mean-spirited and, honestly, not a great look!)

This is not necessarily to say that “looks that don’t matter” or that no such dating hierarchy exists. We do, of course, live in a society. And for better or worse, that society involves class systems and power structures that influence all aspects of life—including dating and relationships. To say that looks, money, and other widely acknowledged markers of societal fitness don’t matter in our sex and love lives would be ignorant. But just because something is doesn’t mean it’s right, nor does it mean it’s universal. Not only do these rubrics for evaluating where someone falls on the desirability scale tend to intersect with all manner of racist, sexist, ageist, and classist belief systems, but to invoke them as a universal standard applied to dating advice and discourse is to ignore the reality that attraction is extremely nuanced.

Source: Yahoo / Cosmopolitan