Woman says she’s found a dating trend worse than ghosting: ‘It’s an apocalypse’

Being ‘ghosted’ means experiencing someone abruptly dropping out of your life without explanation, but a New York TikToker has discovered something more insidious

(TikTok / @mariel_darling)

A woman on TikTok claims she has identified a dating trend worse than being “ghosted”.

Singer-songwriter Mariel Darling posted a video last week to share her horror at the trend she has named as being “zombied”.

“Girl, you’re being ghosted? I’m being zombied,” she shared with her 250,000 followers.

“It’s like ghosting, but he comes back from the dead after a couple months and hits you up,” she explained in the video.

Being “ghosted”, by comparison, means experiencing someone abruptly dropping out of your life without explanation. Darling suggests that being “zombied” is when that person returns and tries to strike up a conversation again.

In a later video, Darling, who lives in New York City, said that dating there was like the “zombie apocalypse”.

TikTok users seemed delighted by the new phrase, and some shared in the comments that they had also been “zombied”.

“Have you ever noticed that they all zombie you at the same time? Like why are four guys from my past all hitting me up on the same day?” one person wrote.

“What about a couple [of] years?” wrote another.

One TikTok user compared being “zombied” to “breadcrumbing”, which is another dating term used to refer to when someone sends out affectionate or flirtatious cues without an intention for commitment.

“Tell me why this happened to me three times in the last three weeks” wrote one person, as another added: ““This just happened to me. Only I went out with the guy twice, SIX years ago!”

One person shared their coping mechanism with continuously being “zombied” by putting a gravestone emoji next to the person’s name in their phone’s contacts.