Meaning
Maintaining flirtatious or romantic contact with people outside your main relationship, or outside the one you are pursuing, so that prospects are on standby if the primary relationship fails. The metaphor is of padding or cushions softening the fall of a breakup. Used mainly in dating and relationship commentary. Informal and strongly negative, since it implies emotional infidelity or bad faith toward the primary partner. Regional use: General English; strongest in online dating contexts.
Origin
No individual coiner has been identified; the dating sense appears to have emerged organically in online dating communities, with Urban Dictionary entries cited by Refinery29 as the earliest documented usage, before the press picked it up. It went mainstream in early-to-mid 2017 as part of a wave of dating-trend vocabulary, notably through the Guardian's 8 May 2017 explainer 'Cushioning, breadcrumbing or benching: the language of modern dating', Vice coverage treating it as a toxic trend, and a June 2017 Boston Globe article on how Tinder and OKCupid had spawned a new genre of dating slang. Reddit threads on r/OkCupid from April 2017 already described it as newly coined, suggesting dating-community rather than journalistic origins. The exact first use is unknown.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cushion
- cushioned
- cushioning the blow
- to cushion someone
Usage Examples
- While dating Priya he kept messaging two exes, cushioning in case things fell apart.
- Cushioning felt like insurance to him and like betrayal to everyone he explained it to.
- She stopped cushioning once she admitted she actually wanted the relationship to work.