Written by Lauren Geall

As Stylist’s digital writer, Lauren Geall writes on topics including mental health, wellbeing and women’s issues. She’s also a big fan of houseplants and likes to dabble in film and TV from time-to-time. You can find her on Twitter at @laurenjanegeall.

Are you trying (and failing) to put together a dating app profile? Take the stress out of your hands with collabidating, the new dating trend that makes finding love a team effort. 

Name: collabidating

Meaning: when the stress of creating your dating app profile gets too much, get your friends to put together the whole thing for you. After all, if anyone can hype you up, it’s your best mates. It’s the ultimate ‘work smarter, not harder’ situation.

Origin: we have dating burnout to blame for collabidating, an original term we coined here at Stylist Extra. At a time when everyone’s feeling a bit over the chaos and pressure of dating apps (research from Hinge published last year found that 61% of daters feel overwhelmed by modern dating), having your friends set everything up makes it easier to focus on the main challenge: finding someone you’re actually interested in.  

So collabidating has nothing to do with going on double dates? No. Collabidating is about the process of finding a date rather than what happens when you go on one. Think about it like hiring a moving company for your dating life, except they’re moving you into an app as opposed to a new home. Oh, and you’re not paying them a penny.

What kind of stuff might that involve? It depends on how involved you want them to be, I guess. Some people might just want their friends to help them pick out the images they’re going to use (as well as the all-important order) while others might feel comfortable leaving the whole thing in their best friends’ hands. You could even work on the profile as a group and make a whole evening out of it – margaritas and all.

That requires a certain amount of trust. Definitely. This is something you’ll probably only want to ask your closest friends to help you with. Otherwise, you might open the app to find your preferences set to people aged 60 years older than you within a 200-mile radius – funny for a quick joke, but not exactly helpful when it comes to finding love. 

And are you supposed to do it for others in return? Sure! You could even start off by offering to help someone else before asking for their assistance. They do say, ‘Treat others how you’d like to be treated,’ after all.

My only fear is that my friends will get overly… invested? There is a risk of that, especially if you’re the only single one in your friendship group. You can always set boundaries after they’ve helped you with the initial set-up, though – if they’re your friends, they should listen to what you want.

Right. And if they don’t listen, you could always try mic dropping them. That’s quite an extreme way to end a relationship with your best friend, no?

I like to live life on the edge – you wouldn’t understand. That’s not the only thing I don’t understand about you, trust me. 

Image: Getty

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