How to tell whether you occupy that third space that both single and settled girls deeply covet? The thrilling middle stage where you’ve just started getting serious? Here’s a few suggested signs…
**1. Giving up your Facebook password **
Probably the greatest show of trust in the modern world, right? There is a point in a relationship where you suddenly start being so open and doe-eyed about someone that you just kind of don’t care when they ask you mad things like what your Paypal password is or whether they can 'Log in to your FB for a second to check something real quick.' Usually, any sound-of-mind person would see these type of requests as sociopathic madness but when you’re getting serious with someone this type of stuff just doesn’t bother you in the slightest. All of a sudden you know each other’s Twitter password, phone passcodes and, even worse, even if they did act like a psychopath and start reading all your texts/DMs/msgs there wouldn’t even be any salacious evidence to uncover. Now that’s love.
2. Letting your other half answer the phone to your mum
If when your phone has rung you’ve ever shouted, 'If it’s work tell them I’ll call them back in a minute but if it’s mum leave it' you know what I mean. It’s not because I don’t want to speak to my mum right now, it’s because I would rather have 10 missed calls from my mum than let some peasant I hardly know speak to the queen. The moment you’re in the shower/waxing your legs in the bathroom/getting dressed and your phone rings in the other room and you shout, 'Tell mum I’m just in the shower!' is massive. These days you can actually see who’s calling, so what in the oldie times used to be a Russian roulette of answering the home phone to family members asking why a boy was at your house at 9pm, now you can filter who they speak to. Thank god.
3. You let them use your Oyster card
Apologies in advance for any non-Londoners but believe me when I say this is actually a huge deal because of how expensive travel is in London. Inflated ham Boris Johnson has declared that fares will creep up by 2.7% across the board, which means that the level of ownership over things like Oyster cards becomes hysterical to the point of wanting to disown someone for asking if they can borrow your travel card on a day you’re not using it. (Answer: never). Something starts happening when you start falling for somebody, though, which makes you suddenly start offering to lend them your travel card, or even – wait for it – top up their Oyster for them when they don’t have money. Some people might just call that being nice. I call that being on a slippery love slope, which will end in debt and house repossession.
4. You both delete Tinder
This might sounds obvious but it’s kind of not. This is significant for a number of reasons. One: obviously, it shows that you’re ready to commit without temptation to only one person, which is great. Good for you. More crucially though, it takes away the very passive aggressive urge you get when you have an argument with someone to furiously start swiping as if to prove that you don’t have to put up with this shit because there’s someone 2km away from you who thinks you’re fit. Also this is a better test of faithfulness than in the olden days when you’d have to just hope that people weren't rifling through your old lonely hearts ads you posted in the paper and calling you up for a date at various times of the day.
5. You delete their surname from your phone
This obviously comes once you’ve learned their full name and have now saved them as their real name, rather than 'blue t-shirt' or 'black guy' or whatever. Whereas in The Past you might have taken their business card or let them write their number on your arm or a notepad or however they used to date in the ’90s, now there’s the whole ordeal of unlocking your phone in a dark club and putting in numbers on a touch screen which is basically impossible when you’re a bit drunk. Anyway, I digress. There is some politics to your phonebook. For instance, when you don’t really care about someone, you put them in your phone as 'Robbie Williams' (lol), and then when you really like them you just put him as ‘Robbie’. So if you have also have a friend called Robbie, then sorry but he’s just been relegated to second place. You’re in love!
6. Personalised hashtags on your Instagram
If you’ve only just started seeing someone, the thought of them existing forever as part of your social media imprint is unimaginable. But when you really start liking someone you’ll notice them creep into your online world. Pretty much the only place it’s acceptable to sometimes have a selfie of you and your other half is Instagram – the social media where everyone you hang out with for more than a week pops up eventually. Then you start sharing little online in-jokes via hashtags, emoji conversations on Twitter, reblogging each other’s Tumblr posts and a slew of other sickening but sadly very real behaviour.
Follow Kieran on Twitter @kieran_yates
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.