Newly trending on TikTok: Dinks. They’re couples with lifestyles defined by their lack of children and by the financial and literal freedom that brings them. DINK stands for double income, no kids, a demographic originally identified in the ’80s by advertising agencies aching to relieve its members of their excess funds by selling them all the stuff their identity allowed them to own.
Think: precious, beautiful homes, lusciously furnished – because who needed to worry about sticky fingers and baby puke staining the cashmere-trimmed-everything? Not DINKs! Think last-minute luxurious travel to far-flung places, for when accommodating school holidays is Not A Thing. Think truffle oil with which to laden leisurely Sunday brunches, the ones spent in companionable silence, one of you reading the sports section, the other reading style (completely uninterrupted by tantrums and snot and need).
And here it is again, looking basically the same, just 2024-style – ergo, on TikTok. Have a search on the hashtag and you may encounter glossy-haired smiler @indianna knight and her 26.3k followers, with a pinned video showing her and her bloke dancing joyously around a sparklingly clean kitchen. Caption: ‘POV: your husband gets the snip so you can live forever in your DINK era’.
You may stumble across Courtney, @letravelstyle (179.1k followers), with a clip that shows her and her bloke somewhere picturesquely foreign, saying, ‘We’re DINKs, we go on 10 trips a year... We’re DINKs, we get 8 hours of sleep a night and wake up when we want to... We’re DINKs, the only TV shows we watch are ones we actually want to...’
Maybe you’ll segue up the side alley of DINKWADs – DINKs With A Dog – with videos voiced by the dog in question: a collie perches on the backseat of a speeding car, wind in its ears, with the caption, ‘Straight chillin’ in my car seat while my dual income Millennial parents escort me on another paid vacation’. Or maybe into #DINKSDinners, where childfree couples raid the shelves at Whole Foods for overpriced chicken katsu curry; or maybe #DINKScoupleproblems, which I assume covers things like ‘So hard deciding what to do with all the excess mojo we have because it isn’t ground out of us by our filthy-nappied progeny (but we can’t just keep having sex all the time, presumably?) #prayforus’.
My first thought on encountering the DINKs of TikTok was: does the world really need another flavour of influencer? Another sub-category of people running around, being screamingly show-offy about lives they don’t actually lead, not really; they’re just showing you their Best Bits, filtered to look even better, with zero mention of the banal/painful/ugly sh*t in-between? Do we really need the Smug Childfrees?
I get that mummy influencers are annoying – but does taking their schtick and turning it against ’em achieve anything, other than to feed the pass-agg war between those with kids and those without? And anyway, isn’t it all graspingly consumerist and wantonly self-promoting and aspirational and... Ah. Then I got it. I got what the DINKs are doing, consciously or otherwise, and I got why it matters.
DINKs are turning life without kids into an aspiration.
I’m childfree. Gloriously so. I realised aged seven that motherhood was not for me and persisted with that conviction, despite many, many people telling me that I’d change my mind, that I’m selfish, that I’d wake up one day and be consumed with a deep, dark, devastating regret. Guess what? They were wrong and I’m having a lovely childfree life. I’ve got a bloke, I’ve even got a dog; I’m full bloody DINKWAD, bitches. Problem is, I’m so happy with living that chosen life that I forget to mention it. And it needs to be mentioned.
It needs to be mentioned because the pervading narratives on people without kids – especially women – are uniquely sad. Non-shiny, non-smug, non-aspirational. It’s all about the tragedy of infertility, the pain of miscarriage and the idea that you are not whole without a biological child. It’s all the celebrities who open up about their IVF and their failed attempts to get pregnant. While all these experiences are valid and truthful, they are not the only ones in town.
If that doesn’t bother me – the sadness of childlessness is the reverse of my experience – I can see how it causes problems elsewhere. How it makes women question themselves when, left to their own devices, they wouldn’t have kids either, and makes those who cannot have kids feel more stigmatised, alien and pitiful. Women without kids are an increasing sector of our society. According to new research from the US, 45% of American women aged between 25 and 44 will be childless, or childfree, by 2030. If the widest spread notion of us is as a tragic, pathetic, half-realised subspecies... How is that helpful? It isn’t.
So if there’s a wave of TikTokers devoted to making it look glossy and fun and fulfilled, who highlight the many positives, who brag about the freedom and the spends... that’s fine by me. Keep up the good work, DINKs of TikTok, my Smug Childfrees! Yours, a most unexpected fan.