Have you ever found yourself six failed relationships into your life, crying to your friends for the umpteenth time and screaming ‘Why is everyone so terrible?!’, only for one of them to meekly suggest, ‘maybe…just maybe, you’re just going for the wrong type of person?'
Well, we hate to break it to you, because other than having one less friend, there’s now a box for you to slide right into and it’s not ideal: you, my friend, are a fleabagger. That’s right, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s influence has transcended TV screens and has now entered our dating lives.
According to Plenty of Fish, fleabagging is a new dating term on the rise, a need-to-know for 2020, assuming we all continue to choose absolutely terrible life partners next year. Essentially, it applies to anyone who continues to date people that are wrong for them. And even worse? A huge majority of women are guilty of it.
Researchers at Plenty of Fish found that 63% of women admit to fleabagging, as opposed to 38% of men. Now, don’t stress – we’re probably just more self-aware than men, but still, that’s a huge percentage of us going through life unashamedly dating terrible people with seemingly no will to mix things up a bit.
And it’s not just the fleabagger who is affected. In fact, we’d argue that fleabagging is even worse on the people around the fleabagger. Think about it, all the emotional labour of dealing with a friend's complaints about a shitty partner, on a constant loop for years. Every dinner you sit and hear the same boring story, every evening you give the same great advice, and like clockwork, the next morning you wake up to the ‘don’t worry, we’re good now!’ text. Sigh.
Perhaps though, now that there’s an actual term for it, fleabaggers will exercise a little bit of self-reflection. If you know a fleabagger, maybe you could even share the definition in the group chat along with a link to a therapist...
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