Where it sits
The talking stage sits early — past strangers, well short of agreed.
How it unfolds
The opening
First messages. Low stakes, high frequency — the pleasant part where everything is still potential.
The deepening
Conversation gets longer and more personal. You start to have a shape in each other's days.
The ambiguity
You're clearly something, but nobody has said what. Both of you may still be talking to other people, and neither of you knows.
The fork
It either resolves into a defined relationship, fades out, or hardens into a situationship — the version that never resolves at all.
Tell it apart
| Aspect | Talking stage | Situationship |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Heading somewhere | Stalled |
| Time | Weeks | Months or longer |
| Expectation | It will be defined | It won't be |
| Ends with | The DTR | A fade, or a reckoning |
A talking stage is meant to resolve — it's a phase with an exit. A situationship is a talking stage that stopped resolving: the same ambiguity, except it has settled in and stopped moving.
What it doesn't mean
There's no standard duration. The useful measure isn't weeks but direction — whether contact is deepening and you're entering each other's actual lives.
By default it doesn't. The talking stage is non-exclusive unless someone says otherwise, which is exactly the assumption that causes so much of its damage.
What it really means
Every generation invents a word for the part of dating that has no name yet. This one is unusually literal: the talking stage is the bit where you are, in fact, only talking. Messages, voice notes, the odd meet-up — real momentum, real feeling, and absolutely no agreement about what any of it is.
What makes it modern isn't the phase itself; people have always had a getting-to-know-you stretch. It's the length. Apps let you sustain a promising conversation indefinitely at almost no cost, so a phase that used to resolve in a fortnight can now run for months without anybody deciding anything.
And here is the assumption that does the damage: the talking stage is not exclusive by default. One person quietly treats it as pre-relationship and stops looking; the other treats it as one of several conversations. Nobody has lied, and someone still gets hurt. The whole phase runs on an unstated assumption, which is why the only reliable way through it is the one conversation it exists to postpone — asking, plainly, what this is.
Where it comes from
words exchanged, nothing agreed
a phase that is meant to pass
It names itself honestly: the part where you are only talking.
- 2017
First logged in slang dictionaries as two people 'slowly getting into a relationship'.
- late 2010s–2020s
Dating apps stretch it from 'pre-meeting chat' to the whole span between first message and defining things.
In real life
- They have messaged every day for six weeks and met twice, and neither of them knows whether they're dating.
- She's in the talking stage with two people at once, and assumes, reasonably, that they are too.
- When a friend asks whether they're seeing each other, he says we're just talking — which is technically true.
Questions
Q01How long should a talking stage last?
There's no fixed answer, and any specific number you read is a rule of thumb rather than a finding. A more useful test than time is direction: is contact deepening, are you meeting, are you entering each other's real lives? A talking stage that isn't moving after a couple of months has usually become something else.
Q02Can you talk to other people during the talking stage?
Yes — by default it isn't exclusive. That's the single biggest source of hurt in it: one person assumes exclusivity, the other assumes the opposite, and neither says so. If exclusivity matters to you, it has to be spoken.
Q03When does the talking stage become a situationship?
When it stops resolving. The talking stage is supposed to be a phase with an exit; once months pass with the same ambiguity and no movement toward defining anything, you're in a situationship whether or not anyone calls it that.
Sources
- The talking stage: what it is, how to navigate it — Feeld.
- talking stage — Urban Dictionary (earliest attestation, 2017).