Throning is dating someone for the view from beside them. Not for money, particularly, and not for looks — for standing: the follower count, the table you get at the restaurant, the way a room reorganises itself slightly when they walk in. The name says it exactly. You put someone on a throne, and the throne turns out to be a plinth you're standing on.

What's genuinely funny about the word is how new it isn't. The coverage that spread it in late 2024 was clear that the behaviour it describes is hypergamy — marrying up — a subject people have written about since the 1800s and practised since long before that. Dynastic marriage was throning with a treaty attached. All that's changed is the currency: standing used to mean land and title, and now it means audience.

The tell people describe is a mismatch between the public and private versions of the relationship. You feature heavily — tagged, posted, brought along — and matter noticeably less when nobody is looking. That's worth naming when you see it, though it's worth being sceptical of the statistics floating around this term, most of which trace back to a dating-app marketing survey rather than to published research.