“It’s so hot right now,” says 25-year-old New Yorker Isabel Timerman. She’s not talking about copping the latest Heaven by Marc Jacobs or Rare Beauty blush. She’s not even talking about Threads. She’s talking being absolutely delusional when it comes to dating. “Everyone loves it,” she adds. That guy who took days to reply? He wasn’t ignoring you, he was just busy. The one who only ever texts past 11pm? He could be the one. The one who ghosted you? Probably scared of how much he liked you.
What started as a way to describe K-pop stans who believe they have a chance with their idols, being “delulu” has become an established aspect of modern dating. Though it’s not exclusively gender-specific, being delulu often sees young women embracing their naivety when it comes to dating and romance. These young women aren’t full-on erotomaniacs, but simply prefer to over-romanticize their situation, completely ignoring the signs that it isn’t heading towards the goal they had pictured: more often than not, a healthy relationship. The mindset is so rife in fact, it’s earned its own nickname and plethora of TikTok content.
Isabel, whose bio dubs her the “Empress of Delululand,” has over 300,000 TikTok followers, making sketch comedy about her life for likeminded fans. A few months ago, she tells me, she was left mourning the end of a romantic interest “like it was a marriage” despite only hooking up for one month. “I actually saw him recently and I realised it wasn’t even real, it was just my thoughts being like ‘okay, here are his credentials, let’s see what we can do with them,” she says.
Of course, being delulu isn’t anything new. Kate Winslet spent the first half of classic rom-com The Holiday convinced her ex would suddenly get serious. He didn’t even buy her a Christmas present and proposed to someone else. In Sex and the City, Carrie’s entire relationship with Big saw a flow of constant ‘expectation v. reality’ moments in which reality invariably fell short. But delusion in these instances was something women needed to overcome, an embarrassing flaw characters confessed to only their closest friends. Now, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and #delulu has 1.3 billion views on TikTok.
“We’re forced into delulu,” says Isabel. “We need it because without it, we don’t have anything else.” It’s a bleak outlook on love today, but it’s not an uncommon sentiment. “It’s a shit show right now. The world is on fire. Dating is on fire right now. It’s horrible,” says Kelsey Soles, who has over 1 million TikTok followers for her content which is frequently themed around her recovery from a brutal situationship break-up — delulu admittance included. Kelsey describes being delulu as being a “forever optimist.”
“I feel like dating has just become this huge game to everyone,” says Kelsey, pinpointing the constant feeling that something better is waiting around the corner, caused by dating apps and social media. “Nobody takes it seriously anymore. Everyone thinks they have these unlimited options. It’s crazy.
“You can literally slide in anyone’s DMs that you want,” she adds. “You see all of these super mega hot people, and like attractive, rich, whatever that you’re into. And you feel like you can have all these options and people are just never satisfied. It’s this feeling of never being satisfied.”
Online dating coach Perri Schneider, who helps people ‘find success on dating apps’, says it’s a “number’s game” today to have the highest chance of success. “How many people can you match with? How many people can you talk to?” she describes. On the flip side, Schneider also says it can be disappointing when you appear to have so many options, yet still can’t find “the one.”
Having approached the world with expectations of passionate romances that breathe excitement into life, daters now say they’re handed Instagram story reactions and late night texts, leaving them unsatisfied with the current reality and their brains filling in for the rest of their desires.
The main suspect? The normalised half-in, half-out approach that’s so popular in the world of dating now— not being closed off, á la Love Island speak. Half-in, half-feelings, half-connection and half-satisfaction. As per a YPulse survey, 20% of Gen Z have been in a situationship and 35% say they prefer to have an undefined relationship. The type of thing that bewilders your mum as you try to explain that yes, he replied to a Hinge message in front of you and yes, you still think he’s into you but that it’s completely normal these days.
“It’s just this unspoken rule that you can’t be too mushy or too lovey-dovey because it’s not chill,” says Isabel, citing situationships as her main disappointment. “We never really see their flaws fully because we never get there, so then we romanticize them more and we put them on pedestals.”
Josh Smith, a couples and family counseller at Relate, says this idea of knowing-but-not-knowing someone, whether it be a situationship or casual date, creates the perfect conditions for delulu behaviour: ”We know often so little about the other person that there’s a lot of space for us to project onto them our hopes, dreams, things that we might want. It’s not necessarily sexy to communicate about those things in a straightforward way because what’s kind of erotic is what’s often mysterious and unsaid and it’s about subtext. When we go into relationships, often it’s very unclear what’s going on, but that’s partly what is sexy about it. That’s the whole mystery of the kind of ‘erotic stranger’.”
For Kelsey though, there’s nothing sexy about being confused: “The reason that we’re delusional is because we’re confused. If people were just honest about how they felt, we wouldn’t have to tell ourselves lies and be like ‘he’s just busy’ or ‘he’s got a lot going on’,” she says.
Not all delulu is made equal: some fantasies may come from a place of mixed messages and stunted feelings, but what would compel someone to envision moving in together with a person they haven’t even been on a first date with yet? Boredom, says Cologne-based Laeyla, 20, who found herself going viral for her admittance to being delulu. “It just adds a little spice in my life to be honest,” she says frankly. “Without being deluded, your life is so boring. I can’t picture myself if I’m not delulu.”
It’s situations like this when the Venn diagram of delulu and limerence, another TikTok psychology focus, begin to potentially overlap. Limerence is not a psychological disorder but a state of being that involves an all-consuming obsession, including intrusive thoughts that can be described as an extreme crush. Josh explains that the main difference is the longevity and intensity of the experience. “While there are some similarities between limerence and ‘delulu,’ most portrayals of the latter on TikTok seem to see it as a short-lived infatuation,” he says. “Limerence, while occasioned by an infatuation (a ‘limerent object’) usually arises in people who experienced developmental stress and complex PTSD. It can affect people for years, even decades, which is somewhat different from spending an evening on social media, stalking someone you met on a date.”
Arguably, it’s the awareness of being delulu while you’re in it and ability to give yourself a reality check, that makes it less harmful. “It’s not wrong. It’s just when you have that experience, I think the best thing you can do is admit it,” says Perri. “Yeah, I was a little delusional and look what it served me. It gave me nothing, so how can I learn?”
Kelsey says that seeing so many people in the comments of her videos go through the same emotions when it comes to being delulu made her feel validated. “It just made me feel like I wasn’t crazy,” she says.
“It’s been really cool to see people be more open and women be more open to these behaviours that for so long have been so shameful and so abnormal,” agrees Isabel. “It’s so liberating.” Up the delulu revolution.