This time last year, a friend of mine was upset because she was single in what is supposed to be one of the cushiest times of year for couples. On the precipice of autumn, her new relationship came to an end, and so did her fantasies about finally having someone to drink hot chocolates and skip through pumpkin patches with.

Since the early 2010s, we’ve all accepted the colder months as a time for seeking out romantic (or at the very least, sexual) connection. It’s cuffing season, duh. But as with most stories, there’s another side. Data from social media status updates back in 2008 showed that the biggest influx in breakups happens two weeks before Christmas. This still tracks even 16 years on: last year, eHarmony’s Dating Diaries report found that 26 per cent of singles were breaking up in September. In 2022, another dating app Wingman saw a 34 per cent increase in new user sign-ups during the first half of September alone. Evidently, the biggest bulk of breakups tend to occur in autumn: so why do we cling onto the idea of ‘cuffing season’?

The cultural obsession with cuffing season began around 2011 when the first mainstream definition of the term was published in Urban Dictionary. “During the fall and winter months people who would normally rather be single or promiscuous find themselves along with the rest of the world desiring to be ‘cuffed’ or tied down by a serious relationship,” it read. “The cold weather and prolonged indoor activity causes singles to become lonely and desperate to be cuffed.” In 2017, the term was even shortlisted by Collins Dictionary for its word of the year, then defined as “the period of autumn and winter, when single people are considered likely to seek settled relationships rather than engage in casual affairs”.

Of course, there’s no smoke without fire, and the notion of cuffing season has some merit. One Hinge survey found that men and women are respectively 15 and 5 per cent more likely to want a relationship in winter. It does make sense – nobody wants to spend the darkest, dullest months of the year without someone to cuddle. Plus, as relationship psychologist Marisa Cohen tells us, there are some biological factors at play. “Some research shows that testosterone peaks during the fall which may lead to greater desire to engage in sexual activity or cuddle up to a potential partner,” she says. “Serotonin also drops during the winter months, and people may compensate for this by seeking out someone to boost their mood.” She adds that “psychological pressures” around bringing someone home for the holidays or going on cute autumnal dates may contribute to why people want to couple up in autumn.

Plus, the memeification of cuffing season likely contributed it to becoming a widespread trend even if it wasn’t a real thing to begin with. “It seems like every day there’s a new term for dating-related behaviours,” Cohen says. “We have the tendency to want to label and understand patterns. Natural shifts that people may experience in their relationship-related thoughts and behaviours [regardless of the season] may be attributed to cuffing season now that the label is out there and in fact something that people start to anticipate each fall.”

But, ironically, the reasons why some people try to get cuffed during autumn are pretty similar to the reasons why others break up. Dr Linda Blair is a clinical psychologist who specialises in families and relationships. She’s been working in the field for 40 years and, in that time, she’s found that whenever couples come to the end of a fun time – such as a summer holiday – they tend to break up. “We come back home and there’s a drop in our mood,” she tells Dazed. As a result, people begin to look for the source of their low mood and their disappointment and pin it on their partner. Or, on a more subconscious level, begin to seek out change. Another factor may be that we have been conditioned to see autumn as a time of new beginnings. “September is a fresh start,” says Blair. “A lot of times people feel they have to start over, and they then reevaluate their relationship.” 

Massimo, 24, met a girl through Hinge towards the end of summer. While there was, he says, a “strong attraction and a degree of passion,” he admits the relationship was likely spurred on by “boredom and summer stagnation”. As it so often goes, the nature of the relationship was never properly defined, and Massimo decided the relationship would “stay in the vague purgatory of a casual relationship” when he saw his love interest swiping on a dating app while sitting next to him. By the time autumn came around, the relationship ended when the dreaded “so, what are we?” conversation finally took place.

Similarly, Matt, 25, tells Dazed that he “tends to fall in love” in summer. “Everybody is more jolly, open to new people, dates are very cute, you know?” he says. This year, Matt fell in love with a girl from another country, who was interning abroad and in an open relationship. “I wanted to leave it there in July, when she went back to her home country, but we just couldn’t,” he says. “I wanted to just get plane tickets and show up, but of course, as she was in a relationship there was no place for me to stay.”

The pair were texting daily and calling regularly and had genuine plans to meet in person. But time went on and that day didn’t come. “In this situation of waiting aimlessly I decided to take a step back for my own sanity,” says Matt. He, like Massimo, wonders whether the relationship had a natural timeline. “I really pictured it as a summer love,” he says. “So I would assume when summer ends and autumn begins, summer love stories tend to end as well.”