This cuffing season, are we horny for a partner? Or for community?

It’s October, and the autumn leaves are slowly drying out, like your liver after a two-day bender. And even if the weather isn’t really cooling down—feeding our ambient environmental anxiety—our bodies are readying themselves for the ravages of winter. You know, when it gets dark at 4pm and the entirety of life seems to revolve around long hours in front of screens and little else. For many of us, our little sunlight-deprived brains struggle with the way our worlds—which seemed so expansive, and vast, in the brighter months—are suddenly swallowed up in a dark abyss. 

So, it’s little coincidence that, around this time of year, many of us become vultures, scrounging for connections and relationships in the debris of every bar and dating app. It’s understood that this is too miserable a time to be alone, so the social ritual of “cuffing season” sees short-lived couples (and sometimes throuples and polycules) form for the sole purpose of bleak midwinter companionship. Despite the fact that it was created to stave off loneliness, I’ve always found this routine pretty depressing. Often, a cuffing season relationship serves for little more than a human bed-filler, someone to provide body heat as you both scroll in silence on your phones, and spend another night watching your streaming service of choice. 

These relationships only exist in a constrained, liminal time period, with the understanding that you’ll shed this partner like an unnecessary layer once spring hits. But people shouldn’t be disposable. What does it say about our romantic culture when such a transactional approach to relationships is normalized? Why do we need someone for a season when it’s cold out—or to serve as a convenient plus one to a holiday party— but are happy to discard them when we feel the revitalizing energy of spring on the horizon? 

I’m not defending continuing a relationship just for the sake of it, far from it. And this is not me coming out as anti-fling. (For the record, I love flings—gimme a holiday romance, zipping around on the back of somebody’s Vespa, any day of the week). But cuffing season itself has nothing to do with eros, sex, or passion. Nor does it have anything to do with true connection, intimacy, and companionship. Instead, it’s really about the lack of community facing many of us today—with single people especially affected. 

Personally, as someone of the dyke experience, I’ve segued plenty of relationships into friendships—if nobody’s got me, I know my emotional support ex has got me. Being queer has enriched my life, and gave me access to a constellation of former lovers, ex girlfriends’ ex girlfriends, Instagram mutuals, and bonafide friends who are involved, to various degrees, on the East London “scene.” 

But not everyone has this in-built community. Under late-stage capitalism, it’s often impossible. Firstly, the obvious: we work all the time. But because we work all the time, and don’t have much spare time remaining, we often trade community for convenience—we order groceries via an app rather than ask our neighbors for a cup of sugar, we get an Uber to the airport rather than ask a friend to give us a ride. We live in a culture where we’re perpetually encouraged—by the self-help industry, by various purveyors of short-form video content—to be as self-sufficient and hyper-independent as humanly possible, always self–optimizing and “working on ourselves” rather than facing outward. Even the mere experience of living in a city, where our choice of neighborhood is constrained by our earning power, can lead to living a 40-minute commute away from any friends or acquaintances.

Perhaps this is why there is so much of a focus on romance, particularly the notion of finding your “soulmate.” We don’t want to go out looking for community, we want them next to us, at all times (and to imagine that meeting them is somehow pre-ordained). Cuffing season might not be about finding this Mr/Ms/Mx “Right” but it’s about embracing the potential of someone right here, right now who can take the sting out of cold nights once we’ve looked around and realized that we have no familiar faces, no local haunts, and no support system to bolster us in unpleasant conditions. 

All-weather intimacy

I think we need to flip the narrative. Rather than looking for a quick, romantic fix each time the weather begins to wither, I think we should be focusing on cultivating an all-weather garden of intimacy. Perhaps if we worked to forge our own platonic relationships—building our acquaintances, finding solidarity in our comrades, and deepening our friendships—we would be able to withstand the emotional freeze of the winter months. There’s also power in embracing the openness of lovers and relationships, nourishing our connections and allowing them to flow —rather than forcing one person to become the salve to our emotional needs. 

I’m always inspired by the possibilities inherent within polyamory, particularly for the way that prescriptive relationship norms are rejected in order to embrace other, more capacious, possibilities. Then there’s the scepticism of a “relationship escalator” which encourages greater and greater levels of monogamous commitment and enmeshment—cohabitation, merging of finances, marriage, kids etc. To me, these cis-heterosexual conventions often always involve a level of stepping back from community, and creating something private, discrete, and removed from wider society. 

Whether or not you’re poly, or queer, retaining a level of curiosity about how we can practice our relationships can help us see the infinite possibilities for making and connecting to community. Rather than embracing a short-lived relationship in order to quell any feeling of discomfort or loneliness, we can seek to establish different ways of finding companionship and intimacy outside the monogamous dyad—methods which can sustain us more, and at any point of the year. After all, the convenience economy is for takeout, not relationships.

Curious about finding year-round connections and community? Discover what’s waiting for you on Feeld.