‘Shrekking’ is ‘dating down’ and settling for ugly partners‚ but it may just ruin your love life, experts warn
By Brooke Steinberg
Dating a troll will take its toll.
“Shrekking” is a new word for age-old behavior that involves settling for a relationship with someone less attractive than you.
The term comes from the 2001 flick “Shrek,” in which pretty Princess Fiona “dates down” and scores her happily ever after with an ogre.
Shrek and Princess Fiona holding hands.
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The trend is based on the idea that a beautiful Princess Fiona took a chance on the green ogre and she had her happily ever after.
©DreamWorks/Courtesy Everett Collection
However, there’s a twist: When you get “Shrekked,” the person you lowered your standards for still ends up hurting you and not treating you the way you had hoped.
“In this plotline, you’re dating an ogre without the princess treatment,” Amy Chan, a dating coach and the author of “Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart,” told USA Today.
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“Plenty of people have put looks lower on the list or hoped attraction would grow over time, and that in itself isn’t a bad thing,” she explained. “Where it backfires is when someone assumes that just because they’re dating ‘down’ in looks, they’ll automatically be treated better.”
A woman embraces a man from behind.
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Being “Shrekked” means getting “absolutely traumatized by a man that either looks like Shrek himself or Lord Farquaad.”
ZoneCreative – stock.adobe.com
“We’ve all been there,” one woman said in a TikTok video. “We give the guy we’re not attracted to a chance thinking that he will for sure know what he has and treat us well. And then we get traumatized by a whole troll.”
The new phrase highlights a major problem in modern dating: the implication that daters can know how someone will treat them based on looks alone.
In reality, appearances and character are not linked, and if someone treats you poorly, they should be seen as unattractive to you — regardless of their looks, Emma Hathorn, a relationship expert at Seeking.com, told USA Today.
“Shrekking” also might discourage people from dating someone who looks different than their usual “type” out of fear that it won’t go well — which isn’t necessarily true.
“The idea is that you stepped outside your comfort zone, but instead of being rewarded with growth or connection, you wound up regretting the experience,” Hathorn says.
“When two people are genuinely driven towards a similar goal and values, they can find an attraction in each other that surprises them and refutes the shallower factors like physical type and societal expectations.”
Chan said that the fact that the term “Shrekking” is being used at all demonstrates how discouraged people are when it comes to dating.
“Modern dating has gotten so complicated that we need new words just to describe what’s happening to us,” she shared. “It’s like we’ve made dating struggles part of our public conversation in a way that just didn’t happen before.”
Shrek and Princess Fiona from Shrek Forever After.
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“In this plotline, you’re dating an ogre without the princess treatment,” Amy Chan said.
©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
If you have been “Shrekked,” Chan said not to give up or go back to your old ways, but rather use it as a chance to figure out what your non-negotiables are for a potential partner — regardless of looks.
“For those who’ve been ‘Shrekked,’ the goal isn’t to retreat back to only dating conventionally attractive people; it’s to develop better assessment skills for character, values, and emotional availability regardless of what package they come in,” Chan says.
“Physical attraction matters in romantic relationships, but it shouldn’t be the inverse predictor of good treatment that some people assume it to be.”
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