Mediated Sexual and Romantic Learning on TikTok: The Dating Wrapped Trend

Data Collection

Videos were identified through the DatingWrapped hashtag on TikTok as of March 2023. The researchers created new TikTok accounts on private browsers that were used only to search for this hashtag. This was done to ensure that the most popular results were presented with as little interference from additional user data as possible. Next, video URLs were collected from the first 100 videos under #DatingWrapped that were both savable and shareable, which are permissions set by creators that allow TikTok users to share and save a specific video. As such, data were only collected from videos that were not limited by privacy boundaries set by creators. After collecting video URLs, the PyTok package for R was used to collect the metadata about each video, including account usernames and the number of comments, shares, and views a video had received at the time of data collection.

Videos were excluded if their content did not fit the nature of the original trend to provide a presentation of romantic and sexual activity despite using the Dating Wrapped format. For example, videos providing reviews of gym activity for the year and videos whose content did not adhere to the PowerPoint format were excluded. Videos that were in languages other than English were also excluded. After exclusion, the final dataset included 54 videos (N = 54). Because videos within hashtagged trends are inherently derivative of one another (Zulli & Zulli, 2022), the researchers found this number of videos sufficient to quickly reach saturation of key themes and categories. This data-collection process was granted exempt status as not human subjects research from the institutional review board of the first author’s institution.

Analysis

Two methods of analysis were utilized to make sense of the data: content analysis (Krippendorff, 2013) and critical thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022; Terry & Braun, 2013). First, a content analysis (Krippendorff, 2013) was performed to understand the specific categories individuals presented within their videos. Because not all creators named categories using exactly the same label, researchers aggregated these categories based on their content. For example, the “employment” and “occupation” of individuals represent the same information despite small differences in naming. This method was to understand broad characteristics that individuals decided to share about their romantic dates and sexual partners.

Second, a critical thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022; Terry & Braun, 2013) was used by the researchers to “examine the sense-making tools people use” and “tell a rich story about a given dataset, as well as identifying and drawing out specific discursive features of interest” (Terry, in Braun & Clark, 2022, p. 255). A critical thematic analysis combines reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) with second-level discursive analysis techniques such that researchers can interrogate “more fine-grained details of language and discourse” (Terry, in Braun & Clark, 2022, p. 255). Accordingly, a critical thematic analysis was performed in this study to isolate aspects of communication within videos beyond the categories used to review romantic interactions. In this way, the researchers were also able to isolate specific statements made by creators for deeper analysis to interrogate how sensemaking occurs for individuals in the context of the Dating Wrapped trend.

Following Braun and Clarke’s (2021, 2022) reflexive thematic analysis, the researchers used codes to identify patterned meaning across the dataset in accordance with RQ1:

How do individuals participating in the Dating Wrapped trend communicate their romantic and sexual experiences?

There are six phases of reflexive thematic analysis: data familiarization, coding, generating initial themes, reviewing themes, defining and refining themes, and writing up results (Braun & Clarke, 2022). For the first phase, both authors watched through each video collected for analysis. Coding, the second phase, was an inductive approach that started by generating both semantic and latent codes while watching the 54 videos retained. For the third phase, researchers developed initial themes independently, and in Phases 4 and 5, they reviewed and refined themes in collaboration with one another. For example, the preliminary themes of “sensemaking” and “observations” were refined to “self-reflections of the dating experience.” The researchers decided on four final themes that address larger content trends within videos in accordance with RQ, collapsing similar content areas to enhance the parsimony of results. During this process, the researchers also isolated specific messages and phrasing creators utilized in their videos to better understand how individuals are presenting information within the categories they chose to review. This was done to engage in the “critical” portion of the critical thematic analysis and answer RQ2:

What messages about sex and dating are present within the Dating Wrapped trend?

The final stage, writing up results, is given below.

Physical and Social Descriptions of Dating and Sexual Partners

Over two-thirds (n = 41, 75.93%) of the videos in the dataset included information about dates’ physical and social attributes. These categories were used to describe how attractive others were, their education levels, and their occupations. For example, categories such as “hotness vs. dateability” and “attractiveness vs. dateability” were used to rate individuals based on their physical features compared to their qualities as romantic partners. Notably, only individuals who self-identified as queer or as participating in the “queer edition” of Dating Wrapped categorized their dates’ gender identities and gender presentations, as well as their zodiac signs. For example, only queer individuals used categories such as “Femme, Stem, Masc, Non-Binary,” and “gender identity,” as well as “astrology bingo.” In these cases, the representation of queer individuals within Dating Wrapped helps demonstrate nuanced understandings of the intersections between sexuality and gender, as well as affirm queer experiences as positive for identity development. For example, one user remarked, “The genders? We’ve got a range of genders here! Five men, three women, and one person who identifies as non-binary, which is a new experience for me and we LOVE new experiences.” This creator utilized an opportunity within their Dating Wrapped to affirm sexual and romantic experiences outside of cis-heterosexuality. The positive connotation of doing so—not just identifying that dating a non-binary individual was a new experience for them, but that new experiences like this are joyful—may allow viewers to reflect on their own romantic identities and explore their sexualities in a more expansive, inclusive way that they may not have previously considered.

The Dating Experience: Formation, Dissolution, and Process

Sexual Activities and Sexual Health

Creators used their Dating Wrapped videos to review their sexual experiences, indicate the amount of casual sexual encounters that were a result of their dates, and in some cases, report information related to their own sexual health. For example, one creator used the categories “did I orgasm,” “protected vs. not,” “pregnancy scares,” and “how many crossed my boundaries” in relation to their sexual experiences with dates over the past year. Just this user’s categories speak to the perceived quality of the sexual experience (i.e., the presence of an orgasm), questions of sexual health (i.e., using protection and pregnancy scares), and the potential for sexual harm to occur (i.e., crossing boundaries).

Creators also spoke with an openness about sexual experiences, including specific kinks, with categories such as “number of men who have asked to be in an ANR [breast feeding kink] with me” and “number of men asked to be pegged.” These categories discussed less-common sexual preferences, but messages are mixed as to whether these preferences are stigmatized or normalized within videos. In addition, although sexual health discussions were beneficial to inform viewers about getting tested, using protection, and consent, some individuals utilized messaging that dissuaded others from taking precautions. For example, when presenting the category “number of positive STI tests,” a creator stated, “none, because you can’t be positive if you don’t get tested.” Instead of encouraging testing to as a way to be informed of one’s sexual health status, this message reinforces fear and stigma toward getting tested. However, the willingness to discuss sexual experiences appears to represent an increased level of sexual openness among current emerging adults, reinforcing the breakdown of boundaries between private and public information online.

Self-Reflections of the Dating Experience

Self-reflection on the dating experience is essential to the Dating Wrapped trend. In a sense, the creation of a Dating Wrapped video necessitates an individual to reflect their dating experiences to appropriately categorize individuals for their presentation. Subsequently, self-reflection occurred prior to and throughout the videos, thus allowing for the presentations to serve cathartic and reflective purposes to both the creators and viewers while engaging in processes of relational sensemaking.

Within the dataset, 26 out of the 54 videos (48.15%) included at least one category that was directly self-reflective in nature, such as “current relational status,” “amount of money spent,” “lessons learned,” and “current perceptions” on the people they dated. Categories that were directly self-reflective in nature were often limited to one or two presentation slides. Instead, self-reflection usually occurred between or within categories during a Dating Wrapped video. Moments of reflection were frequently concluding statements based on the information shared in earlier slides and potentially acquired through making the video itself. In addition, the creation of a Dating Wrapped video may denote a reflective ethos on an individual’s experience of dating as a whole.

Creators expressed reflection in varied fashions. In many videos, creators highlighted how dating was “exhausting” with “little result from the countless first dates” they went on. One creator, for instance, described “How many times I said I’m done with/I hate men” due to their experiences in dating. This connection between dating and feeling burnt out with dating men that feminine-presenting creators often lamented spoke to the way that creators used these categories as moments of self-reflection to vent their frustrations with the dating experience. Multiple other creators tallied the financial cost of their year of dating, as dating is not merely an emotional and time investment but is also a financial investment. This allowed creators to accurately quantify the dating experience along multiple different metrics. In this sense, the reflective categories served as moments where creators could not only make sense of their experience and the costs of dating but also translate the other categories into takeaways that their audience could learn from.

Dating Wrapped as Platformization

Platformization, understood by Poell and colleagues (2019) as the “penetration of the infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental frameworks of platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life” (p. 5–6), manifests in all aspects of social life. In a sense, Dating Wrapped shows how public-facing forms of data visualization (e.g., Spotify Wrapped) become models through which emerging adult members make sense of their dating lives and build intimacy capital by sharing their experiences with others. These apertures reveal “platform intimacies” (Rambukkana & Matthews, 2024, p. 1), wherein data become a process of socialization and sensemaking through the formation of data intimacies. These processes are by no means new, as dating applications already use data to construct frameworks of intimacy, but Dating Wrapped offers both the possibility of reworking those frameworks of data intimacy to exist on the terms of their participants or to reify toxic tropes proffered by hegemonic forms of intimacy. Dating Wrapped, then, serves as an intermediary of intimacy wherein data visualization quantifies the aggregated experience of dating into a shared recognition of intimacy habits. Although this quantification might often imply a logic of neoliberal self-improvement, our analysis highlights the nuanced ways that users come to understand their own sexual experiences and themselves through the introspective process.

Furthermore, Dating Wrapped provides insights into the emic categories that creators use to narrate their own experiences. Although the Dating Wrapped trend shares the quantitative ethos of data visualization with Spotify Wrapped, Dating Wrapped requires creators to pick and choose their own categories to describe their experience, compared to Spotify’s algorithmically determined criteria. Some of these categories are stable across many different videos—number of dates, ages, date activities—while others are unique categories created by individual content creators to express their own experiences which may never be used again, such as “number that have a strange nickname my boss refers to them as” or “how many girls had me in my feelings listening to Take Care.” This key difference forms the basis of important insights about how users make sense of their own experiences and make categories that uniquely explore their own situation, while setting up space for them to produce content surrounding it. Although Spotify Wrapped requires universal metrics that can explore a litany of different experiences and exists on its own terms without an accompanying explanation, Dating Wrapped videos are built with the understanding that other users’ video categories serve as inspiration to explore and share one’s own romantic experiences and build intimacy capital via this sharing process.

Dating Wrapped as Redefining Relationship Expectations

Many creators used their videos to describe particular attributes of individuals to participate in processes of expectation redefinition by using categories that may seem unusual when reflecting on a year of dates. Categories such as “number who bought me flowers” are reflective of a larger trend of emerging adults’ online participation, which is the ability of networked intimate publics to build consensus about relationship standards and dating norms (Mendelson, 2023). For example, TikTok’s viral “couch guy” video (Zarras, 2021) and “wife strike” (Flood, 2021) movement have previously served as ways for millions of individuals to determine appropriate behavior in partnered romantic relationships. For the former, individuals within the “couch guy” networked public redefined expectations for reactions that romantic partners should have when surprised by a long-distance significant other. For the latter, married women refused to participate in household chores to illuminate the unfair division of domestic labor between themselves and their husbands. In many cases, “wife strikes” were so effective in illuminating these labor disparities that women were encouraged to leave their husbands, and a number of women did. Within Dating Wrapped, creators use their videos to negotiate sexual expectations, such as the desire for a partner to achieve orgasm, their communicative expectations of others, and to indicate thoughtful gestures during the dating process.

Dating Wrapped as Identity Formation and Relational Learning

The process of creating one’s own Dating Wrapped presentation requires an individual to reflect on a year of past dating experiences, categorize others, and create their own online content in adherence to the larger viral trend. Subsequently, participation in Dating Wrapped serves as an instance of socialization about dating and romantic identities for individuals who choose to participate in a variety of ways. First, when creators describe new romantic experiences as enjoyable, they assign a positive connotation to that previous experience and affirm their relational exploration. Second, when individuals specifically identify their video as #QueerWrapped, the replacement of “Dating” with “Queer” in the hashtag communicates one’s identity in alignment with a broader queer community. Third, reflecting on one’s own communication patterns, such as whether or not they ghosted others or were ghosted by others, allows individuals to analyze potential trends in their own relationship habits and whether they were beneficial to the development of relationships. These examples are just some of the ways that both identity formation—such as identifying as “queer” in a public-facing video—and relational learning occur through the video-creation process.

Viewers on TikTok who are networked into the Dating Wrapped intimate public may, in part, understand their own interpersonal relationships as reflective of or discordant to these videos. Given the examples above, viewers may be encouraged to engage in new sexual experiences, explore identities within the queer community, and learn more about the effects that communication patterns have on others. However, if creators reinforce stigmatizing and stereotypical beliefs about sex, identity characteristics of others, and gender roles, this expansive relational development may be stifled. In either case, viewers are still participating in relational learning; the question becomes whether this learning occurs through the exposure to new ideas or the reinforcement of what has been previously taught.

Although participation in Dating Wrapped may not be intrinsically motivated by the desire to understand one’s romantic life, results demonstrate that individuals understand their sexual and romantic experiences in the community with others. While the desire to obtain intimacy capital encourages individuals to share intimate details of their private lives online to form social connections (Gibson & Talaie, 2018), Dating Wrapped demonstrates how social media trends motivate this sharing by providing a communicative format to do so. Sexual and romantic selves are formed not only through in-person conversations (Morgan & Korobov, 2012) but also through participation in trends that mobilize networked publics between individuals who may not know one another offline (Mendelson, 2023).