What Does It Mean When People are “Just Talking?”

The proliferation of social media has turbocharged the ever-evolving lexicon of ways to talk about romantic and sexual behaviors. This includes everything from the soft launch technique for relationship disclosure to what it means if you ghost another person to what exactly a situationship is. Today, we’re going to discuss new research out of the Binghamton University Human Sexualities Research Laboratory that explores what it means when college students say they’re “just talking” to someone. We’ll first discuss dating culture on a broader scale, then we’ll take a closer look at the study and investigate the many and varied meanings of “just talking.” 

Relationship Formation Among Emerging Adults 

College campuses have long been viewed as the nexus of hookup culture, offering a place where emerging adults can explore and develop their sexual identities while engaging in uncommitted sexual activity with others [1]. Hookup culture is prominent among college students due to the unique environment afforded by campus life, where students are living in dorms and/or close-knit residential areas, there are many opportunities to engage in alcohol consumption, and there’s a strong desire to try and fit in with others in a new social situation. Many previous studies have found that college students actually seem to prefer lower-stakes uncommitted sexual relationships as opposed to close romantic partnerships [1,2]. 

Paradoxically, however, members of Generation Z are having less sex than those in previous generations, both when those individuals were also college-aged and at their current age. This suggests that the sexual landscape among college students is shifting, and with it, the terms we use to understand different relationship stages and courtship behaviors are evolving. 

How College Students Define “Just Talking” 

Given this changing sexual landscape among college students, a group of researchers recently investigated what students really mean when they say they’re “just talking” in order to understand how college students actually conceptualize popular relationship slang [3]. 

Colloquially, and akin to terms like soft launch and situationship, the idea of “just talking” represents yet another ambiguous stage in relationships where neither the intimacy level nor commitment level are clearly defined. The top result on Urban Dictionary defines “just talking” as:

When two individuals are interested in each other, make out etc on a regular basis, but are not dating. There may or may not be the prospect of dating in the future. Not to be confused with “friends with benefits.”

Beyond the present study, it appears that only one other peer-reviewed study has investigated “just talking.” Through a quantitative survey of college students, that study found that a majority of participants had heard of the term, but many identified the “just talking” stage as involving a subset of individuals who are friends with benefits  [4], which suggests that there’s a lack of consensus on what it it means to be “just talking.”

In the new study, a group of researchers within the Binghamton University Human Sexualities Research Laboratory utilized a two-phase qualitative approach to the concept. First, they asked college students a series of open-ended questions about the concept of “just talking,” which were then coded by individuals within the lab. Due to a litany of contradictory responses, the research team then conducted a series of focus groups with college students to investigate the concept further. Within these focus groups, individuals could self-select into same-gender or mixed-gender groups, the content their conversations were then transcribed and thematically analyzed by the researchers [3].

The focus groups revealed four major themes within how college students conceptualize “just talking:” that (a) it’s a way for individuals to get to know one another, (b) it’s not a hookup, (c) it’s a way to determine compatibility with another person, and (d) it may be used to develop a relationship without having to “put a label” on it. 

I asked Dr. Melissa Hardesty, the lead of the study, what she found most surprising from the focus groups. First, she told me that “the idea that “just talking” is a label without a label. Young adults are simultaneously saying they want to avoid labels, but they keep coming up with new ones.” In this case, “just talking” appears to be reflective of a broader phenomenon – that emerging adults continually invent new relationship terms (e.g., situationship) as a way to subvert so-called “traditional” relational development processes. 

Another finding that Dr. Hardesty found surprising is how “college students are engaging in courtship, but they don’t recognize it–probably because they think in terms of labels/categories instead of considering the processes that create the labeled categories.” That is, “just talking” serves as a way to develop intimacy with another person, but is done so in a way that is more casual than “dating” someone else. Here, the idea of “just talking” is similar to how soft launches act as incremental disclosure processes of a new romantic relationship in a way that is seen as more casual and lower-stakes.

Lastly, the use of smartphones was integral to “just talking” to someone else. Dr. Hardesty remarked that despite the idea that smartphones alienate us from others, “they also create private spaces in which people can get to know one another.” Even within forms of mediated communication, different modalities can be used to be more or less casual when talking to someone else, something almost all participants agreed with (as one example, most people seem to agree that messaging on Snapchat is more casual than texting on iMessage). 

What “Just Talking” Tells Us About Modern Dating Behaviors

Knapp’s relational stage model classically identifies five stages of relational development: initiation, experimenting, intensifying, integrating, and bonding [5]. “Just talking” is likely to fall into the experimentation phase, where individuals seek to reduce their uncertainty and, generally, interpersonal commitments are kept casual. Hookup culture, however, does not neatly follow this stage model, which makes it difficult to determine just how close individuals are when they are “just talking.” 

Regardless of the level of closeness, however, two things are clear from this study. First, digital technologies play a key role in developing both sexual and romantic relationships for emerging adults. Second, ambiguity is a key part of modern dating: it plays a “strategic role in just talking because it allows young people to balance conflicting needs for intimacy during young adulthood with perceived cultural proscriptions on the desire for commitment” [3, p. 9]. 

Moving forward, the research team from this study is conducting a series of longitudinal interviews of people who are actively just talking. It will be interesting to see how individuals feel when they are actively in the “talking” phase, as well as how relationship terms continue to emerge and are reinvented in the next generation.

Have you ever said you were “just talking” to someone? What did this mean to you? Tell us about it in the comments below!

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References

[1] Garcia, J. R., Reiber, C., Massey, S. G., & Merriwether, A. M. (2012). Sexual hookup culture: A review. Review of General Psychology, 16(2), 161–176. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027911

[2] Hollis, B., Sheehan, B. E., Kelley, M. L., & Stevens, L. (2022). Hookups among U.S. college students: Examining the association between hookup motives and personal affect. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 51(3), 1793–1798. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02157-8 

[3] Hardesty, M., Wilson, S. E., Wasserman, L., Young, S., Massey, S., & Merriwether, A. (2024). What are college students talking about when they say they’re “just talking?” Emerging Adulthood, 21676968241234398. https://doi.org/10.1177/21676968241234398

[4] Powell, D. N., Freedman, G., Jensen, K., & Preston, V. (2021). “Talking” as a romantic interaction: Is there consensus? Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 20(4), 384–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/15332691.2020.1867684[5] Knapp, M. L. (1978). Social intercourse: From greeting to goodbye. Allyn and Bacon.