“Shrekking,” Explained (and Why You Should Probably Avoid It)

A friend of mine once explained her boyfriend to me over brunch the way you’d explain a sensible car purchase. He wasn’t her usual thing, she said. But that was sort of the point. He’d know what he had. He wouldn’t get complacent. She said this with the calm of someone reading out a weather forecast, and then she ate a piece of toast.

It turns out this has a name now.

What Shrekking is

Shrekking is dating someone you consider to be below your standards, usually meaning below your looks on the theory that because you’re out of their league, you’ll hold the upper hand. They’ll be grateful. They’ll try harder. And most importantly, they won’t hurt you, because what are they going to do, leave?

The companion term is “getting Shrekked,” which is what happens when the supposedly inferior person fails to perform the gratitude you budgeted for. Sometimes that means they treat you badly. Sometimes it means they dump you, which, in the internal logic of the trend, registers as a kind of cosmic filing error.

Both terms are named, obviously, after the DreamWorks ogre. We’ll come back to how badly that name misreads its own source material.

Where it came from, and whether it’s real

The term was popularized in August 2025 by a TikToker, @jaxitodwyer, who posted a video claiming that every attractive woman he knew had been traumatized by a man who looked like either Shrek or Lord Farquaad. It caught on. USA Today wrote it up on August 21st. By early September there was full discourse; psychologists weighing in, magazines running the word “toxic” in the headline, podcast hosts accusing each other of being Shrekked.

There is also a persistent accusation, logged on Know Your Meme, that the whole thing is a forced meme: a term pushed into existence by its own creator rather than one that bubbled up from how people actually talk. The comparison is “cheugy,” which had a similar arc in 2021 and which nobody has said out loud since.

The skeptics have a case. One writer went looking for evidence of a genuine cultural phenomenon and found a handful of TikToks, a few write-ups, and a segment of older news anchors delightedly explaining Gen Z slang to each other. Her friends had never heard anyone use the word in conversation. Which produces a nicely ironic situation: a trend about people being unrealistic about attraction may itself be largely imaginary.

But that’s not a reason to drop the subject. Even a manufactured trend has to be manufactured out of something. The reason “Shrekking” travelled at all is that a lot of people recognized the strategy immediately, even if they’d never had a word for it. The word is new. The behavior is old, and it has a much less fun name, which is “settling.”

Why it’s tempting

Here’s the part where I stop being smug about it.

Dating right now is a machine for generating rejection at scale. You can be perfectly lovely and still spend eighteen months getting ghosted by people whose faces you can’t remember. Under those conditions, wanting some control is not a character flaw. It’s the most understandable impulse in the world.

And Shrekking offers control, or the convincing shape of it. Psychologists who’ve looked at the trend describe it as a defense against vulnerability, a way to sidestep the terror of dating someone you consider an equal, where you might actually be the one left. A matchmaker interviewed by Newsweek put it more bluntly: this isn’t a rebellion against trophy dating so much as self-preservation. People who talk constantly about not caring what others think turn out to be quite frightened of being seen.

So the appeal isn’t cruelty. It’s insurance. You pick someone you believe can’t afford to lose you, and you get to skip the part where your heart is exposed.

Why it doesn’t work

The insurance doesn’t pay out.

The strategy has a load-bearing assumption in it, which is that how someone looks tells you how they’ll behave. It doesn’t. There is no mechanism by which a mediocre jawline produces loyalty. Being overlooked can just as easily produce resentment, or a rich fantasy life about what might have been, or a man who becomes considerably less charming the second he stops feeling lucky.

But the more interesting problem is what Shrekking does to the shrekker. There’s a well-known study by Conroy-Beam, Goetz and Buss looking at what actually predicts relationship satisfaction. Their finding was specific: satisfaction dropped for people whose partner seemed less desirable than their available alternatives, but only among people who rated themselves as higher value than that partner. Not the partner. Them.

Translated out of the jargon: the person who believes they’ve dated down is the one who ends up miserable. You have built a relationship whose entire premise is that you could do better, and then you have to live inside that premise every day, over dinner, at his cousin’s wedding, for years. It doesn’t stay a private thought. It leaks. It comes out as impatience, then as boredom, then as the particular contempt you can only feel for someone you’ve decided is lucky to have you.

The strategy doesn’t protect you from an unhappy relationship. It specifies one in advance.

Leagues are mostly a stranger’s opinion

There’s one more thing wrong with the plan, and it’s structural.

Shrekking assumes leagues exist, that there’s a shared, agreed-upon ranking everyone can read off a face. In the first ten minutes, that’s sort of true. Strangers do converge on who’s conventionally attractive, which is why dating apps feel like a marketplace. They’re built to keep you in the ten-minute phase forever.

But that consensus is fragile. Hunt, Eastwick and Finkel ran a study on couples and found that the longer two people had known each other before they started dating, the more mismatched in attractiveness they tended to be. Couples who’d met and paired off quickly looked like each other’s equals. Couples who’d been friends first, or colleagues, or in the same orbit for years, routinely didn’t.

The obvious reading is that leagues are a feature of first impressions, not of people. The ranking dissolves as soon as anyone actually knows you. Which makes Shrekking a strategy that takes the least reliable information available; what a stranger would guess about your relative worth, and builds a life on it.

Fiona did not do this

Which brings us to the name, and to the strangest thing about the whole trend, which is that it argues the precise opposite of the film it’s named for.

Fiona did not choose Shrek because she’d calculated he’d be grateful. She wasn’t hedging.

Her alternative was Lord Farquaad, a man who was neither kind nor, for that matter, tall. She chose Shrek because he was honest with her and she was honest with him, and because he was the only person in the story who wanted her as she actually was rather than as a prize.

A trend named after that movie should have produced the advice to stop grading people. Instead it produced a scoring system with a sad little arbitrage strategy attached.

So no, don’t Shrek anyone. Not because it’s mean, though it is. Because it’s a plan to be unhappy on purpose, and because the ranking you’re playing against was never real to begin with. The move isn’t to date down. It’s to put the scorecard away and find out what you think of someone once you actually know them.