Have
you got
the ick?
From the way someone eats a salad to how
they tie their shoelaces, ‘getting the ick’ – being
instantly turned off by something seemingly
innocuous – has become a modern dating
phenomenon. So what does this say about us,
asks Charlie Gowans-Eglinton
It was just a pot of salad. It was even from
M&S. But it was one of those layered horrors
with mayonnaise and cheese on top that
I’ve always felt queasy looking at. Suddenly
the dishy but unreliable older man who had
alternated between flaking and telling me he
loved me for three years of my early twenties
was just a man eating a weird salad, and
I couldn’t even look at him.
Have you ever had the ick? One minute
you’re looking at your date wondering
whether their friends would get on with
yours, and the next you feel your gag reflex
engage: complete revulsion, with no way
back to fancying them again. The ick factor is
the line in the sand for most modern dating,
a point of no return that to outside eyes
can seem entirely random. Or it might be
completely justified.
My friends all agree on a few universal
“everyicks”: if your date is rude to waiters or if
they call their mother “mummy”. But it’s just
as likely to be some small and completely
inexplicable thing that has turned you off
them — for good.
When Olivia Attwood spoke about getting
the ick and going off the boy she was coupled
up with on Love Island in 2017, she gave a
name to something that my friends and
I have been talking about since we were
teenagers. When I was 13 I agreed to be
someone’s girlfriend, but broke up with him
three days later because his texts were too
keen: icky. Two decades later a man I’d been
on several dates with grazed his knee playing
tennis, then turned up to dinner that night
wearing shorts (with no plaster) — a dog
under the long communal dining table kept
trying to lick his bloody knee: icky.
On TikTok there’s a subculture called
IckTok with some 150 million views where
women (and a few men) share their ick
moments. It can be a physical thing —
long fingernails, hairy toes — a too-tight pair
of skinny jeans or even a turn of phrase.
A friend got the ick after receiving a text
message from her boyfriend when they were
arranging to meet near Whitechapel, east
London: “Just hopping on a Boris bike back
to Whitechaps.” She stopped taking his calls.
Perhaps our mothers would say we’re
being fussy. But I think there’s a reason that
the ick has spread so quickly through
Generations Y and Z: we’re the app-daters,the ones for whom ghosting and catfishing
are all in a day’s swiping. We fall in lust based
on 2D versions of each other — and those
versions are filtered and flawless but also
incredibly narrow in scope. We’re not
meeting through friends, work or hobbies
that would give us common ground, so I tend
to flesh out that 2D version of a prospective
date with what I imagine them to be like:
how their voice will sound, the jokes they’ll
make. When the 3D person turns out to
be completely different and not at all
compatible with us, we’re already playing
catch-up, trying to convince ourselves that
we like them, really, because we were so
optimistic about them and it’s so boring to
be disappointed again. Maybe the ick is our
subconscious telling us to stop flogging a
dead dinner date. Or to run not just from the
mayo salad but the whole situationship.
On first dates I’ve had the ick from a high-
pitched laugh, a braided brown leather belt
worn with jeans, and a bitter anecdote about David Burton/ Trunk Archive22 • The Sunday Times Style