Cookie jarring

Cookie jarring is keeping someone in reserve: texting them, seeing them now and then, letting them think something is building, while you chase the person you actually want. The person in the jar does not know they are in it. That is the difference from dating around, where everyone knows there are others.

Updated October 5, 2026

Means

Being kept in reserve while someone pursues their first choice

First seen

In the press from June 2019 (NBC News, Metro); no dictionary entry

Related terms

Situationship, Breadcrumbing, Orbiting, Roster dating, Cuffing season

The image is a jar on the kitchen shelf, there for when nothing better is on offer. Nobody asks the cookie how it feels about that.

Signs you are in someone’s cookie jar

Most of the signs are about time: whose schedule the plans follow, and which nights you get.

• Plans run on their schedule. You get a time when it suits them, and it moves when “something came up.”
• You are never the weekend plan. Tuesday drinks, fine. Saturday is always taken, and you never hear by what.
• Their phone is busy in ways they do not explain. It stays face down, and the messages they step away to answer come with no names.
• They are warm in person and vague in writing. The evening goes well. The text afterward says “that was fun” and nothing about next time.
• Months in, nothing has moved. Nobody has said what this is, and somehow it never comes up.

Any one of these has an innocent explanation. Together, over months, they describe a ranking you were not told about. If you both know it is undefined, that is closer to a situationship. The jar is when only one of you knows someone is ranked above you.

Cookie jarring vs benching, cushioning and roster dating

All of these involve a backup. What differs is who knows, and how much contact the backup gets.

Benching is keeping a prospect in reserve with minimal contact, as Dictionary.com defines it (Dictionary.com, 2021). A benched person gets the odd message. Someone in the cookie jar gets actual dates.

Cushioning is keeping backups warm while you are already in a relationship, as padding in case it ends. Cookie jarring usually happens before anything is official.

Roster dating is seeing several people openly, and anyone involved can find out there is a roster. The person in a cookie jar believes it is going somewhere, and nobody has told them otherwise.

The wider family, in short:

Cushioning has a near relative with its own page: monkey branching, where one backup becomes the exit before the current relationship ends. Small secret contact kept inside a relationship, short of either, is on micro-cheating.

Why people keep a backup

We found no study of the motives, so read these as common explanations rather than findings.

• Fear of being single. A backup means never starting from zero.
• A shaky first choice. The person they want has not said yes, so they hedge.
• App habits. Keeping several chats warm is normal on the apps, and the habit follows people offline.
• Not deciding. Two half-options feel safer than one decision.

Marisa T. Cohen, writing in Psychology Today, tied it to the paradox of choice (Psychology Today, 2019): the more options you hold, the harder it is to commit to one. That is a reasonable idea, not a test anyone has run on cookie jarring.

What to do about it

1. Ask one direct question. “Are you seeing someone else you’d rather be with?” It is blunt. It is also quicker than months of decoding their phone habits.
2. Give it a date, not a feeling. Whatever they say, watch the plans for a few weeks. If you are still the Tuesday and never the Saturday, you have your answer, even if nobody said it out loud.
3. Leave without a closing argument. “I don’t think this is what I’m looking for, take care” covers it. A long explanation invites negotiation, and negotiation puts you back on the shelf.
4. If you are the one with the jar, say so. One line will do: “I’m seeing someone else too, and I don’t know where this goes.” It costs less than being found out.

What the research says

We found no study of cookie jarring, and no prevalence figures, so this page has no numbers.

What exists is press coverage. NBC News explained the term on June 18, 2019 (NBC News, 2019), quoting psychologist Catalina Lawsin and family therapist Theresa Herring, and named no coiner. Bustle, in a piece updated in 2024 (Bustle, 2024), says the term came to life in 2019 according to Metro, and quotes dating coach Hayley Quinn for the definition. We have the Metro link only secondhand. Cohen’s Psychology Today piece, published August 1, 2019 (Psychology Today, 2019), separated it from yo-yo dating, where the connection is cut and then restored. In a cookie jar it is never cut. It just never grows.

No dictionary lists the term. The definition comes from journalists and the therapists they called, not from data. Plenty of people will recognize the setup, but we found no study that counts them.