DTR (define the relationship)

DTR stands for 'define the relationship': the conversation in which two people dating say what they are, usually whether they are exclusive and whether to call it a relationship. As a verb: 'we need to DTR.' Exclusive and 'in a relationship' are separate questions, and one talk can settle one without the other.

Updated October 5, 2026

Means

Define the relationship: the talk about what you are

First seen

US college slang by 1996 (Eble, via Green's Dictionary of Slang); Urban Dictionary March 9, 2003; Dictionary.com acronyms page April 13, 2018

Related terms

Situationship, Talking stage, Casual dating, Hard launch, Soft launch

The letters mean other things outside dating: a deep tendon reflex in medicine, and a double treble stitch in crochet patterns (AMBOSS; Craft Yarn Council). This page is about the talk. We read the slang record back to 1996, seven papers and a dissertation on relationship talk and commitment, the advice pages that rank for the term, and three threads on Mumsnet, a British parenting forum. We found no study of when couples have the talk, so every timeline below is opinion, and the ones that are ours say so. The scripts and both tables are ours. Skip to the three answers you can get.

What DTR means, and where it came from

As a noun, a DTR is the talk itself: “we had the DTR.” As a verb, it is having it: “we need to DTR.” Either way it names a conversation, not a status. Two people can date for months without one.

Most DTR talks settle one or both of two questions, and they are different questions. Exclusive means neither of you is seeing anyone else. “In a relationship” is the word for it, to each other and to everyone else. Some couples agree to the first and leave the second for later. If you leave the talk unsure which one you settled, ask before you part.

The term is older than dating apps. Green’s Dictionary of Slang records it as US campus slang, with an earliest citation from 1996, in Connie Eble’s Slang and Sociability, page 36 (Green’s Dictionary of Slang). In May 2000, Lynne Murphy reported it from Baylor University on the American Dialect Society’s mailing list as “a stage in the dating process,” the point “after you’ve had a few dates and want to know whether anything’s going to come of it” (Murphy, 2000). The earliest Urban Dictionary entry we could see is from March 9, 2003 (Urban Dictionary, 2003). In February 2005, a Sacramento State student paper ran a column headlined “DTR talks can be uncomfortable, not knowing is worse.” The page shows no date, so the month comes from its URL (State Hornet, 2005).

In April 2007, BYU’s student paper reported that the acronym was coined among Latter-day Saints. It quoted a BYU psychologist who called the term a “Mormon phenomenon” and said it probably did not exist at other US schools (Daily Universe, 2007). The sources above are two to eleven years older than the article.

The term kept traveling. In February 2011, Biola University’s student development office ran a campus “DTR Week,” and the student paper’s editorial headline said it addressed tough issues “often tritely” (Chimes, 2011). On Mumsnet, a thread started March 27, 2013, with about 11 replies, was about learning the term late. “Apparently this is how teens talk now,” one post explained, and one reply took it for going steady (Mumsnet, March 2013). Dictionary.com covers DTR on an acronyms page dated April 13, 2018, which the site labels an informal summary rather than a formal definition (Dictionary.com, 2018).

When to have the DTR talk

When one of you would mind the answer. That is as precise as we can honestly be, and the advice pages that give a number did not show us more.

The most specific advice we read is on mindbodygreen. It quotes an expert advising at least two to three months “if you struggle to work outside of time frames,” and supports the span with the line that “it takes 66 days on average to develop and form habits” (mindbodygreen, 2021). The study it links followed 96 volunteers for 12 weeks, and the time it took a new behavior to become automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days (Lally et al., 2010). None of the behaviors was a person.

Our rule of thumb: the talk is due when one of these is true.

• You would mind if they saw someone else, and you have not said so.
• You are deciding whether to delete the apps, and you would like to know whether they are deleting theirs.
• Plans now run past next week: a wedding, a trip, a birthday dinner.
• One of you has started reading small things, such as reply times or who gets invited where, for an answer neither of you has asked for.

Our view: too soon is before you have met in person twice. Until then, you would be defining something with a person you mostly know from messages. The outer limits on this site are two rules of thumb of ours, not findings: about a month after two meetings on talking stage, and about three months of an open question on situationship. This page adds no further timeline.

Two Mumsnet threads show how it goes in practice. In one, started April 8, 2019, with about 15 replies, a poster wrote: “We had the ‘exclusive’ chat around the 6 week mark. Neither of us were seeing anyone else but I guess that’s where it began to feel like we were an official couple” (Mumsnet, April 2019). In another, started July 28, 2021, with about 12 replies, a reply put the default plainly: “Until you’ve discussed and agreed upon exclusivity, you’re just dating and both parties can date others too” (Mumsnet, July 2021). That default is the reason the talk exists. Until someone says otherwise, nothing has been agreed.

Our view: whoever wants to know brings it up, and in person or on a call is easier than a text, because the reply comes with a face or a voice. A text you send still beats a talk you keep postponing. If you cannot tell whether you are there yet, our situationship check turns the signs into a score. How many dates people report before that talk, and where the figures come from, is on how many dates before a relationship. What counts as a breach once you have agreed is on micro-cheating.

What to say: scripts by what you want

Say where you stand, as a statement, and then stop talking. A question asks the other person to define the relationship alone, on the spot. A statement gives them your position and room to answer with theirs.

The alternative is what Baxter and Wilmot called a secret test. In a 1984 study of 181 participants, they sorted the ways people tried to find out where a relationship stood without asking into 14 categories of “secret tests.” The tests were reported more often during transitions between relationship types (Baxter & Wilmot, 1984), which is around the point where a DTR comes up. A test can only show you what someone did. A sentence tells them what you want, and gives them a reason to tell you what they want.

Two rows need a word. “Casual, but said out loud” is a full answer, not a failed DTR. The rest of that is on casual dating, and if what you both want is physical and no more, that has its own name: friends with benefits. The last row is for the person on the receiving end, and there is more on that under the answers below.

What to do with the answer

Most replies are one of three answers. The table is ours.

If the answer is yes, finish the job and say what it covers. That means the apps, other people, and whether you use the word. One talk can settle exclusivity and leave the label hanging, and later one of you finds out which. Going public is a separate decision, covered on soft launch and hard launch.

“I don’t know,” “not yet” and “I don’t do labels” are honest early on. Repeated months later, they have stopped being an early-days answer. Step 3 on situationship covers that, so this page does not repeat it. Unequal commitment is common: in a national sample of 315 unmarried couples, about a third had one partner substantially less committed than the other (Stanley et al., 2017). That is background for a “not yet,” not a reading of any one reply. Decide your own limit, say it once, and do not ask again every week.

“No” and “I want to keep it as it is” usually mean the other person has decided. Our view: you can accept it as it is or end it, but negotiating a no into a yes tends to produce a yes neither of you believes. Ending it has its own page, how to end a situationship, and the weeks after are on how to get over a situationship.

If the reply is silence, or a change of subject that lasts weeks, treat it as one of the answers above, usually the second. If they stop replying altogether, that has a name too: ghosting.

If you are the one being asked and want less, say so in the same conversation, in one sentence. The last row of the scripts table is one version, and more ways to word it are on how to reject someone nicely.

What the research says

The most direct finding is also the oldest. Baxter and Wilmot ran 90 ethnographic interviews about topics that were off limits in an opposite-sex relationship the informant was in. The state of the relationship was the most pervasive taboo topic, and informants “held a negative vision of relationship talk as destructive, inefficient, futile and risky” (Baxter & Wilmot, 1985). The topic a DTR exists to discuss was the one informants most often named as off limits.

Baxter and Bullis interviewed the partners of 40 couples separately, 80 people in all, about the turning points in their relationships. About half of the 759 turning points involved explicit talk about the relationship, and the share varied by type of turning point. Neither explicit talk nor agreement between partners was related to how satisfied people were (Baxter & Bullis, 1986). Our reading: in that sample, how much explicit talk a turning point involved was not tied to satisfaction. The study did not test skipping a DTR, so this is no case for or against one.

The research name for what a DTR tries to settle is relational uncertainty. Knobloch and Solomon split it into three sources: the self, the partner and the relationship. Roughly: do I want this, do they, and what is it (Knobloch & Solomon, 1999). In a study of 216 participants, relational uncertainty went with avoiding topics and helped explain the link between intimacy and avoidance. That link was curvilinear, so avoidance did not simply rise or fall as people got closer (Knobloch & Carpenter-Theune, 2004). Solomon and Knobloch propose that “the transition from casual dating to serious involvement coincides with relational turbulence in courtship” (Solomon & Knobloch, 2004). That is a model with a cross-sectional test and small effects, not a timetable. The transition it describes is the one a DTR would fall in.

The only study we found with DTR in its title is a 2022 dissertation from the University of Texas at Austin, built on 40 semi-structured interviews. Its abstract calls the DTR “a commonly understood scenario that has yet to be fully explicated by communication scholars” and describes the state of the relationship as “both the topic and the outcome” (Varga, 2022). We read the abstract only.

These studies have clear limits. Most of the work dates from 1984 to 2004, and several of the samples were small: 90 interviews, 181 participants, 40 couples. At least two of the studies looked only at opposite-sex relationships. Most are cross-sectional, so they show what goes together, not what causes what; Stanley’s national sample is the longitudinal exception. None of them involved dating apps. What they point to is narrow: relationship talk gets avoided, people look for ways around it, and the move from casual to serious is the stretch this research calls turbulent. None of them tested when to have a DTR.