Seagulling: The Dating Trend That Describes Someone You Already Know

There is a particular kind of man — and I say man because, in my clinical experience, the ratio is not flattering to the gender — who appears in your life with the force of something intentional, takes what he wants from the moment, and then vanishes back into the crowd as if the whole thing never happened. You are left standing there wondering whether you imagined the chemistry, the eye contact, the charged twenty minutes at the bar that felt like the beginning of something.

You did not imagine it. He was simply seagulling.

The term is new. The behaviour is ancient. *Seagulling* — and the metaphor, once you hear it, is impossible to unsee — describes the act of swooping in on someone else's situation: a person already in a relationship, a moment that clearly belongs to someone else, a connection that isn't yours to claim. Like a seagull stealing a chip from your hand and disappearing into the sky, this person arrives with enormous energy and zero intention of staying. The disruption is the point. Your confusion is the collateral damage.

I have sat across from women in my clinic who spent months trying to decode this behaviour. They replay the conversation. They audit their own responses. They wonder what they did wrong, what signal they sent, why the connection evaporated so completely. The answer — and this is the thing I tell them, the thing they don't always want to hear — is that there was no connection to lose. What they experienced was a performance. The seagull does not eat with you. He grabs and flies.

What makes seagulling specifically toxic, distinct from ordinary romantic ambiguity, is its function as an ego mechanism rather than a romantic one. The person doing it is not interested in you — they are interested in the confirmation that they *could* have you. The pursuit is the meal. Your availability, your warmth, your brief openness — these are the chips on the wall. Once taken, they are gone. There is no cruelty in it, exactly. But there is a stunning indifference to what they leave behind.

The Gottman Institute has spent decades documenting what actually builds lasting intimacy, and one of the clearest findings — almost boringly clear, because it is so simple — is that bids for connection must be *turned towards*, consistently, over time. Not grabbed at and discarded. Not performed and abandoned. The couples who last are not the ones who had the most electric beginnings. They are the ones who kept showing up on ordinary afternoons when the stakes were low and nobody was performing anything.

Seagulling is the opposite of turning towards. It is the dramatic swoop without the landing.

What I find most interesting — psychologically, not cynically — is what seagulling reveals about the person doing it. In my experience, it is almost always rooted in avoidant attachment dressed up as confidence. The seagull *looks* bold. He initiates. He turns up the heat. But real intimacy requires staying in the room after the heat has settled, and that is precisely what he cannot do. The swoop is safe. The landing is terrifying. So he never lands.

If you recognise this pattern in someone you know — or, more uncomfortably, in yourself — the question worth sitting with is not *why do they do this* but *what does it cost everyone it touches*. The person left standing on the beach didn't do anything wrong. They simply had the misfortune of being a chip in the path of someone who hasn't yet learned the difference between appetite and hunger.

Appetite wants to take. Hunger wants to stay.

The most important thing you can do is learn to tell the difference before you've already handed over the chip — because by then, the seagull is already a dot on the horizon, and you're the one left wondering why the sky feels so empty.