Follow-up question: Do you really want to get back together with your ex or have you just listened to Evermore a few too many times?
As Taylor Swift once said, “’Tis the damn season”—by which I mean cuffing season, to be specific. And speaking of “’Tis the Damn Season,” ’tis also the damn season to go home for the holidays and rekindle a potentially risky flame with an ex.
As it turns out, this relatable if not necessarily advisable experience that Taylor immortalized on Evermore actually has a name: “winter coating.”
Like “sledging” (cuffing someone with the intention of breaking up by spring), winter coating is considered a variant of cuffing—one that isn’t necessarily reflective of cuffing season best practices and may or may not be downright toxic. But as we’ve previously discussed, few things are really ever as simple as good or bad, toxic or non-toxic when it comes to anything involving love and dating.
The way I see it, reaching out an ex may not be the wisest move you can make for your love life this holiday season, but that doesn’t necessarily make winter coating inherently toxic. As with sledging, context and intent need to be considered when assessing the potential toxicity of any given winter coating situation.
Per my preliminary analysis, it seems the potential concerns re: winter coating are twofold. First, there’s the usual risks that always come with getting back together with an ex: namely, the question of whether you really want to be with them or just don’t want to be alone, whether it’s love or just nostalgia, whether they’re really “the one” or you’re just settling for something that feels comfortable.
And then, of course, there’s the not terribly unlikely possibility that when you rekindle that flame, it will blow up in your face and ultimately end up re-opening old wounds, undoing whatever post-breakup recovery progress you’d previously made, and leaving you both in worse shape than you found each other.
