By December, everyone on the dating apps looks warmer. Softer. More emotionally available. String lights appear in living rooms. People suggest soup and hot chocolate, walks and bonfires with smores, intimacy that feels casual but isn’t, not really, not in a season built entirely around togetherness.

Holiday dating has a glow to it, the way everything looks better under low light. It’s easy to mistake that glow for connection. It’s easy to confuse shared loneliness with compatibility. It’s easy to call it chemistry when what you’re really responding to is the relief of not being alone in a time of year that feels isolating.

While I have written a queer guide to cuffing season, I’ve also learned the hard way that holiday dating isn’t inherently more romantic, no matter what the movies make you think. It’s just more emotionally charged. It’s the romanticization and ignoring of red flags that often comes with New Relationship Energy, dialed up even more thanks to the seasonal pressures to hook up, date, fall in love..

December compresses time. Conversations get deeper faster. People disclose more, earlier. Stories about estrangement, breakups, grief, and family dysfunction arrive before you’ve even decided if you like the way someone laughs. There’s an unspoken pressure to be open, to be vulnerable, to “lean in,” as if holding parts of yourself back during the holidays is a kind of failure. Most people seek someone to take home for the holidays, as a type of soft armor to filter potential uncomfortable and hard conversations with family during the holidays.

What I wish I’d known sooner is that vulnerability isn’t the same thing as safety. Sharing a lot isn’t proof of intimacy; it’s just information. And closeness, when rushed, often tells you more about the season than the person in front of you. Both have harmed me in the past, while also teaching me lessons I carry with me.

For survivors, this season hits differently. Many of us learned early how to bond through intensity. We know how to connect quickly, how to listen deeply, how to meet someone exactly where they are. December rewards these skills. It frames them as romance. It calls them chemistry. But sometimes, it’s just familiarity with emotional urgency wearing a festive outfit; other times it might even be love bombing.

One thing I pay attention to now is how someone responds when I slow things down. If gentleness disappears when urgency does, that tells me something. If interest fades the moment I name a boundary, I don’t take it as rejection; I take it as protection.

Holiday dating doesn’t just encourage closeness; it assumes it. There’s the quiet expectation of a plus-one. The casual questions about plans. The invitations that arrive early and often: You could come with me. You could stay over. You could meet my people. I’ve learned it’s okay to enjoy someone without folding them into my life just because December is short and cuffing season is even shorter.

Cuffing season pretends all of this is lighthearted. A meme. A joke. But underneath is a real pressure to pair off, to soften loneliness by attaching quickly, to buy into love stories that tell us being alone is a “problem” you can solve before the year ends.

What’s helped me is asking a few simple questions, not as rules, but as check-ins. Am I curious about this person, or just relieved they’re here? Do I feel calmer after seeing them, or more activated? Would I still want this connection if the holidays weren’t happening?

I’m not anti-dating in December and cold winter months. I’m just more intentional. I don’t confuse availability with alignment anymore. I don’t assume intensity means depth or even layers. I let things move at a pace that leaves room for discernment, even when the season pushes otherwise. And I trust my gut and how I feel more than anything.

If there’s concrete advice here, it’s this: You don’t owe the holidays your emotional acceleration…at all. You’re allowed to want connection without rushing it. There is nothing but time when it comes to ensuring you make the right decisions. You’re allowed to enjoy flirting without promising a future, or even flirting and then deciding to be alone. You’re allowed to let some connections be warm without making them permanent, without adding any extra pressures of labels or titles.

Some things feel real because they’re softly lit. Others feel real because they last when the lights come down. I’m learning to tell the difference and to trust that what survives January was never just seasonal.