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Hot Then Cold, Yes Then No: Microwave Dating, Explained

BYYassine Hariss

June 16, 2025

I spent most of the first 18 years of my life coming up with half-baked theories to explain whatever problem me or my friends were tangled up in at the time. It was how I made sense of teenagehood, life, and all its lessons, without feeling too lost in it all in that weird no-man’s-land between kid and adult. As creative as a few pubescent boys could be, some of the odd concepts we came up with stuck, etching themselves into our daily lingo where they’re still loosely applied, sometimes only ironically, to describe a specific feeling we couldn’t name back then but all instinctively understood from where we stood. Packed with the inside jokes of an entire generation, to this day, I still find myself using these theories—mostly for a laugh— because they still explain things better than anything else can. And “microwave dater” is one of them.

The term describes the moment when a love interest— or should we say, what you thought was one— suddenly pulls away and gaslights you for even daring to think that there was something between you two. It gave a name to a feeling we couldn’t quite articulate back when we just started growing hair on our upper lips. In adult terms, it describes when someone backs off and makes you feel stupid for catching feelings they clearly encouraged. But back then, microwave dater just made more sense. Crude? Maybe. But for a bunch of half-grown boys trying to figure out love and rejection, it got the job done. Why? Mostly because of the imagery behind it.

Picture this: It’s the mid-2010s, and I had never cooked a proper meal in my life— unless you count pot noodles or the pasta that only came out al dente because I’d always forget about it on the stove. The microwave was the ultimate make-it-happen appliance before I moved out; the one machine that had all the bases covered without asking for much in return or putting me at too much risk of burning my parent’s kitchen down. As someone who still shouldn’t be let near an open-fire, it was, and still is to an extent, my best friend when it comes to putting food in my stomach.

Relatively straightforward and easy to use, the microwave quickly became our metaphor of choice for the confusing, emotionally ambiguous flings of adolescence. Have you ever popped a plate inside one, patiently waited for the timer to go off, only to find the outside of your meal to be scalding hot while the inside remains ice-cold? That’s how we saw the ones who flirted like they meant it, reeled you in like it mattered, then ghosted like it never happened. They flirted, you leaned in, they stirred the pot, you came out with a spoonful of hope. Excuse the bad play of words, but they were exactly what Katy Perry sang about— hot then cold, yes then no, in then out.

via GIPHY

And suddenly, you’re made to feel like you imagined the whole thing. You start overthinking every interaction, decoding the mixed signals, re-reading every reply, and dissecting each message for hidden double meanings. When you bring it up to your friends, their half-hearted “yeah, maybe” responses only add to the fog you’re trying to see through. You start to doubt yourself, to wonder if you did indeed make it all up. But the attention felt so real. But so did the weird looks they gave you when you finally shot your shot. And unlike leftovers, some things aren’t meant to be warmed up again— unless you enjoy overcooked expectations and underwhelming results. If the situation sounds familiar, sorry to break it to you, but to me and my mates you had to deal with a microwave dater.

Messy, confusing, and twisted in so many ways, what we now call being “led on,” back then, was just another teenage heartache we tried to understand with whatever scraps of wisdom we had. The phrase microwave dater gave us a language for what we couldn’t yet explain, and while we didn’t always get closure, we at least got a name and story to laugh about. And in the thick of growing pains, maybe that was exactly what we needed.

Hot Then Cold, Yes Then No: Microwave Dating, Explained

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Hot Then Cold, Yes Then No: Microwave Dating, Explained

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