# What the first study on the ick actually found He ran for the bus. That was the whole thing. Two good dates, a conversation you replayed on the drive home, and then he sprinted twenty feet in a puffer coat with his bag slapping against his hip, and something in you closed like a door. You could not explain it to your friends without hearing how it sounded. You went anyway. It did not matter. It was over. Almost everyone who has dated in the last decade knows that feeling, and now it has a name. The ick is a sudden, total loss of attraction triggered by something small and usually silly. The word has been floating through television since an episode of Ally McBeal in 1998, resurfaced in Sex and the City in 2003, and then found its permanent home in 2017 when a Love Island contestant described it as something that catches you and takes over your body, impossible to shake off. TikTok did the rest. By 2020 there were tens of thousands of videos of people cataloguing their icks like exhibits. What there was not, until recently, was any research. That changed in 2025, and the findings are more uncomfortable and more useful than the trend deserves. ## What the researchers actually found Psychologists Brian Collisson, Eliana Saunders and Chloe Yin published a study on the ick in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. They started where the phenomenon actually lives, analyzing viral TikToks tagged with the term to sort the triggers into categories, then surveyed 125 single adults between 24 and 72 about their own experiences, their thresholds, and their personalities. Start with how common it is. Roughly two-thirds of the sample had experienced the ick. Women were more familiar with the term than men and reported it more often, though men reported it too, with different triggers: vanity and self-conscious trendiness turned up more often on their lists. Most people had felt it a handful of times across their dating history rather than constantly. It is not a fringe reaction and it is not universal either, which is the first clue that it is telling us something about the people who get it. Then the outcomes, which are not small. About a quarter of the people who felt it ended things immediately. A larger share ended things later. Only about a third carried on with the person despite the feeling. Whatever the ick is, it is deciding a meaningful number of romantic futures on the evidence of a bus. The interesting part is what predicted it. Three traits stood out. The first is disgust sensitivity, meaning how strongly a person reacts to things they find repellent in general, which makes a certain sense: the ick is disgust, wearing a dating outfit. The second is narcissism, associated with whether someone got the ick at all. The third, and the one that predicted both whether and how often, is other-oriented perfectionism, which is the technical term for holding other people to standards you would not apply to yourself. Here is where we have to be careful, because this is the point at which the coverage of this study ran ahead of the study. The paper reports associations, not causes, and it explicitly declines to say whether these reactions are adaptive or overly rigid. Recoiling at a small signal might be good pattern recognition doing its job. It might be an unreasonable standard. The data cannot separate those two, and anyone telling you it settled the question has not read it. :::pullquote The ick is disgust, wearing a dating outfit. And the trait that predicted it best was holding other people to standards you would not apply to yourself. ::: Two more limits worth stating plainly. This is 125 people recruited online, which is a first serious look at something millions of people are doing rather than a verdict on it. And an association between a trait and a reaction does not tell you the trait caused the reaction. What the study does give you is a direction worth sitting with. If the trait that best predicts the ick is expecting more of other people than you expect of yourself, then the ick is probably not pure information about the person who triggered it. Some of it is information about the person receiving it. That reading is ours, not the paper's. ## The part that stings, and why it is not a character flaw The uncomfortable implication is that the ick describes the person having it at least as much as the person receiving it. That is a hard sentence to read if you have ever ended something over a laugh or a text message or the way someone held a fork. So here is the more generous and, we think, more accurate frame. Disgust is one of the oldest systems you have. It is fast, involuntary, and built to keep you away from things that could hurt you, which is precisely why it does not ask permission before firing. It works beautifully on spoiled food. It was never designed to assess whether a specific human being would make a good life for you, and it has no way of knowing that the thing it just flagged was a man running for a bus he needed to catch. You are not shallow for feeling it. The feeling is real and it is yours. The question is only whether it deserves the authority you have been handing it. ## What dating apps might have to do with it There is a second body of research that sits next to this one, and connecting them is the most interesting thing you can do with either. It is also where we are going to be openly speculative, so treat this section as a hypothesis rather than a result. Psychologists Tila Pronk and Jaap Denissen ran people through long sequences of real dating profiles and watched their yes rate collapse as the sequence went on, dropping by roughly 27 percent from the start of a session to the end. They named it the rejection mindset: the longer you browse, the more your default answer becomes no, regardless of who is in front of you. We went through that research and the choice-overload studies behind it in [why a feed of strangers makes you feel like inventory](/blog/why-a-feed-of-strangers-makes-you-feel-like-inventory). Be precise about what that study did. It measured acceptance rates across a browsing sequence. It did not measure icks, it did not ask anyone about disgust, and it did not test whether app use changes a person's standards over months or years. Nobody has run that study. The two research programs have never been connected by anyone who actually collected data. So here is our inference, labeled as one. The trait that best predicted the ick was expecting more of other people than you would deliver yourself. The dominant dating format rewards exactly that posture, by showing you an endless supply of alternatives and paying you in dopamine for dismissing them quickly. We have written before about the exhaustion an infinite feed produces, in [swipe fatigue](/blog/swipe-fatigue-the-case-for-slower-dating). If a format can drive your yes rate down by a quarter inside a single sitting, it seems unlikely to leave your standards untouched over a year of sittings. That is a plausible mechanism, not a demonstrated one. If it is right, then the ick sometimes arrives as information about him and is really information about the last two hours you spent scrolling. Worth noticing either way, because noticing costs nothing. ## How to tell a manufactured ick from a real dealbreaker Some icks are worth trusting. Not everything in the study's trigger categories was a mannerism, and some of what people described was behavior that would disqualify a person on the merits rather than on a mannerism. That is not an ick. That is data. The problem is that both arrive in the body the same way, as a fast no, so the feeling itself cannot tell you which one you got. Four questions separate them reasonably well. **Is it a pattern or a moment?** A dealbreaker shows up more than once and gets worse when you look at it. A manufactured ick is a single frame you cannot unsee. **Is it about how they treated someone, or how they looked doing something?** How a person speaks to a server, handles being told no, or talks about an ex tells you what living with them would be like. Their gait does not. **Would it still bother you if you liked them more?** This one is uncomfortable and it works. Icks often trail behind a decision you have already made for other reasons and are looking to justify. **Are you two dates in, or two hours into a scrolling session?** Notice when the feeling shows up, not only what it is about. There is one more reason to take the habit seriously, separate from any single person. John Gottman's research on couples identifies contempt, the family of feeling that includes eye-rolling, mockery, and finding the person beside you slightly ridiculous, as the single strongest predictor he found for divorce. To be careful about what that does and does not mean: his work studied established couples, not third dates, so it is not evidence that an early ick predicts anything about a relationship you have not started. What it does suggest is that a well-practiced habit of quietly ridiculing the person across the table is worth examining as a habit, whoever is sitting there. We wrote about the daily habits on the other side of that ledger in [bids for connection](/blog/bids-for-connection). ## Fewer people, considered more slowly The practical fix is not to try harder to be a better person while using a product designed to raise your threshold every day. It is to change the conditions. That is the bet Bloom makes. The free plan comes with a set number of likes a day, because a bounded day of dating is the condition under which people evaluate each other well. Every preference filter is free, so the people you see already fit what you are looking for and your real dealbreakers are handled up front, before anyone's mannerisms are involved. Seeing who liked you is free too, because a feed should never be bait for a paywall. That last one is the industry's favorite conversion lever and we refuse to use it, for reasons we set out in full on our [pricing page](/pricing). Profiles are built to be read rather than glanced past, which is the only format in which someone can register as a person rather than a frame. And when it works, the app keeps going. Bloom is the dating app that grows with you, from first match into the relationship itself, which is where the research says the real work lives. We laid that evidence out in [what makes a relationship last](/blog/what-makes-a-relationship-last). ## He was running for a bus The ick will keep happening, because disgust does not take instruction. What you can change is how much authority it gets, and how many hours of scrolling you do before you hand it the decision. Most of the time, the man in the puffer coat was not revealing his true self. He was running for a bus, in a body, in public, which is the condition all of us are in. None of this research tells you to ignore your instincts. It gives you a reason to ask, about any particular one, where it came from. Bloom is pre-launch, starting in Utah along the Wasatch Front. The only thing to do today is [join the waitlist](/#waitlist) and grow with us.