Are you a black cat or a golden retriever?

Sometime last year, women across the globe became obsessed with golden retrievers. Not the dog with the flaxen locks and a loveable permasmile, though — golden retriever is TikTok-speak for a partner who shares the breed’s affectionate, caring and good-natured qualities. A golden retriever boyfriend is the kind of guy who wants to hold your hand all the time and who doesn’t mind if you eat his food when you don’t like what you ordered at a restaurant. He’s entirely, or almost entirely, unafflicted by anxieties — so he’ll gladly pick up the phone to order your favorite takeout or breezily pick up a game of beach volleyball with a group of strangers. Essentially, a golden retriever is the kind of dude who definitely would still love you if you were a worm. He’s just happy to be here. 

And if you’re dating a golden retriever, chances are you might be a black cat. According to TikTok. Again, not a real black cat, just a human who acts like one — moody, mysterious, typically reserved but knows how to fight. The golden retriever and the black cat are said to be a perfect romantic pairing — TikTok’s version of yin and yang, the easygoing extrovert working in harmony with the “don’t talk to me” / “do not perceive me” introvert. It’s a bit like horoscopes, but instead of looking at a New Age-y website, Cosmopolitan listicle, or Instagram carousel to determine your characteristics and your compatibility with someone else’s, you have to trawl through TikTok to determine your camp. But it doesn’t take long to place yourself, or your loved one, as a black cat or a golden retriever. These labels are so simple and straightforward that they almost appeal to our prelinguistic selves. A toddler doesn’t know what a Scorpio moon means — they do know that Buddy the golden retriever doesn’t mind when you pull his tail, but the family black cat does.

Across TikTok, similar tests, simple enough to appeal to our (literal) inner child, abound. One viral trend sees people self-identifying as an introvert or extrovert based on how they look while singing two parts of Tyler The Creator’s 2017 track “SEE YOU AGAIN”. If you vibe better with Kali Uchis’ dreamy “lalala” chorus, you’re an extrovert. If Tyler’s “okokok” suits you better, then you’re an introvert. This dichotomy is also determined by evidence that’s replicable by a toddler — monosyllables rhythmically repeated. Still, it has TikTok by a chokehold, with over 600K videos exploring the lalala/okokok divide using the trend’s sound. Similar to the golden retriever and black cat’s compatibility, lalala’s and okokok’s are said to be a well-suited partnership. The comment section below a popular video of an okokok-bf/lalala-gf combo is full of admirers — one suggests the couple is so cute it makes them want to sleep on the road (read: die), and another wistfully wonders, “where’s the okokok to my lalala?”.

Craving categorisation through contrast in relationships is not new — “opposites attract” is the oldest line in the book when it comes to making sense of what people work together. We all know that blondes and bad boys go so well together, at least in our collective imagination, because they’re so identifiably different. And in ye olde world terms, a golden retriever x black cat relationship is basically the same thing as a blonde x bad boy relationship. Afterall, actual golden retrievers are blonde and bad boys love to wear black. And in the last year, there’s been a renewed interest in The Art of Seduction by Robert Green, an early 2000s book which sold millions of copies through typifying lovers into single word personas.

But these categories, when reinvented and reduced to dog or cat/ok or lala by TikTok, flatten the ways in which we speak about the people we love and what we expect from a good relationship. Come across any TikTok of a man doing a relatively good deed, or just not acting abominably, and there will be comments below calling him a golden retriever. It’s the relationship version of commenting “cabincore” under a fit check that involves a flannel shirt. It takes our brains a step back. When your boyfriend stops to tie your shoe for you, it’s not a sweet gesture or a sign of a caring partner — it’s golden retriever energy to tell TikTok about. We’re learning to speak about our partners, our crushes, our closest friends — and the care they give us — in the kind of lowest-common-denominator, high-impact language that the algorithm can’t get enough of. And if you do try to go a little deeper, past the single-syllable classifications, you might find yourself down the rabbit hole of feminine/masculine energy soothsayers whose classifications are more complicated, but almost always dosed with a bigger agenda (and a guide to purchase in the bio). But all hope is not lost. Across the internet, romance, the kind that’s certainly not reduced to a few words, is being romanticised. Alex Turner’s love letter to Alexa Chung is still doing the repost rounds and Carly Holt-Hann’s dreamy letter to a lover on The 1975’s “About You” is one of biggest hits of the last year. Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun with TikTok’s low-entry love games — so long as we remember that they reflect how even our inner worlds, even how we think about those we hold dearest, are now being rearticulated for short-form performance.

For more content like this, explore the rest of the Digiverse, or connect with us on TikTok or Instagram. If you’re a brand or business and want to inspire your audience in innovative ways, reach out to our strategic & creative lab eve@thedigitalfairy.co.uk