Column: Use the right word

I recently had a conversation with a friend where she aired out her grievances against her boyfriend about a fight they had had the week before. I listened intently as she went into detail about all of the reasons she was mad at him, and have compiled them here.

• He lied to her about being busy when she asked to hangout (claiming to be at the gym, but was at his apartment). 
• After confronting him, he said he was just too tired to hangout and scared to tell her. 
• The next day he texted her several times apologizing for lying to her.

While telling me this story, my friend used the words “gaslighting” and “love bombing” as ways to describe his behavior. She claimed that he had gaslighted her about his location and then attempted to love bomb her after the fact with excessive apologies.

I care about my friend, and while I certainly empathize with her frustration over her loser boyfriend, I couldn’t help but note her usage of these words. Gaslight. Love bomb.

Recently, with the proliferation of TikTok relationship advice, I have seen a massive increase in phrases like these. Phrases that describe oftentimes serious psychological manipulation in relationships being tossed around without any regard for their actual meaning.

To be clear, and in case my aforementioned friend reads this article, what her boyfriend did was still unacceptable, but labeling any action in a relationship that relates to lying as gaslighting is diminishing to the actual meaning of the word.

Words mean something — or at least they should. The social media dictionary, however, has created an entirely separate word bank with completely different meanings for words than originally intended.

While this isn’t inherently harmful, in situations where words like gaslight are thrown around wherever and whenever, it devalues genuine instances of gaslighting, which is oftentimes employed in manipulative relationships to control one's behavior.

The misuse of these words can make it difficult for victims of such a situation to even understand that this is what they are experiencing. It can also make it more difficult for them to be taken seriously when describing the gaslighting they have experienced.

Take for example, the term depression. Depression describes a consistent, serious mood disorder that disrupts daily life, yet this word is tossed around in casual conversation.

I’d never invalidate someone’s depression, but the term has become interchangeable with sadness in general; they aren’t the same thing and implying such is misguided.

A result of equating depression to sadness is the tendency for people to write off depression as just another bad day. If everybody, everywhere is constantly walking around casually saying that they’re depressed because they’ve had a few down days, then there’s no actual significance to depression itself.

It’s not a serious mood disorder, just another emotion you mention when someone asks how you’re doing.

I don’t mean any of this to discourage people from speaking about their mental health, or seeking help from others, but it's important that people understand the full implications of a word before they use it.

In a situation where you are engaged in a genuine fight with a partner, immediately resorting to the conclusion that gaslighting has occurred, as my friend did, can shut down an actual productive discussion. In any relationship there are difficult discussions to be had, and broadly describing instances of lying as a general form of gaslighting completely prevents that.

There’s nothing one can do to stop other people from using a specific word, and if you are confident enough in a situation to label it with a term like love bombing or gaslighting, then feel free to do so.

That being said, we need to be more mindful about the phrases we employ. Taking your entire terminology from social media creates an extreme mindset where people are running around using words they don’t fully understand. Just because you see a word used everyday on the internet, it doesn’t mean you should pick it up yourself.

As I said to my friend, not everything needs to be labeled. Sometimes your boyfriend does something shitty and it's not gaslighting, it's just shitty. 

@dthopinion | opinion@dailytarheel.com