It is cuffing season again — Nature’s annual reminder that humans, like migratory birds and Delhi influencers, become deeply seasonal creatures. The temperature dips, the lighting gets forgiving, and suddenly everyone wants someone to sit beside them on a couch that otherwise feels aggressively large. Sensible people who have spent most of the year insisting they are “very happy alone” begin sprinting into temporary arrangements with the urgency of contestants on a dating show filmed entirely in December.
For the uninitiated, cuffing season is that winter-adjacent window when single people seek short-term companionship — warmth, routine, shared meals, someone to watch bad television with, without the long-term paperwork. It is meant to be a pit stop. What fascinates me isn’t the ritual itself, but how earnestly we misinterpret it.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the great Indian sub-genre of cuffing season: NRI and foreigner season. A friend in Jaipur once told me, with the calm logic of someone who has cracked the code, “I wait all year for winter. That’s when all the foreigners arrive. It’s perfect. You meet for coffee, go out for drinks, have great sex, enjoy the city, and then they leave.” She paused. “No escalation. No confusion. No awkward run-ins at a Diwali party six months later.”
Another friend in Goa swears by dating only people with return tickets. “The expiry date is the romance,” she said. “Nobody’s asking where this is going because everyone knows where it’s going — departures.” There’s something refreshingly honest about this. Temporary arrangements work best when everyone agrees they are temporary. NRIs and visitors come pre-packaged with boundaries. You cannot accidentally build a future with someone flying back to Copenhagen on Sunday.
Things get messier closer to home. A woman I know met someone, who was visiting Mumbai for two months, and did what many of us do: she built a winter narrative. They cooked together, watched films, spent most evenings indoors. “I thought we were doing something cosy and slow,” she told me later. “Turns out he thought we were just hiding from the cold.” When February arrived, so did his sudden interest in “being free again”. She was heartbroken; he was confused. Neither of them was malicious. They were simply operating with different subtitles.
Another friend described cuffing season going spectacularly right. “We met in December, agreed it was casual, and actually stuck to it,” he said. “No future talk or anxiety crept in. It ended in March with a hug and a ‘take care’ text. It was one of the healthiest things I’ve done.” His secret, he claimed, was low projection. “I didn’t imagine who they could become by summer. I just liked who they were on Wednesdays.”
It is not that serious
Of course, cuffing season also produces its own special delusions. Someone else confessed, “If you dance with a person at two weddings and one Christmas party, your brain decides you’re basically married.” Another laughed, “I once got offended that someone didn’t invite me to their New Year’s party. We had been on three dates.” Winter does funny things to perspective.
Part of the problem is that loneliness has become ambient. Not dramatic loneliness, but the low hum of wanting company. Someone to send memes to. Someone to sit beside you while nothing happens. That desire is not wrong, but it does make us over-invest quickly. A friend put it bluntly: “Loneliness makes us eager, and eagerness makes us intense. Intensity ruins perfectly good casual arrangements.”
Cuffing season collapses time. You see someone more often because it is cold, dark, and socially acceptable to cancel other plans. Familiarity accelerates. Suddenly, a person you met two weeks ago feels central to your emotional weather. That is when expectations creep in. And when those expectations are not met, confusion follows.
What we often forget is that cuffing season was never designed for continuity. It is not a trial relationship or a promise of spring. It ia a seasonal companionship experiment. Some people thrive in it. Some people shouldn’t attempt it at all. One woman I know said, “I realised cuffing season isn’t for me because I want something wholesome. Casual makes me anxious.” That is self-awareness.
Others are built for it. A man told me, “I love winter dating. Nobody’s trying to impress. It’s just dinners, conversations, and sleep.” He shrugged. “By March, we both wanted our lives back.”
Maybe that is the real lesson. Cuffing season goes right when we let it be what it is — warm, temporary and unambitious. It goes wrong when we demand permanence from something designed to be fleeting. A small pocket of warmth in a cold stretch. Sometimes, body heat really is enough.
A fortnightly guide to love in the age of bare minimum
Published – December 19, 2025 06:36 pm IST
