If your partner makes you feel safe, seen, and secure, your relationship is probably solid — any dating expert or therapist will tell you that. And while that may feel obvious, people online are saying there’s one more very important thing your partner needs to do to solidify the success of your relationship: Peel your orange.
Across the internet (mainly on TikTok), people are asking their partners to peel an orange for them: If they say yes, they pass with flying colors, but if they say no, beware — of the comment section and the alleged downfall of your relationship. And this orange peel theory isn’t something that was pulled out of thin air — it’s the TikTok-ification of another term called a bid for connection. According to The Gottman Institute, a bid is “any attempt from one partner to another for attention, affirmation, affection, or any other positive connection.” While these bids are seemingly small, menial asks that you’re entirely capable of doing yourself — again, like peeling an orange — they can tell us a lot about our relationship and if it has a chance for long term success.
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Of course, it’s not about whether or not we’re actually capable of peeling our own orange or not. It’s about whether or not our partner accepts or acknowledges the bid we present to them. “Research really shows that there’s a very positive correlation between trust and relationship security when a partner follows the bids for attention and doesn’t reject them,” says Moraya Seeger DeGeare, LMFT, in-house expert at the Paired app. And a bid doesn’t have to be a task or an act of service, especially if that’s not one of your love languages — it could be a reach for a hand, a flash of a smile, or an invitation to share stories about your day.
Michelle Elman, author of The Selfish Romantic, recently posted her own version of the orange peel theory to TikTok. “Just learned what the orange peel theory means,” she wrote over a clip of her fixing a bouquet of flowers. “Since we met, I’ve not made my own cup of tea because he does it for me, even if he doesn’t want one. He’ll run me a bath, take my stuff to the dry cleaners, and when we travel, I don’t carry my own bag. When we met, I was hyper independent but realizing just because you can do it yourself doesn’t mean you have to.”
Elman has been with her partner for two and a half years, and agrees that your partner responding to your bids is a great indicator of relationship success. “I do think you should be in a relationship where the person responds to your bids,” she says. “That’s not necessarily meaning that they should do everything for you or that they should say yes to every single one of your requests because no human in the world can, and no human in the world can be your everything.”
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Now, the orange peel theory isn’t the only relationship test that’s making its rounds on the internet. There’s the bird theory, which has users testing their partners to see if they’ll pay attention and be interested in their conversations or observations about meaningless things — yes, like birds. There’s also the Beckham test, where a user will set up their phone camera, start dancing to “Islands in the Stream,” à la the Beckham documentary, to see if their partner will start dancing with them (or not). There's also the burnt toast theory, which is more about embracing the world through a glass half-full lens than testing your partner (but still, it can be applied to relationships).
While trends like these are essentially harmless — and sometimes amusing to capture on camera — if you find yourself constantly feeling the need to test your partner or trap them in a “gotcha” moment, take a beat and look further within. Why do you feel this way? What are you hoping to accomplish? “If you have the mindset of testing your partner constantly, I think that could be really unhealthy,” says DeGeare. “Be super honest with yourself about it because there’s no tiny task, whether they pass or fail, that is going to be the thing that’s going to make you instantly happy in this relationship.” Your partner could peel ten oranges for you every week and there could still be signs that the partnership isn’t working — it’s just that some people are better at tasks than others, DeGeare says.
On the flip side, if your partner is constantly rejecting your bids and asks for small favors, use that intel to open up a conversation and ask them why they refused you. Maybe they’re having an off day or they have an aversion to oranges. It’s not a red flag until it becomes a pattern, says Marissa Nelson, LMFT, relationship and intimacy expert for BLK, a dating and lifestyle app for the Black community. “When we feel like a burden, when we feel like we are bothering our partner, when we feel like our partner is making fun of us or rejecting us in some way, shape, or form, then you step back,” she says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean vast relationship consequences, but you step back for a little bit. And if that continues over time, then you start to shift the momentum in the relationship.”
We test our partners all the time, both consciously and not, and at its core, this trend just draws attention to the fact that we all have the desire to feel seen and understood. And yes — have our orange peeled.