If your partner makes you feel safe, visible, and secure, your relationship is probably solid—any dating expert or therapist will tell you that. And while that may seem obvious, people online say there’s one more very important thing your partner should do to solidify the success of your relationship: Peel your orange.
Online (mostly 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, watch out — in the comments section and the alleged downfall of your relationship. And this orange peel theory isn’t something that just came out of thin air — it’s TikTok-submitting another term called link bidding. According The Gottman Institute, an offer is “any effort from one partner to another for attention, affirmation, affection, or any other positive connection.” While these offerings are seemingly small, honest requests that you’re completely capable of doing it yourself — again, like peeling an orange — can tell us a lot about our relationship and whether it has a chance for long-term success.
Of course, it has nothing to do with whether or not we are capable of peeling our own orange or not. It has to do with whether our partner accepts or acknowledges the offer we present to him. “The research actually shows that there’s a very positive correlation between trust and relationship security when a partner follows through on offers of attention and doesn’t reject them,” she says. Moraya Seeger DeGeare, LMFT, in-house expert on the Paired app. And an offer doesn’t have to be a chore or an act of service, especially if that’s not one of your love languages — it could be a hand, a smile, or an invitation to share stories about your day.
Michelle Elmanits author The selfish romanticrecently published her own version of it orange peel theory on TikTok. “I just learned what the orange peel theory means,” she wrote above a clip of her making a bouquet of flowers. “Since we met, I haven’t made my own cup of tea because he does it for me, even if he doesn’t want to. She’ll give me a bath, take my things to the dry cleaners, and when we travel, I don’t have my own bag. When we met, I was fiercely independent, but realizing that 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 offers is a great indicator of relationship success. “I think you have to be in a relationship where the person responds to your offers,” she says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to do everything for you or that they have to say yes to every one of your requests, because no person in the world can and no person in the world can be your everything.”
Now, the orange peel theory isn’t the only relationship test making the 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’s 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). While such tendencies are essentially harmless—and sometimes fun to catch on camera—if you constantly feel the need to test your partner or trap them in a “gotcha” moment, take a moment and look away. Why do you feel this way? What do you hope to achieve? “If you have the mindset of constantly testing your partner, I think that could be really unhealthy,” says DeGeare. “Be extremely honest with yourself about it because there’s no tiny project, whether they pass or fail, that’s going to be the thing that makes you instantly happy in this relationship. Your partner could be peeling ten oranges for you every week, and there might still be signs that the partnership isn’t working—it’s just that some people are better at tasks than others, says DeGeare.
On the other hand, if your partner is constantly turning down your offers and asking for small favors, use this knowledge to open up a conversation and ask them why they turned you down. Maybe they have an off day or have an aversion to oranges. It’s not a red flag until it becomes a pattern, he says Marissa Nelson, LMFTrelationship and intimacy specialist for BLK, a dating and lifestyle app for the Black community. “When we feel burdened, when we feel like we’re 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 take a step back,” she says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean huge consequences in the relationship, but you step back for a while. And if that continues over time, then you start to change the momentum in the relationship.”
We test our partners all the time, consciously and unconsciously, and at its core, this trend just calls attention to the fact that we all have a desire to feel seen and understood. And yes — to clean our orange.
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