Something strange happens in the early weeks of a new attraction. You are drawn to someone, perhaps even infatuated, and then – without warning – a switch flips. They reach for a chip with their fingers and you feel a wave of revulsion. They laugh too loudly in a quiet restaurant and suddenly you cannot unsee the way their ears stick out. You have caught what the internet calls “the ick”: a sudden, visceral repulsion toward a person you were, only moments ago, keen to see again.
On TikTok, the hashtag #theick has accumulated more than 157 million views. But beneath the comedy sketches, the ick touches something real and, according to a 2025 study, something ancient. Published in Personality and Individual Differences, the research offers the first systematic attempt to understand why some people experience this sudden disgust more frequently – and what it reveals about human mate selection.
A Term Born on Television, Resurrected by Algorithms
The specific use of “the ick” in a romantic context traces to a precise cultural moment. In 1995, Friends aired “The One with the Ick Factor.” In 1999, the title character of Ally McBeal used “the ick” to describe her inexplicable loss of attraction to a colleague – a feeling she defined as simply knowing something is “not meant to be.” Sex and the City picked up the concept in 2004.
For over a decade, the term remained dormant. Its resurrection came in 2017, when Olivia Attwood, a contestant on ITV2’s Love Island, described her collapsing attraction to fellow islander Sam Gowland. “When you’ve seen a boy and got the ick, it doesn’t go,” Attwood told the camera. “It’s caught you, and it’s taken over your body. It’s just ick. I can’t shake it off.” The quote went viral on Twitter, and by 2020, TikTok had transformed the ick into a full-blown meme format.
What makes the Azusa Pacific study significant is that it treats the ick not as pop-cultural detritus but as a measurable psychological phenomenon. The research team – Brian Collisson, Eliana Saunders, and Chloe Yin – recruited 125 single adults, aged 24 to 72, and asked them to complete surveys about their familiarity with and personal experiences of the ick, alongside personality assessments measuring disgust sensitivity, narcissism, and other-oriented perfectionism.
Sixty-Four Per Cent and Counting
Of the 125 participants, 64 per cent reported having experienced the ick. Among those who had, the average number of ick episodes was approximately six – though one participant reported experiencing it 300 times. The consequences were not trivial: 26 per cent ended the relationship immediately, while a further 42 per cent ended it later. Only 32 per cent continued the relationship regardless.
The gender gap was pronounced. Women were more likely to be familiar with the term – 63 per cent compared to 39 per cent of men – and more likely to have experienced it: 75 per cent of women versus 57 per cent of men. This aligns with decades of evolutionary psychology research on jealousy and emotional management. As David Buss and his colleagues have documented across multiple cultures, women’s greater minimum obligatory parental investment – the biological reality of pregnancy, lactation, and early child-rearing – has produced a psychological profile characterised by heightened selectivity. Disgust, in this framework, is not a character flaw but a calibration mechanism.
Eliana Saunders, the study’s second author, told Newsweek that the ick generally reflects “superficial cues” rather than “true incompatibility.” This distinction is critical. The ick is not the same as recognising a genuine dealbreaker. It is something more fleeting, more sensory, and more likely to be triggered by minor behaviours that carry outsized emotional weight.
The Three Engines of Revulsion
The team identified three personality traits that predict ick susceptibility.
Disgust sensitivity – the general tendency to feel revulsion at unpleasant stimuli – was the strongest predictor. People who are easily disgusted in general were far more likely to experience the ick in dating. Notably, disgust sensitivity predicted the likelihood of experiencing the ick but not its frequency, suggesting highly disgust-sensitive individuals react strongly to specific triggers without encountering the ick more often overall.
Grandiose narcissism was linked to the likelihood but not the frequency. Narcissistic individuals are selective. They do not get the ick over everything. But when a perceived flaw threatens their self-image or their idealised vision of a partner, their reaction is disproportionately intense. The study’s authors note that narcissistic individuals may “selectively reject partners based on specific perceived flaws,” running a stricter filter on potential mates.
Other-oriented perfectionism – the tendency to hold others to unrealistically high standards – was associated with both the likelihood and frequency. Perfectionists got the ick more easily and more often. If your internal template demands flawlessness, you are primed to notice every imperfection in the dating pool.
What Women and Men Find Icky
The study’s pilot phase involved analysing 100 TikTok videos tagged with #theick to identify common triggers, which were then used in the main survey. The triggers revealed a clear gendered pattern.
Women’s ick triggers tended to centre on behaviour perceived as “overly feminine” in men – a partner who laid his head on her shoulder – fashion missteps (“he wore jorts”), and misogynistic conduct, such as a man loudly shushing another woman. Women with perfectionistic or narcissistic tendencies were particularly reactive to appearance-based icks and public embarrassment.
Men’s triggers were different. They reported aversion to physical appearance quirks (one participant described a woman whose “feet didn’t reach the floor” at a bar), overly trendy behaviour, excessive vanity, and women who expressed enthusiasm about astrology. Men with high disgust sensitivity were especially put off by annoying speech patterns and what they perceived as performative trend-following.
Both genders reported the ick in response to annoying speech, including “weird slang” and repetitive verbal tics. The Observer described the ick’s triggers as possessing “the attentiveness of poetry to intangible indignities.”
Error Management and the Evolutionary Bargain
To understand why the ick exists, it helps to invoke error management theory, developed by Martie Haselton and David Buss. When the costs of different types of errors are asymmetrical – when a false positive (rejecting a good partner) is less costly than a false negative (accepting a bad one) – natural selection favours cognitive mechanisms biased toward the less expensive error. In mate selection, humans evolved to over-detect potential threats in partners, because the consequences of committing to an unreliable mate – resource depletion, disease exposure, reproductive failure – far outweigh the consequences of walking away from a good one.
Disgust, in this framework, is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working as designed. Joshua Rottman, a psychology professor at Franklin & Marshall College who studies disgust, told NPR that the emotion has deep roots in pathogen avoidance but has been “co-opted” over evolutionary time to regulate social and sexual behaviour. The three-domain model of disgust, proposed by Joshua Tybur and colleagues, distinguishes between pathogen disgust (avoiding infection), sexual disgust (avoiding reproductively costly partners), and moral disgust (avoiding behaviours that undermine social cooperation). The ick activates primarily the sexual and pathogen domains simultaneously – a date who eats messily triggers both a hygiene concern and, at a deeper level, a question about what kind of parent or provider this person might be.
The problem is the system is imprecise. Rottman warned NPR that disgust is “a product of our socialisation” as much as biology, and specific ick triggers often reflect “social norms that we might want to challenge.” A man laying his head on a woman’s shoulder is not, in any objective sense, a threat. But the emotional circuit that fires in response does not distinguish between a genuine red flag and a culturally constructed one.
The Danger of Overcalibration
The Azusa Pacific team explicitly warns that while the ick may serve an adaptive function, it can also produce “overly rigid rejection thresholds.” People who experience the ick frequently may be filtering out perfectly viable partners based on superficial signals that carry no real predictive value about long-term compatibility.
The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest noted that the study “doesn’t tell us much about the purpose of experiencing the ick, such as whether getting the ick – or acting on it – actually helps people make better romantic choices.” Future longitudinal research is needed to determine whether ick-prone individuals achieve better relationship outcomes or experience greater difficulty forming partnerships.
Saunders put it plainly to Newsweek: “Generally, the research seems to suggest that the ick is based more on superficial cues than true incompatibility, and so I think it’s important to keep this in mind when experiencing the ick.” It is advice worth heeding in a dating culture – shaped by apps that reduce human beings to photographs – that already incentivises snap judgements.
Learning to Interrogate Disgust
The practical question is not how to eliminate the ick – evolution is not so easily overridden – but how to engage with it more deliberately. As research into the biology of desire suggests, our romantic responses are deeply wired, and understanding those wiring patterns is the first step toward navigating them. The psychologist Lila Chen, whose 2023 research on couples found that reframing disgust as curiosity (“Why does this bother me?”) correlates with higher relationship satisfaction, advocates what might be called a diagnostic approach. Rather than treating the ick as a verdict, treat it as a question.
The distinction matters. A verdict says: this person is wrong for me. A question says: what does this reaction reveal about my own fears, my own history, my own calibration? The hum that once annoyed you might remind you of a childhood irritant that has nothing to do with the person across from you. The fashion choice that repels you might be a class marker you have never examined.
The Azusa Pacific team are careful to note their sample was relatively small. But the direction of evidence is clear: the ick is real, measurable, and shaped by a confluence of evolutionary inheritance, personality structure, and cultural conditioning. As Rottman told NPR, there is good reason not to give the ick too much weight: “These feelings of ickiness are not going to be great signals of whether someone’s going to be good for us and a good partner.” In a culture that increasingly treats instinct as insight, this is a countercultural proposition – but a necessary one.
