SwipeLife’s editorial standards are ten principles. Each has a declarative title and a specific meaning. They are not aspirational statements — they are operational constraints on every piece published by this outlet.
1. Every empirical claim traces to a primary source.
“Studies suggest” is not a citation. “Research indicates” is not a citation. “According to experts” is not a citation. Every empirical claim in SwipeLife dispatches carries the author’s name, the publication year, and where applicable the journal name and volume. The full citation appears in the References
This standard is stricter than most journalism and significantly stricter than most dating content. It is stricter because the clinical and behavioral literature contains important nuance that is lost when studies are referenced without specificity — and because “a study found” is frequently used to lend false authority to claims that the actual study does not support.
2. Clinical terminology is used correctly or not at all.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a DSM-5-TR diagnosis with specific diagnostic criteria. Gaslighting is a documented coercive control tactic with an operational definition in the peer-reviewed literature. Anxious attachment is a dimensional construct measured by validated instruments, not a synonym for someone who texts frequently. When SwipeLife uses these terms, it uses the operational definitions. When the operational definition is contested or revised in recent literature, we note the debate and cite both positions.
If we cannot use a clinical term correctly, we do not use it. Alternative vocabulary that is precise without being clinical is preferable to clinical terminology used loosely.
3. We diagnose patterns, not people.
SwipeLife describes behavioral patterns as documented in the empirical literature. It does not assess individuals. A dispatch on avoidant deactivation describes the regulatory mechanism — its activation conditions, its behavioral manifestations, its neurobiological correlates. It does not tell readers whether their partner is avoidant, whether they are avoidant, or whether a specific experience constitutes avoidant behavior.
The distinction between pattern analysis and individual diagnosis is ethical, legal, and epistemic. SwipeLife is not a clinical practice. Its writers are not licensed clinicians practicing in a journalistic context. They are journalists using clinical literature to analyze patterns at the population level.
4. We do not advise.
SwipeLife dispatches do not tell readers what to do. They do not recommend whether to leave a relationship, initiate contact, respond to a message, or engage with a dating application. They do not provide therapeutic scripts, conversation templates, or “how to respond if he does X” guidance.
This is a more unusual constraint than it may appear. The publishing model for most relationship content — dating advice, attachment content, pop psychology — is built on the advice structure. SwipeLife does not use that structure because it is incompatible with the clinical accuracy standard. Advising requires knowing the individual context. Journalism operates on patterns and data. The two are different functions, and conflating them produces advice that is unmoored from individual context and analysis that is distorted by the imperative to be actionable.
5. We do not review platforms.
SwipeLife does not assess, rate, or recommend dating applications. It analyzes the behavioral conditioning mechanisms in those applications when they are documented in the peer-reviewed literature. It investigates fraud operations that use dating platforms as a vector. It does not produce comparative reviews of features, matching algorithms, or user experience.
Platform reviews are functionally editorial advertising unless the reviewer has no financial relationship with the platforms reviewed and applies a rigorous and disclosed methodology. Most platform reviews in the dating content space meet neither condition. SwipeLife does not produce them.
6. We have no financial relationship with the industry we cover.
SwipeLife accepts no advertising from dating applications, technology platforms, matchmaking services, or any company whose business is in the sectors we cover. It earns no affiliate revenue from referrals to those services. Its writers hold no equity in those companies.
The reason this is an editorial standard rather than merely a business policy: financial relationships create pressure on editorial decisions even when those relationships are disclosed. The only reliable protection is structural independence, which requires that the revenue model not depend on industry goodwill.
7. The clinical-vs-colloquial distinction is editorial, not pedantic.
Several terms central to SwipeLife’s coverage — gaslighting, love bombing, narcissist, trauma — have been adopted into popular vocabulary with meanings that have drifted significantly from their clinical definitions. This drift has consequences. It deprives people experiencing actual clinical phenomena of precise vocabulary to describe those experiences. It produces a false equivalence between ordinary interpersonal conflict and documented coercive abuse. And it makes it harder for clinicians, researchers, and journalists to communicate precisely about the documented phenomena.
When SwipeLife uses a clinical term in its operational sense and notes that the popular use has diverged, this is not terminological gatekeeping. It is the foundational function of accurate reporting.
8. Corrections are transparent and dated.
Errors are corrected in the original article with a visible, dated correction notice. The correction identifies the original claim, the correct information, and the source for the correction. SwipeLife does not remove articles, silently edit errors, or issue blanket “article updated” notices without specifying what changed and why.
The corrections record is part of the publication’s accountability infrastructure. A publication that handles errors opaquely cannot credibly claim editorial standards for its reporting.
9. Author credentials are visible and accurate.
SwipeLife’s author pages describe the actual background, areas of coverage, and sourcing practices of each writer. They do not inflate credentials. They do not list institutional affiliations that do not exist. They do not describe writers as “experts” in clinical fields where they hold no clinical credentials.
Both SwipeLife writers are journalists using clinical literature analytically. Neither is a licensed clinician. Neither is a therapist, psychologist, or social worker in current practice. These facts are stated in the author bios and are relevant to how readers should evaluate what they read here.
10. Readers can verify everything we publish.
Every cited source in SwipeLife dispatches is publicly accessible or available through standard academic library access. The publication does not cite sources behind institutional paywalls without noting that the citation is to a paywalled document. Where a cited study is freely available via the journal or via PubMed, the DOI or URL is included.
The Source Library aggregates every
citation from every published dispatch. Readers can use it to identify all works cited on a given topic across the publication. This infrastructure exists because “you can trust us” is not an editorial standard. “You can verify us” is.We answer correspondence.
Editorial questions, sourcing challenges, and correction submissions go to eleanor@swipelife.com. Correspondence related to specific dispatches is reviewed against the primary sources and responded to within ten business days. We do not answer questions about individual relationship situations — that is the work of licensed clinicians, not investigative reporters.