1. You've suddenly met most of his friends and family in the span of a few weeks. Your partner went from being vague and mysterious, to suddenly inviting you out for dinner or drinks and pulling you around to what feels like a "Meet Everyone Important to Me World Tour."
2. You've been an official wedding date. Yeah, it's one thing to net an invite via a plus-one, it's a whole other to get a name on the invitation. You might not realize it, but at some point, things got pretty serious. Serious enough that people planning a wedding assume you're going to be together 10 or so months from now.
3. You just celebrated some kind of one-year "anniversary." Don't underestimate the significance of a year. It doesn't really matter how casual your relationship is, surviving your amorphous, barely definable hookup-sorta relationship still has something going for it if you've made it a year. And especially if you acknowledge it, even just "being goofy and totally not at all serious about it" you've still made it manifest. It makes serious relationships more serious, and it makes sort of casual relationships way less casual.
4. You've talked about a future together. Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, you wind up in relationships that you know aren't going anywhere. Maybe they're for fun, or you're lonely or killing time, but in the back of your mind, you're very much aware that there's an expiration date slapped on the side of them. But when you and your partner start discussing what to do when your lease is up, or you get a promotion and have to start working at the satellite office an hour away, it means you want to stay in each other's lives.
5. You're now all over each other's social media. No, not every healthy relationship needs a slew of photos to prove it's real, but hear me out. Early relationships typically have no digital footprint. You don't want a host of randos all over your Instagram. You don't want to be fielding questions RE: who was in the background of your Snapchat. And also, if you break up, you don't want to have to go purging all your accounts of any trace of them. But getting featured on your partner's social media is the "will you go steady with me and wear my varsity jacket and go down to the malt shop with me?" for Millennials.
6. You feel comfortable around them. At some point, you don't feel like you need to be "on" to be with them. Whether that means not wearing makeup, or farting in front of them, or confiding in them, you don't feel like you need to impress them anymore. You've already got them.
7. You've stopped playing games. There's no more waiting hours (or days) to answer texts, no being coy with plans or being afraid to sleep over. There's no making him work for it. You've moved past that stage and now you just act like reasonable human beings toward each other without overthinking and dissecting every interaction. That's love.
8. You keep a change of clothes at their house. You're clearly spending enough time over there that you need to have some extra clothes for emergencies. It not only says that your relationship is serious enough to do that, it also says, "I believe in this relationship enough to gamble at least three articles of clothing on it, because if we do break up, I may never see them again."
9. They stop being "his friends" or "your friends." Your friend groups have merged into a single entity, flesh meeting flesh and melding into one another. Your friend groups are now an orgy of taut muscle and grinding bone, wet with sinew, a thousand eyes and a hundred screaming mouths. Or just, like, you have some mutual friends or whatever.
10. You've purged all your dating profiles. When it hits that moment where you delete your profiles because you know someone who would get really mad if they saw a Bumble message pop up on your phone ... you are dating that person and it's no longer casual.
11. You've had a major fight that's now behind you. Your first major fight is the time in the relationship where it's effectively OK for one of you to walk away without looking like a total asshole. Sticking around says, "No, this relationship goes deeper for me."
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