Between the name and the reaction to it from the media class, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “princess treatment” referred to a wildly sinister practice. Locking a woman in a tower and using her hair as a ladder, for instance, or putting her in a coma because you’re mad that you didn’t get invited to her birthday party. In the past week, outlets like The New York Times and Rolling Stone have published anguished think pieces about the trend. Think headlines such as: “Dating Experts Are Sounding the Alarm on This Viral Dating Behavior That Women Are Actually Celebrating” and “Can the ‘Princess Treatment’ Go Too Far?”
For the uninitiated, “princess treatment” is a dating strategy that anyone born before 1996 would recognize as a combination of traditional courtship and basic good manners, the kind of things a dad would remind his teenage son to do as he prepares for a date: Open the door for her. Bring flowers. Pay for dinner. Give her your coat if she’s cold. Online, Zoomers have rebranded these mundane acts of chivalry as “princess treatment,” with women who’ve successfully refashioned themselves into dating royalty making videos to show off their spoils—gifts, flowers, love notes, and so on—and to instruct other women how they, too, can either land a chivalrous fellow of their own or train an existing boyfriend to be a bit more princely.
Silly? Yes, but not surprising; this is the generation that thinks it invented the concept of taking time off from work. What is new, however, is that the dating discourse now takes place in a medium where everyone is competing for attention and engagement, and where the best way to accrue both is to make people mad as hell—and so, calls for and against princess treatment have become increasingly extreme.
Enter the outrage bait boss, a 37-year-old TikToker named Courtney Palmer, who’s been making videos on this topic since early in 2025 and whose version of the princess treatment is a cut above the rest. Flowers? Manners? What is this, amateur hour? In her videos, Palmer describes refusing to walk in the rain, having her husband tie her shoes, and neither speaking to nor looking at waitstaff in restaurants. “I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food,” she explained in a recent video which, as of this writing, has been viewed more than 7.5 million times.
That video sparked predictable backlash on TikTok, at which point the princess treatment discourse broke containment into the mainstream press—which wasted no time in declaring it dangerously uncritical of traditional notions of women’s proper role in a relationship, much like the adjacent tradwife trend. The whole idea was a patriarchal mess, a red flag, or even a submission kink thinly disguised as something more wholesome.
