In simple terms, a pick-me person is someone who wants nothing more than to be noticed or chosen above everyone else. 

Essentially, they are seeking your approval, your interest, or your attention—often with the added implication that they are doing so somewhat insincerely, or ultimately to their own detriment, and to the detriment of other people like them. As anyone familiar with the term will know, though, there’s a little more to being a pick-me person that just acting in an attention-seeking way. 

The Background of Pick-Me

Both online and offline in modern slang, the phrase pick-me is often associated with the so-called “pick-me girl” archetype—that is, a young woman who not only wants to attract attention ahead of her peers, but wants specifically to attract the romantic attention of men.

To do so, she is setting herself apart from other women by overtly shunning more stereotypically feminine things (regardless of whether she actually enjoys them or not) and embracing more traditionally masculine or boyish things instead, in the hopes that doing so will appeal more to the male gaze. 

So a pick-me girl won’t be looking to get a boyfriend by sharing or talking about her and her friends’ love of romcoms, shopping, or dating shows; she’s looking to get a boyfriend by joining him and his friends for a couple of beers, a round of pool, or a night in playing video games, regardless of whether she really wants to.

In this sense, there’s a little extra nuance to the idea of a pick-me person: they’re not just looking for attention, but, whether consciously or subconsciously, they’re willing to embrace traits and behaviors that they might not even genuinely enjoy or support in order to get it. 

This trope is said to have first emerged among the breezy yet stereotype-heavy romcoms of the early 2000s, when the handsome love interest might find his eye being caught by the quirky and unconventional girl who is very clearly not like all the others: she might like sports and guitars and grunge music, rather than makeup and sleepovers and all things pink.

But according to Merriam-Webster, it first truly caught on in popular culture thanks to a 2005 episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which the title character, Meredith Grey, pleads with her romantic interest to pick her over his ex-wife.

From there, the term became even more widely used in the mid 2010s when a jokey hashtag, #TweetLikeAPickMe, trended on Twitter, before it found its way onto TikTok in the early 2020s in skits and videos mocking the desperate and hopelessly submissive behavior of typical pick-me girls. 

From Pick-Me Girl to Pick-Me Boy

In more recent years, though, the gender balance has been redressed. The rise of the so-called “pick-me boy” in the 2020s has seen young men called out for often disingenuously shunning traditionally masculine behavior, and embracing more overtly feminine things instead, purely to attract female attention. And from there the term even inspired conversations about toxic masculinity and romantic manipulation. 

As the term has come to be more widely used in this way, pick-me has emerged as both a noun (“She’s such a pick-me!”) and an adjective (“Oh, that’s so pick-me…”) to describe any behavior—not necessarily romantic—that could be seen as submissive, hypocritical, or dishonest, yet is intended to gain acceptance or approval.

A pick-me employee, for instance, might stop at nothing to attract the attention of their boss or to climb the corporate ladder, regardless of the effect of themselves, or their colleagues. The phrase might now be used more loosely than before, and so doesn’t necessarily refer to an attention-seeking girl, but it is still almost always used disparagingly.

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