The prevailing American beliefs about sex, love, and commitment were, for many years, encapsulated by the 1977 Meat Loaf song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” The epic Wagnerian rock duet plays out in three acts: First, a young couple hooks up in a parked car, and the guy pushes the girl for sex. Then the girl declares that, before they go further, she needs to know that the guy will love her until the end of time, which, under duress, he promises to do. Finally, from some point in the future, miserably tied together, the two sing that the end of time can’t come soon enough.

The song stretches for about eight minutes, an absurd length for a single, but it managed to become such a staple of classic rock that, two decades after its release, as teenagers, my friends and I had learned the words without trying. It also contained the metaphor that we used to talk about our early sexual experiences, via an interlude in which the shortstop turned sports announcer Phil Rizzuto calls out a batter’s progress as he rounds the bases: “First base,” any listener would have understood, was a kiss; a “home run” represented intercourse. Although my peers and I hardly required a lifetime commitment from a partner to have sex, I did take for granted that sexual encounters and relationships typically unfolded in a certain order, with clear steps.

Today, though, many young people consider the bases (and the tidy progression they offer) a relic. Sophia Choukas-Bradley, a University of Pittsburgh psychology professor who researches teens and young adults, told me that the only times she’d heard Gen Zers—also known as Zoomers, the people born from 1997 to 2012—use the base system was ironically, with first base referring to, say, oral sex. The way Gen Z talks about sex and dating instead involves an explosion of new language, if that’s even the right way to put it. The linguistic acrobatics suggest that they haven’t just come up with new slang but have also evolved a novel form of communication.

Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage

In my reporting, including in conversations with about a dozen Zoomers across the country, I learned about the terms sneaky links (people you hook up with in secret), zombies (people who come back after ghosting you), and simps (guys, usually, who try too hard to get a partner).