There are two pretty standard genderslop takes about the dating landscape for today’s singles, depending on your gender or “team.” Some men claim that dating apps have inflated women’s egos and given them all the belief that they should settle for nothing less than Christian Grey himself, spinning up fiction about the increasingly ridiculous height preferences (at one point, it was supposedly six feet, now I’m hearing it’s 6’5”.) Then, to add insult to injury, apparently these women are engaging in nonstop sexual debauchery with said giant-scale Chads while being “flown to Miami.” (Of course the 8’9” Chad is flying you to Miami—he’s too tall to fit in an airplane himself!) Meanwhile, plenty of women will push back and say that actually, the bar for men is “on the floor,” and if men weren’t all depraved, porn-addicted, misogynistic, cheating jerks, women would be perfectly happy to date them. Some have taken the stance that even straight women never particularly liked men, and it’s only Gen Z women who are emboldened to admit it.
Either way, clearly something isn’t working, and in both cases the assumption is that, for whatever reason, modern-day women are not interested in dating most men.
That conclusion is not entirely unfounded if you look at the current state of affairs. Over half of Gen Z is single, and many of those people are not actively dating, while 78% still want marriage someday, indicating that there is a discrepancy between current behaviors and desired outcome. But the issue is likely not quite as gendersloppy as “women all want Chad” or “all men are losers.” While attractive playboys exist and always have, they are not hoovering up all the women and engaging in nonstop orgies. A lot of women just aren’t having sex at all. Zoomer women are having less sex than their millennial predecessors, to the point that sex positivity, casual sex and hookup culture are seen as painfully passé. And while losers have always existed, there are plenty of decent men and women who want partners, but can’t seem to find them. (When I ran a qualitative survey for all singles, both men and women complained at length about all their dates being flaky or ghosting.)
In fact, the dating crisis probably mirrors the general loneliness crisis in one particular way: a lot of people may theoretically want a serious romantic partner someday, and may not harbor any hateful feelings toward any gender, but cannot find the motivation to engage in the unpredictable, sometimes disappointing, embarrassing, boring or awkward world of dating and relationships—especially when they have so many other things they could be doing instead.
