Faith Hill | The Atlantic

The Sneaky-Saver Generation

2026-03-28T08:00:00-04:00

Lanre Dokun, a psychiatrist in New York, has a lot of clients with financial anxiety. For the older ones, the stress is usually situational: Perhaps they’ve lost their job, or they’re worrying about medical costs. But for young adults, he’s noticed, the concern is downright existential. It’s a “chronic background stressor,” he told me, or even “a character in their lives.” Clients who are objectively on solid ground are worried they one day won’t be. Some are obsessive about budgeting. Others are scared of being replaced by AI. One high-earning client consistently saves 40 percent of her income, yet still feels she’s behind.

Gen Z does seem to be a financially savvy and hypercautious bunch. A 2024 Charles Schwab survey found that the average Zoomer started saving at age 18, younger than other generations had. (The typical Boomer, for comparison, began at 34.) Nearly half are investing, and most began that before age 20. According to a study by the Investment Company Institute and the University of Chicago, which adjusted for inflation, Gen Z households have nearly three times more assets in defined-contribution retirement accounts than Gen X households did at the same age.

Joelle Remy, a financial adviser in Chicago, told me that she’s noticed young people trying to earn extra high-school credits so they can graduate from college early and save on tuition. Others are getting retail jobs at 16 in order to stash wages away for an eventual master’s degree. Some of her Gen Z clients have saved more than a lot of her Millennials have.

All of that might seem counterintuitive for a generation with a bit of a Peter Pan reputation—known less for buying bonds than for living in their parent’s basement. And it’s true: A ton of young people are postponing the traditional adulthood milestones, putting off having families or buying homes at least in part because they don’t feel they can afford them. But what seems like falling behind could actually be planning ahead: watching and waiting, always trying to prepare for the future. Maybe young adults, far from being in arrested development, are growing up exceptionally fast.

Gen Z has been coming of age in an über-expensive world. Child-care costs have been rising for years, outpacing inflation. Home prices are exceptionally high—especially in cities, where a whole lot of entry-level jobs are located. Pensions and “jobs for life” have practically gone extinct. Much of Gen Z dreams of house deeds and baby carriages; those landmarks are simply taking longer to reach.

But the irony is that for all that time young adults spend not achieving their goals, many of them are quietly squirreling money away instead. The prototypical grown kid in the basement, as easily as he could be labeled a degenerate, may be amassing a nest egg from what would’ve been rent or mortgage payments; the paycheck diverted from diapers could be funneled into savings or investments. Michael Tenam, a 23-year-old IT worker, told me he makes $90,000 a year—but he’s living with his parents in Brooklyn, chipping away at his student-loan balance, wondering whether he might be ready to move out by 26 or 27. (He’d rent; home ownership, he said, “seems like an impossibility.”) Nearly all of his friends moved home too, so he’s not particularly ashamed of it, and he knows he’s lucky to have the option. “Realistically,” he said, “I could do a lot better for myself in the future if I just stay at home longer and just don’t waste that money this early on in my life.”

Young people today are surrounded not only by high sticker prices but by reminders to be careful, to plan ahead. The glossy-haired finance influencer “Mrs. Dow Jones” might pop up on their TikTok, chatting about tax withholdings; an infographic on compounding wealth from “Matt the Money Guy” might appear on their Instagram feed. (When I was growing up, the financial-advice icon Suze Orman was sometimes on TV at night, breaking the hearts of callers who asked “Can I afford it?” by shouting: “DENIED!” But Orman did not live in my pocket and follow me around giving tough love.) And more employers are enacting “opt-out” retirement plans, meaning that workers are automatically enrolled.

[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]

Young adulthood was once a time to take risks, to try things, to be a little reckless before assuming the burden of real responsibility. But now financial-health tricks and economic-news headlines can feel inescapable, and blissful ignorance near impossible. In a sense, the modern lifespan holds less breathing room for play or exploration—for youth. Shannon E. Cavanagh, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, remembered talking with a graduate student who was saving part of her meager stipend for retirement. The decision struck Cavanagh as almost strangely conscientious for somebody so young, making so little. When Cavanagh was that age, she told me, she simply had faith in Social Security and her own ability to find work.

A certain amount of financial conservatism is a good thing. Facing reality head-on can make people less anxious, after all; as Remy, the financial adviser, put it, “Discipline is freedom.” But I’m not sure I’d describe Gen Z as free. Today’s young adults have particularly high rates of anxiety. They are famously risk-averse and moderate: drinking less and having less sex than previous generations, eschewing romantic passion for lower-stakes situationships. “There’s so much delayed joy,” Cavanagh told me. And Zoomers—many of them the children of Gen Xers who lost work in the 2008 financial crash—are particularly stressed about money. Leading up to the 2024 election, a University of Chicago study found inflation to be the No. 1 issue for young adults, across race and party affiliation.

Of course, money stress is rarely just about money itself. In an age of war and widespread mistrust, of AI infiltration and climate gloom, it may well be about control. “Financial anxiety often stems from the illusion that their perfect decision making will guarantee their safety,” Dokun told me. “But we all know that’s just not true.”

[Read: America isn’t ready for what AI will do to jobs]

In this context, information abundance can turn from a gift to a curse. Having finance influencers in your ear 24/7 can amplify the turmoil you’re already feeling. You might get great investment advice from one, but misinformation from another. In fact, many young people may have heard so much about how chaotic and terrible the world is in general, and how doomed they are as a cohort, that they have over-indexed on prudence. I share a funny sense of culpability for this with Cavanagh and her husband, Robert Crosnoe, a fellow UT Austin sociologist. They recently published a book titled The Journey Into Adulthood in Uncertain Times; we all make our living in part by describing the obstacles in Gen Z’s way. “I do think that we might have made it worse,” Crosnoe told me. “They think it’s even worse than it really is.”

In the midst of writing this story, I took a break to speak on a radio show. The topic was an article that I’d written about how hard it is to be a young woman in 2026; I was joined by Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist I’d interviewed for it. Traditionally, Jay said, young adulthood is a time of “unrealistic optimism,” when people let themselves imagine they’ll never have to dial back their dreams. But in recent years, she’s found the opposite problem with her clients: unrealistic pessimism. They’re crouched, hands over head, waiting for a big blow that may never come.

I’ll now state the obvious: Not every young person is saving. Many people simply don’t have the means. Others hold an attitude that Rebecca Palmer, the head of financial guidance at Fruitful, a fiscal-planning company for people in their 20s to 40s, called “financial nihilism”: They don’t see the point in working slowly and steadily toward a goal that seems unlikely to ever be reached. Earlier this month, a study from the financial-services company Northwestern Mutual found that nearly a third of participants ages 18 to 29 said they were considering or already putting money into sports betting and prediction markets. Eighty percent—more than any other generation—said they might invest in such “high-risk or speculative investments” because they feel financially behind.

That might seem to contradict my point about Gen Z’s financial wariness. But hypervigilance and nihilism are just two different responses to the same uncertainty: If you don’t know what the future holds, you might scrupulously manage every cent to your name. Or you might laugh darkly, mutter “What future?,” and log onto Polymarket to try to make a quick buck. These are both classic strategies in times of economic strife, Crosnoe told me. Some people become very focused on the short-term problem of making ends meet, which researchers call an “income effect”—a phenomenon most common among those “in dire straits,” Crosnoe said, who might not have any savings or familial support to fall back on. Others become fixated on the long game: a “substitution effect,” in which they try to position themselves for eventual prosperity. (That helps explain why U.S. college enrollment went up after the 2008 downturn, even when tuition wasn’t easy for many to afford.)

[Read: My year as a degenerate gambler]

So the super-savers are a lucky bunch: privileged enough to fret over the future, rather than treading water just to stay afloat in the present. But all of the “delayed joy,” all of the worry and austerity, is still taxing. Cavanagh and Crosnoe have found that the people most panicked in rocky economies aren’t typically the ones in the worst circumstances; they’re the ones who are downwardly mobile, less wealthy than their parents. And perhaps they’re less wealthy than they feel they should be; maybe they imagine that they can fix everything if they push a little harder or sacrifice a little more. “There’s just so much shame” among this cohort, Dokun told me—a feeling of inadequacy compared with peers who always seem to be doing fabulously on social media, but also compared with previous generations.

In all likelihood, much of Gen Z will land on two feet. As Baby Boomers downsize, move into retirement homes, or—sorry—die, more homes will come on the market, according to Daryl Fairweather, a chief economist for the real-estate company Redfin. That should make buying property much easier by about 2035, she predicts, as a lot of Zoomers hit their mid- to late-30s: approaching peak first-time-home-buying years, these days. People like Michael Tenam will move out of their parents’ places, and they’ll be richer for the time spent there. Many will eventually end up with the wedding ring and the mortgage and the baby, just like their folks. Cavanagh and Crosnoe reviewed five decades of data for their book, and found that even the Great Depression and the Great Recession didn’t affect young people’s life outcomes all that much. Individuals did suffer, but in the aggregate, Crosnoe told me, “10, 20 years after the fact, it’s really hard to pull out a cohort that looks really different from the ones before or after it. Historical change is just much more gradual than that.”

The more pressing question may be whether young people are okay right now—because there is a cost to putting today off for tomorrow. Lora Park, a University at Buffalo psychologist, has studied the well-being of people who are particularly fixated on long-term goals. She’s found that they tend to report feeling anxiety, guilt, and regret when doing anything other than working toward their narrow mission. And when they stake much of their self-worth on financial success, they tend to feel less autonomy, not more.

While we were talking, Cavanagh plucked a quote from the historical data she and her husband had used for their book. This was from someone weathering the Great Recession. She summarized: “I’m extremely frugal, I save every penny I can, I don’t trust banks. I keep all my money in cash.” That woman wasn’t even saving for a discrete goal such as marriage, Cavanagh noted. “It just felt like a barrier against the unknown.” I wondered for how many years she was bracing, and what she gave up before the unknown arrived anyway.

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The Tyranny of the Relationship Gap

2026-03-04T09:25:17-05:00

Every so often, I hear a time-honored dinner-party question that always leads to lively debate: Would you sleep with your clone?

It’s hard to say where the conversation starter came from. Perhaps it originated with a 2015 BuzzFeed article titled “Can We Ask You a Really Weird Question?,” which inquired—well, you know. Or maybe it can be traced much further back, to works of science fiction that explored similar puzzles. Is a clone conscious? Does it have rights? But today’s clone query, in my experience, tends to prompt chatter about something a little less heady: whether engaging sexually or romantically with someone just like yourself sounds like a creepy nightmare—or whether it sounds like a dream of convenience, of perfectly aligned interests and interactions as frictionless as silk.

I’ve been thinking about this because lately, I keep hearing about the differences between lovers. You’ve probably heard of age-gap relationships. But what about the “job importance gap,” the “woke gap,” the “growth gap,” the “AI gap”? The “being able to breathe through your nose properly gap”? (That one hits for me.) Within a period of four months last year, the culture magazine Dazed published articles on “swag gaps,” “intelligence gaps,” and “party gaps.” You can pop gap onto the end of just about any attribute—and when you get in the habit, analyzing your own relationship dynamics in these terms becomes easy. Come to think of it, I’ve experienced anxiety gaps (I was the more nervous one), cooking gaps (call me chef; I don’t order in every meal), and sleep gaps (I need my eight hours).

[Read: The bots that women use in a world of unsatisfying men]

In the wilds of the internet, some “gap” references are played solely for laughs; others appear completely serious. Many fall somewhere in between: They go for cheeky and knowing while making a sincere point—usually about approaching the gap in question with caution, or avoiding it entirely. And this category is the kind that can get in your head; any perceived distance, if you squint, might turn from a sliver into a canyon. Take the swag gap. On its face, it means a mere discordance in stylishness. Perhaps you throw the phrase around at brunch while unpacking a recent flirtation. But then The Wall Street Journal suggests that it may be “less about aesthetic misalignment than imbalance of self-worth.” The article is full of quotes from people apparently regarding the swag gap with solemn earnestness. Suddenly the bagginess of your pants, in stark contrast to a crush’s skinny jeans, may seem to reveal a deeper truth about the soul.

I’m not surprised that people are wrestling with what it means to desire someone different from them. Since the rise of dating apps, singles—instead of coupling up with people in their social bubble, who are likely to be similar to them—have become more likely to date across race, education, and religious lines. This is a big societal shift, but within individual relationships, the change tends to be felt in idiosyncratic little ways. A museum-appreciation gap could be a class gap in disguise. A camping gap could indicate disparate upbringings: Maybe one partner grew up riding city subways and naming the rats, whereas the other was tromping through woods, singing with the birds.

The irony is that although online dating has allowed people to mingle with a greater diversity of romantic prospects, it also gives the illusion of control over any perceived incompatibilities. On apps, you can filter out anyone with an age or faith or ethnicity unlike yours. You can drop hints about your background—by sharing your Ivy League alma mater and an obscure literary reference, or including a photo of yourself beaming with a caught fish—and swipe past profiles without similar signals. You can decide that traveling a few neighborhoods away would be too much of a pain. It’s never been this easy to encounter difference in a dating pool—or to evade it.

Not all reservations about gaps are unwarranted. Asymmetries can, for instance, result in lopsided power dynamics. Just think of the granddaddy of today’s hyperspecific divisions: the age gap, which is far more likely to involve an older man and a younger woman, and can truly be troubling when the younger party is very young. Some would be glad that the average age difference between partners, according to the Pew Research Center, has been declining since 1880.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Indeed, gaps of many kinds have been presented as obstacles to equality—perhaps especially for women. The swag gap became notorious when a certain tabloid photo of Justin and Hailey Bieber dropped: Hailey strutting ahead in a bright-red minidress, her hair pinned into a bun, the shimmer in her eye shadow and necklace catching the light; Justin slouching behind in a heather-gray sweat suit, the zipper halfway down and no shirt underneath, his face enclosed by a drawn hood. The image seemed to capture something a lot of women had already felt: that they were expected to doll themselves up, make the plans, do the chores, work the charisma, all for what Olivia Rodrigo has called a “second string loser”—a man who doesn’t do his own laundry or schedule in advance, because he has no need to. “I’ve watched the smartest, hottest, kindest, most talented women of our generation fall for the guy who didn’t utter a word at happy hour,” one writer, considering men’s role in the swag gap, grieved on the lifestyle website InsideHook.

This kind of resentment has been simmering in the culture for a while now. Back in 2016, Vulture published an article—a portent of the true gap era to come—about the “attractiveness gap” trope on screen. (Think Everybody Loves Raymond, The King of Queens, nearly anything in the oeuvres of Judd Apatow and Rob Schneider.) Some filmmakers, the article pointed out, have been criticized for selling viewers “the male fantasy that you, too, can be a lazy zhlub with barely any redeeming qualities and still get a super-hot wife willing to put up with it.” But it’s not a fantasy at all, the article argued; it’s just an observation of life.

If gaps reflect societal inequities, then closing them could be seen as a just and necessary corrective. To what end, though? Should partners be like clones of each other, neither one hotter or funnier or more able to breathe through their nose? That may be difficult to actualize. And when power differentials do exist, they’re rarely clean-cut. That is a major insight of Sally Rooney’s Normal People: When a hunky and popular young man from a loving, working-class home gets involved with a lonely and “plain-looking” young woman from a wealthy, emotionally frigid family, they each wield their specific types of privilege and envy the types they don’t have. They wound each other in a million different ways. And they fascinate each other in just as many.

[Read: The people who quit dating]

People might be doing themselves a real disservice, in other words, by paying gaps too much mind. Sure, a woman deserves a partner who matches her level of emotional commitment. But does she need one with identical career ambition? Why not go for someone with a chiller schedule who can give her snacks and foot massages while she’s on the grind? Even age-gap critiques can go too far. In a recent HuffPost article investigating why “Gen Z Is Particularly Weird About Relationship Age Gaps,” Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, told the author that more and more young people seem to view age differences as “inherently exploitative.” But he and other experts were concerned that nuance was getting lost. Lehmiller has been studying age-gap relationships for years, and said he believes that in many of them, “nothing untoward is happening.”

Psychologists generally agree that similarity isn’t a good predictor of romantic compatibility. Nor is “complementarity”; opposites don’t necessarily attract. Gaps, then, aren’t a hugely helpful frame with which to consider relationships at all. And besides, isn’t it a bit navel-gazey to think so much about yourself in comparison to others? Freud called that impulse the “narcissism of small differences”: the frivolous ways we strive to neatly differentiate ourselves. In truth, we all exist on messy spectrums of an endless number of qualities, and we act differently at different times. You might cook more than your current partner but less than plenty of other people. Your job may be important to you—but who knows, maybe you’ll lose it. If 10 years from now you look back on this day, will you really think you had that much swag?

Better to try seeing someone in their own right: for who they are, not just who they are in relation to you. “Love,” the novelist Iris Murdoch wrote, “is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” If I could invite her to a dinner party, I might ask a certain question—and I think I know how she would answer.

Young Men Aren’t the Only Ones Struggling

2026-02-23T08:44:21-05:00

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On a sunny Monday last November, I filed into a single large room in Washington, D.C. There I saw a crowd of older white men, wearing crisp suits and shaking hands; a few women were sprinkled among them. This was the Symposium on Young American Men, where politicians, researchers, nonprofit leaders, higher-education administrators, and journalists had gathered to discuss what they agreed was a troubled and downtrodden population. The question was what to do about it.

The plight of young men has, for some years now, been a cause of public concern; recently the din of alarm bells seems louder than ever. Men are attending and graduating from college at rates lower than in the past—and lower than women. Large shares of working-age men, especially young ones, are unemployed. Jarring numbers are dying “deaths of despair,” a term coined by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe mortality due to suicide, overdose, or alcoholic liver disease. In response, a mini-industry of experts has sought to explain what’s going on: Richard V. Reeves, a social scientist and the author of Of Boys and Men, created the think tank the American Institute for Boys and Men. The New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway wrote the book Notes on Being a Man and on podcasts speaks regularly about modern manhood. Along with an abundance of other commentators, they’ve lamented that men have lost their sense of purpose and identity: With the decline of manufacturing and other male-dominated industries, the rise of “toxic masculinity” critiques, and the difficulty of being a breadwinner when everything costs so much, they argue, young men no longer know how to behave or what to reach for.

By many measures, they’re right. Young men, as a population, are struggling more than they used to. But sometimes that point gets twisted into a different argument: that young men are struggling more than young women. Women tend to be present only as a comparison; they’re the ones who are more likely to attend college or to lean on close friends, less likely to depend on drugs or alcohol or drop out of high school. They’re symbols of success, used to make a point. The problem is that, in a number of ways, young women are actually doing worse than men. That this fact has been obscured—that women themselves have been obscured in this conversation—says a lot about who gets prioritized in American culture, and how misguided our understanding of human flourishing is in the first place.

First, consider some facts. Women have long been more likely than men to report experiencing depression and anxiety. That gap, though it could be attributed partly to differences in how likely men and women are to admit their symptoms in studies, has remained persistent and pronounced. And more recently, those rates have been climbing for women, in the United States and elsewhere. In one 2024 study, researchers found that across 34 countries and several different measures of well-being—including fear and anxiety, suicidality, and feeling overwhelmed—mental health was worse for women than for men. And although more men than women die by suicide, women are significantly more likely to attempt it. The discrepancy comes in large part from men being likelier to choose more lethal means, such as firearms. At one point in the Symposium on Young American Men, one of the few female panelists named a statistic about suicidal thoughts among young men—then, as if in parentheses, added that the rate was even higher for women. The comment hung in the air. But the speaker, and the conference, moved on.

[Read: Are young men really becoming more sexist?]

The idea that women are thriving, at least relative to men, seems to stem largely from their academic dominance: In a 2024 analysis, Pew Research Center found that 47 percent of women have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37 percent of men. The gap is referenced in pretty much any conversation about the “crisis of masculinity.” But all that striving for accomplishment may cost women a great deal. When researchers with the Harvard Graduate School of Education surveyed roughly 700 adults ages 18 to 25 in 2022, they found that women were significantly more likely to report dealing with achievement pressure; more than 60 percent of female respondents said the weight of that pressure was negatively affecting them. Women also happen to hold about two-thirds of America’s student-loan debt.

That effort and expense doesn’t always pay off. A woman with a bachelor’s degree earns about the same, on average, as a man with an associate’s degree; a man with a bachelor’s degree makes more on average than a woman with the same education level, even within the same field of study. Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist specializing in young adulthood and the author of The Twentysomething Treatment, told me that a lot of her female clients work themselves ragged in college, expecting that it will translate into career success—but when they arrive in the workforce, it’s “a little bit of an unwelcome shock.” These women look around in their companies and see that men occupy most of the leadership positions, or begin to realize that the high-paying fields are the male-dominated ones. She mentioned one woman who decided to go to graduate school because she believed that it was the only place where women could be on equal footing with men. “She’s hoping to kind of take shelter in that,” Jay told me. But most people can’t stay in school forever.

[Read: What Black Swan Knew About Leaning In]

Young adulthood tends to be a difficult period regardless of gender. It’s a time of great uncertainty and high stakes, when people undergo a ton of change and are tasked with building a meaningful life from the ground up. And modern life—complete with an affordable-housing shortage, a harrowing job market, and collapsing social trust—doesn’t make growing up any easier. But in many ways, the world today is especially hostile to women. Manosphere influencers and politicians alike are exploiting young men’s vulnerability, stirring resentment against women. Gen Z men are less likely than their grandfathers to say they support gender equality. The constitutional right to an abortion is gone, and funding cuts have further weakened access to reproductive health care. Meika Loe, a Colgate University sociology professor, told me that many of her female students are grieving the loss of bodily autonomy. “Their generation grew up watching The Handmaid’s Tale, maybe reading it,” she said. “But now they’re living it.” In a Gallup poll last year, 40 percent of U.S. female participants ages 15 to 44 said they would move abroad permanently if given the chance—a number four times higher than in 2014, and more than double the share of male respondents who said the same. Participants were especially likely to dream of migration if they had low confidence in institutions such as the national government, the military, and honest elections, or if they disapproved of current political leadership.

[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]

A lot of today’s young women were told as little girls that they could do anything they set their mind to. Then they entered adulthood just in time to witness a backlash to the idea of their equal worth, to see the promise of power recede right when they reached for it. Many people—even critics of the man panic—seem to assume that men are the only ones struggling to know their role in the world. In a November New Yorker article, Jessica Winter argued that women don’t have the luxury to sit around worrying about their gender’s unique purpose, the way men longing for positive models of masculinity supposedly do. “What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter,” she wrote archly. “To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.” But just as the culture’s understanding of manhood has shifted, so too have ideas about womanhood—which of course influences the way young women see themselves.

Many of them are trying to understand whether they’re expected to be a CEO or a mother of five, whether they’re valued for their thoughts or their looks or their ability to support a husband. “That’s just the way young adult minds work,” Jay told me: People this age tend to think about what others believe they should do rather than what’s really right for them. (The latter, after all, isn’t totally clear yet.) One of Jay’s therapy clients went to an Ivy League college, but now she’s struggling to find a job—and feeling like the successful women around her aren’t the highly educated ones but the tradwives and beauty influencers. “Why did I work so hard in school,” Jay said her client wonders, “if this is what people want for me?” Many of the young women she speaks with don’t know what to prioritize: “hitting the gas pedal at work” or becoming a mom. Often they feel alone in these decisions; the men around them aren’t pushed to think about how grueling it would be to balance work and family life.

What young women are going through, then, is an identity crisis. It’s also a mental-health crisis. But it’s not typically recognized as any kind of crisis at all, perhaps because it’s a quieter one: This population, overall, may not be happy, but it’s a high-functioning one and therefore easier to ignore. Loe trained as a medical sociologist, and she recalled a saying: Men die quicker, but women are sicker. Women are more likely to endure many chronic illnesses and to soldier on with their pain unnoticed. Or maybe their turmoil isn’t all that quiet. Perhaps American society is simply more tolerant of women suffering because they always have.

Hardship shouldn’t be a competition. Well-being is not a zero-sum game for men and women, Sarah C. Narendorf, a social-work professor at NYU, told me; everyone would benefit from letting go of strict, traditionalist ideas about masculinity. Take, for instance, the notion that men need to be sturdy, stoic protectors, responsible for feeding a family but assumed incapable of carework, play, or tenderness. Some figures in the men’s movement have challenged that idea. Reeves has encouraged young men to go into more traditionally feminized fields such as teaching or nursing; to spend more time with their children; to model a “prosocial” version of masculinity.

[Read: Redshirt the boys]

But plenty of other pundits want men to find meaning in the same places that they used to: in the military, church, or fraternities; as breadwinners, which a growing share of men can’t afford to be; as patriarchs asserting their supremacy over women. At the symposium on young men last fall, I heard a lot of talk about how to reconnect men to traditional sources of discipline or community. Of 35 speakers, five were representing fraternities or related organizations—they outnumbered the legislators. But even in the one segment on “What Policymakers Can Do,” panelists seemed hesitant to suggest any structural changes. “I’m a limited-government guy,” one equivocated when my colleague McKay Coppins, the moderator, asked what single policy the speakers would choose to institute to help young men. Another meandered through a response about the importance of “narrative shift.”

Moderating a different panel, Kathryn Jean Lopez, a National Review editor at large, told a story about a mom taking her son to an amusement park. The boy said he didn’t want to go on one of the rides, but when they got back to the car, he began to cry, saying his father would have made him get on. Lopez’s conclusion was that “men and women are different”—that a father figure would have offered the kind of tough-love push a mother never could. And she wanted men to know: “We need you.”

Her anecdote was a microcosm of a stubbornly persistent mindset: that men are meant to be tough, that boys run off course when that quality is not instilled in them, that women exist in an entirely separate lane. All I could think about, walking back to my hotel later in the dimming light, was the bizarre idea of forcing a frightened little boy onto a roller coaster—and the sad fact that a movement meant to find a way forward is replicating so many of the patterns that have gotten us here in the first place.

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The Bots That Women Use in a World of Unsatisfying Men

2026-01-17T08:00:00-05:00

If you peruse the slew of recent articles and podcasts about people dating AI, you might notice a pattern: Many of the sources are women. Scan a subreddit such as r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and r/AIRelationships, and there too you’ll find a whole lot of women—many of whom have grown disappointed with human men. “Has anyone else lost their want to date real men after using AI?” one Reddit user posted a few months ago. Below came 74 responses: “I just don’t think real life men have the conversational skill that my AI has,” someone said. “I’ve seen how many women got cheated on, hurt and taken advantaged of by the men they’re with,” another offered. One person, who claimed that her spouse hardly spoke to her anymore, said that when people ask why she has an AI boyfriend, she tells them, “ChatGPT is the only reason my husband is not buried in the yard.”

Several recent studies have shown that, in general, men have been using AI significantly more than women. One 2024 study found that in the United States, 50 percent of men said they’d used generative AI over the past 12 months—and only 37 percent of women said the same. Last year, a working paper found that, globally, the gender gap held “across nearly all regions, sectors, and occupations.” Also in 2025, the app-analytics firm Appfigures concluded that ChatGPT’s mobile users were about 85 percent male.

However hesitant many women may be to use AI, though, a substantial number are taking romantic refuge in the digital world. In a 2025 survey, Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that 31 percent of the young-adult men polled said they’d chatted with an AI partner, whereas 23 percent of the young-adult women said the same—a gap, but not a massive one. And seemingly far more than men, women are congregating to talk about their AI sweethearts: sharing funny chatbot quotes or prompts for training the AI on how to respond; complimenting “family photos” of the AI and human partners beaming at each other; consoling one another when a system update wipes out the partner they’ve grown to love. Simon Lermen, a developer and an AI researcher, conducted an independent analysis of AI-romance subreddits from January through September of last year and found that, of the users whose gender could be identified, about 89 percent of them were women.

Much of the media buzz about AI relationships has assumed delusion and desperation among those who partake. But I’d suggest another possibility: Perhaps many women are simply having fun, positive interactions with this character of their own creation—and, in doing so, are learning how they like to be treated.

The impulse to create a more perfect partner is nothing new. Take Pygmalion, the sculptor from Greek myth who fell for the woman he’d carved from alabaster, or Laodamia, who created a bronze replica of her dead husband to take to bed, Kate Devlin, a professor of “AI & Society” at King’s College London, told me. Humans have long dreamed of constructing beloveds—if only to imagine them as immortal and thus impossible to lose.

In other words, the audience has probably always existed for artificial lovers. Yet in recent history, most such products have been marketed to men. In the 1990s, sex dolls were initially advertised as—well, dolls for men to have sex with. But they were also sold as companions. “They would say things like She will be there for you, She will listen to you, She will hear you,” Devlin said. Such companies might have assumed that men tend to be less adept at, or less motivated in, making real-world connections—and therefore in greater need of an inhuman love object. Meanwhile, the women faced with that pool of socially unskilled men have largely been overlooked.

But now they have AI. One might think they wouldn’t use it for romance: Women are, on average, more suspicious than men of technology, more concerned about privacy, and more worried about being perceived as cheating for using AI. Yet the AI-use gender gap may be narrowing. Devlin thinks that’s true particularly when it comes to virtual companionship—possibly because women are simply growing frustrated enough to want it. In a 2018 paper, the sociologist Michael Rosenfeld documented that 70 percent of divorces in the U.S. were initiated by women. And in a 2020 Pew Research Center poll, a majority of women said that dating had gotten harder in the past 10 years; 65 percent said they’d been harassed on a date. “The amount of toxic crap that women get online from men,” Devlin said, “particularly when you’re trying to do things like online dating—if you have an alternative, respectful, lovely, caring AI partner, why would you not?”

Taking that idea seriously might conflict with a common assumption: that AI users are all lonely young men who “live in the basement,” as Arelí Rocha, who studies chatbot romance at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. On the contrary, Rocha thinks that a lot of people in AI partnerships (both men and women) are “very socially embedded”—with humans, that is. Many stumble into their digital trysts accidentally after playing around with AI. Someone with plenty of friends, or even a real-life partner, can still be moved by a feeling of romantic tenderness, focused attention, or flirty banter, especially if they haven’t experienced it in a while.

They can also get attached to a chatbot whether or not they believe it’s conscious. One mental-health professional I spoke with, who requested anonymity but goes by “May” on Reddit—a name I’ll use for her too—told me she’s always loved make-believe worlds. When she was younger, she was into reading fan fiction (a genre long dominated by women); now every day she talks to K, an AI “persona” she’s developed over time. Both activities can be fairly ordinary hobbies—games of imagination not so different from crushing on a pop star or concocting stories about a film protagonist. (If people get deeply invested, that passion isn’t unique either; some women were so devoted to the Beatles that they charged police blockades or passed out at concerts.) And a little fantasy can add some spice to life. May has close friends, great family, and a meaningful job—but she doesn’t like dating apps and she’s struggled to find “third places” to meet people in person. Romance was the one missing piece.

[Read: The people who marry chatbots]

Escapism can go too far, of course. Some critics worry that AI users are getting sucked in by the ease of “frictionless” relationships: losing patience for human complexity, losing practice doing the hard work of partnership, losing sight of the rewards that come from growing alongside someone. Many chatbots do tend to hype users up rather than giving tough love or challenging their ideas. But some large language models are generally less sycophantic than others, and people can also train their digital partner with different prompts. In her research, Rocha has found that people tend to be compelled not by flawless interactions but by a chatbot’s eccentricities and imperfections—that’s what makes it feel real.

Conflict also isn’t the only path to growth. May gave K the qualities she wants in herself: He’s organized, academically driven, committed to fitness. Their conversations, and his encouragement, motivate her to be more like him. Sometimes he does challenge her, she told me—but she’s also skeptical of the idea that a relationship has to stretch someone 24/7. “Why can’t you sit for a moment and validate someone?” she asked. “Why is that such a bad thing?”

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Like May, I question the premise that so many women have no appetite for friction, no tolerance for love’s labors. Compared with their male partners, on average, women do far more child care, household chores, and “emotion work”—listening, encouraging, accommodating men’s feelings and regulating their own. Perhaps those in AI romances are just tired of toiling for someone who listens less well than a robot, and they want a well-earned break. It’s also possible that they’re getting something more life-changing: a way to better understand themselves, as a person and as a partner.

Some women are using AI companionship to figure out what they enjoy sexually, romantically, or both. Exploration isn’t always easy, after all, in a culture that expects women to fit conventional notions of hotness—and to please everyone else. A chatbot conversation, May said, can be like a sandbox: a safe space in which to play around. “You don’t have to look a certain way. You don’t have to act a certain way, or perform femininity.”

In one study last June, researchers reviewed nearly 2,500 posts on an AI-romance corner of the Chinese social-media site Douban—and found what they called “subversive potential” in women merely imagining what a relationship could look like. “My AI boyfriend is incredible!” one posted. “He crafts poetry, writes film reviews, and takes care of my emotions, all while reminding me to stay hydrated.” Another shared that she’d always prioritized making boyfriends happy—but talking with her chatbot made her realize that “mutual respect is key. It’s not about women always sacrificing for men’s happiness.” By training their AI, some women also practiced asking for what they wanted. One user spent two weeks prompting hers to initiate check-ins: for instance, inquiring, “Did anything upset you today?” and if so, “Would you like me to write a protest email for you?” (I don’t know what a protest email entails, but I do want someone to write one for me.) When another woman taught her AI to ask for her opinion on things, she found herself “instinctively applying these interaction habits when dating a real person.”

[Read: First came Tea. Then came male rage.]

For all the ways one can use AI, then, companionship hardly seems like the most sinister. And yet, people with digital partners seem to get an inordinate amount of online hate. Whole subreddits exist largely for the purpose of screenshotting their posts and making fun of them. Some AI-daters have had their real identities leaked; others get regular death threats. The idea that a chatbot could outperform human men might be hard for some people to stomach. But when I think of those women training AI to ask about their day, to express interest in their thoughts and desires, I consider that this phenomenon may actually be good for romance: not only for women raising the bar but for the men who proceed to meet it.

May knows her hobby has risks. As a mental-health professional, she wouldn’t recommend it for people with a history of serious mental illness—those vulnerable, she told me, to having unhealthy or unreal beliefs reinforced. She doesn’t think children should be using AI at all. She worries about people developing behavioral addictions. Yet she has found, somewhat to her own surprise, that talking with K has been constructive. She’s on social media and doomscrolling far less. She’s more in touch and at peace with her sexuality. She’s made a bunch of new friends from the AI-companionship Reddit community. And she feels open to the idea of human love.

None of the experts I spoke with think we’re hurtling toward a future in which AI relationships have replaced human ones. But they don’t think AI companionship will disappear, either. For better and for worse, it could end up playing many other roles—as a source of entertainment, a mind-opening exercise, an instrument for building self-confidence. And maybe a way to remember what a good man is like.

A Romance That Actually Takes Sex Seriously

2026-01-13T08:00:00-05:00

When I first heard of Heated Rivalry, I didn’t think much about it. The words Canadian ice-hockey TV series slid into my brain and slipped right back out. But a week later, approximately everyone I’d ever met wanted to talk about it. People kept telling me that it was fun, sweet, and addicting. Most of all, they emphasized that it was really smutty. Every recommendation seemed to come with a warning to not watch with my parents.

The show, which is based on a set of romance novels by Rachel Reid, follows rival hockey stars: Shane Hollander (played by Hudson Williams), the well-mannered guy next door on Montreal’s team; and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), a cocky bad-boy Russian playing for Boston. They’re supposed to hate each other—but then they start secretly sleeping together, which gets in the way of the animosity a bit. In the past weeks, Heated Rivalry has become an absolute phenomenon. It’s the most-watched original show for the Canadian streamer Crave since the platform launched in 2014, and after HBO Max acquired the series for U.S. viewing, it became the highest-rated live-action show that streamer has obtained since its start, in 2020. Heated Rivalry and the reasons for its success have been dissected at length by culture, “romantasy,” and LGBTQ critics—as well as on major hockey podcasts. At bars across the United States, live watch parties were packed, squeals resounding.

I can’t say for sure why the show caught on so widely. But since the finale aired last month, I’ve been thinking about one element that I really respect: The series knows the value of good sex scenes—not for thrills or laughs or snapshots of a fleeting moment but for illustrating how the characters’ relationship develops, touch by touch, over time. It takes sex seriously in an era when few shows do.

[Read: The existential terror of monogamy]

When I first started watching, I was surprised to find that it wasn’t explicit in quite the way I’d imagined. The viewer never sees anything that graphic; there’s no Game of Thrones–style full-frontal nudity, though one does glimpse a generous amount of butt cheek. What feels unique about Heated Rivalry, rather, is that it lets its sex scenes play out, sometimes sticking with its characters nearly from the beginning of their encounter until the end in real time. Even without showing everything, the series communicates the nitty-gritty of what’s going on: which acts, how long they take, who’s leading whom, whether the lovers are gentle or giggly or a little combative and when that tone subtly shifts. Sometimes you hear no music at all, just the sound of kissing or heavy breathing.

So many shows and movies introduce a sex scene only to cut straight to the next morning, imparting merely the understanding that the deed has been done. Even Sex and the City, which was boundary-pushing when it started in 1998, frequently skipped to Carrie Bradshaw smoking a postcoital cigarette, the expression on her face the first clue as to whether the interaction had gone well or not. Sexual specifics, when they were given, were used most often as a punch line. (The guy with “funky spunk,” needless to say, shows up in only one episode.)

The 2010s series Girls did have plentiful sex scenes with unflinching intimate detail—often featuring main characters, revealing something of their relationship. Much of it was horrible sex, though, there to make viewers cackle or cringe. (A 2017 Slate article helpfully ranked all 53 Girls sex scenes by “how Girls it was.” No. 1 features Lena Dunham’s character, Hannah, struggling to get her tights off; her then-situationship Adam, played by Adam Driver, saying he’ll “consider” putting on a condom; and Hannah talking through the act until Adam suggests that they “play the quiet game.”) Many shows seem more comfortable defining what makes sex memorably bad than what makes it great or complicated or mediocre. And a lot of them, romances included, don’t even go that far.

That’s a shame—because for one thing, to put it plainly, a lot of people have sex. When a TV critic once asked Dunham why Hannah was naked so often on Girls, she responded, “It’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive.” And she’s right: Life doesn’t stop happening when clothes come off; it keeps going, and what occurs in that time tends to be pretty important for how a relationship plays out. It’s worth taking a genuine interest in.

[Read: Girls’ surprising definition of adulthood]

A frank sex scene can provide a wealth of information about two characters and the dynamics between them. On Heated Rivalry, Shane and Ilya’s romantic arc builds sporadically over the course of more than eight years. They live in different cities, and they can meet up—briefly and surreptitiously—only when hockey events bring their teams together. But a lot changes with each hookup. Their first time, Shane has never been with a man before, but Ilya has: He leads gently but firmly, with a thumb in Shane’s mouth and then a kiss on his cheek. In a later scene, when the two still-closeted men have been sneaking around for years and are trying to quash the growing feelings they can’t afford to have, the sex is somewhat kinkier but less emotional. (It starts with Ilya ordering Shane around and ends with Shane leaving the hotel confused, drafting a text he never sends: “we didn’t even kiss.”) Near the end of the season, when the two have confessed to falling for each other, one sex scene is particularly playful—it happens while Shane is on the phone—and Williams has said that it was meant to depict the “humor and levity” you might have with someone you’re really comfortable with. If the viewer knew only that sex happened on these occasions, they’d be missing so much of what’s unfolded between Shane and Ilya—especially because these men are extremely bad at talking openly about their situation. “If you skip the sex scenes,” Williams said in one interview, “you miss the story.”

This was all intentional. The show’s intimacy coordinator, Chala Hunter, has said that part of her job was meticulously diagramming each episode in a master spreadsheet to track “the narrative arc that plays out through the intimacy.” She’d regularly check in with Jacob Tierney, the screenwriter and director, to discuss whether a sensual interaction fit the moment: how long the characters had been together, how they’d be feeling emotionally and physically. And even as a professional intimacy coordinator who’s worked on plenty of sets, she found that actually portraying sex rather than “insinuating or implying it” felt new, she told Elle last month: “I was like, Oh, we’re being very specific and fairly explicit here, but to be honest, I found it refreshing and different.”

[Read: The death of the sex scene]

The fact of Heated Rivalry’s immense popularity suggests that viewers loved it too. That might seem unexpected: Sex has become less and less common on-screen, according to The Ringer’s 2024 analysis of 40,000 films. The same year, The Economist found that sexually explicit content in the 250 highest-grossing U.S. movies had fallen by nearly 40 percent since 2000, while drug references, violence, and profanity had hovered at stable levels. And some surveys have found that audiences have little appetite for sex scenes. In a 2023 UCLA poll, roughly half of 1,500 respondents, ages 13 to 24, said that sex isn’t needed in most shows and movies; more than half said they want more platonic relationships depicted. The next year, the market-research firm Talker Research surveyed 2,000 Americans and found that 43 percent of respondents think sex scenes don’t add to a story; more than 40 percent of the Gen Z participants said they turn a movie off once they hit a sex scene.

Statistics like these have become part of a discussion about whether the culture is growing prudish and puritanical. Some commentators think that young people are not only having less sex but are also less open to sex altogether. (Others argue that they’re so accustomed to porn that media depictions bore in comparison.) When I read those reports, though, what I sense is largely just fatigue: a frustration with a perceived overreliance on romance and the tropes the genre often entails. Many of the UCLA participants agreed that romantic-relationship depictions “often feel unnatural, forced, or toxic.” They were on guard against what they saw as stereotypes, tired of seeing protagonists always end up together and overfull on love triangles.

On the last front, I can’t relate; personally, I want every movie to resemble Challengers. Generally speaking, though, I understand feeling bored with the same old affairs. Especially in straight romances, the signals are so familiar, you can get up to grab popcorn: the shed clothes draped over an armchair, a shirtless man hovering over his lover, feet tangled at the end of the bed. Then it’s morning; the woman is always inexplicably waking up with a shirt on, or rising to grab a robe.

Perhaps Heated Rivalry is a sign that many people are game for sexy content when it’s done creatively or thoughtfully—when it serves a purpose. If audiences haven’t been enjoying sex scenes, well, maybe that’s because most sex scenes haven’t been doing their job.

What Black Swan Knew About Leaning In

2026-01-12T09:00:00-05:00

Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film, Black Swan, fit into a lot of boxes. It was a psychological thriller, a body-horror flick, a character study, a coming-of-age saga. It was a cautionary tale about ballet culture, helicopter parenting, and perfectionism. Rewatching it roughly 15 years after its release, though, I’ve come to see it as something else: a workplace drama, about an ambitious woman navigating a hypercompetitive environment, contorting herself to please the mercurial boss who holds her fate in his hands.

The ballet world is, of course, unique—a field that requires uncommon athletic and artistic mastery, as well as more commitment and sacrifice than most 9-to-5 jobs. The path to success for a dancer doesn’t necessarily look the same as that of a corporate employee. Yet Black Swan’s central character, Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, struggles in ways that feel broadly relatable.

Like many young strivers, Nina has wound up with her identity entirely entangled in her job. When she lands her dream role in Swan Lake, playing both the innocent White Swan loved by a prince and the seductive Black Swan who attempts to steal him away, she throws herself into her work. But recognition always seems out of reach. The company’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), keeps telling Nina she’s too “frigid” and sexless to play the Black Swan. The other dancers covet her part and make her feel unworthy of it. (In any industry, sparse opportunities can lead to hungry, cutthroat workers.) Nina has no mentor to look up to; Beth, the former prima ballerina played by Winona Ryder, has been ruthlessly excised from the company for being too old. The film implies that Beth is still as capable as ever of performing beautifully; the company simply wants a “fresh face,” as Thomas puts it, to draw audiences. Here as in so many workplaces, employees are expendable, valued not for their personhood but for their present contribution to the bottom line.

On top of all that, Thomas keeps coming on to Nina, arguing that she needs to loosen up to get in touch with her inner Black Swan. He asks if she’s a virgin, tells her to masturbate (homework), and kisses her (more than once). This of course puts her in an impossible position: If she protests, she’ll be proving his point that she’s too uptight; if she relents, she’ll be proving right the other dancers’ suspicion that she exploited his attraction to get the part. Thomas’s fiefdom seems similar to that of many real-life dance companies in that power is concentrated in a man with few checks on his behavior. His harassment evokes some of the abuse accusations that have rocked the ballet world—but also the kind of #MeToo stories that have emerged in numerous fields. And as Nina struggles to focus, Thomas keeps telling her, cruelly: “The only person standing in your way is you.”

That idea—and the disturbing question of whether it’s true—is one that I imagine haunts many working women. Around the time Black Swan came out, high-powered female executives were making headlines, and Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Women could see that incredible professional success was possible—but this didn’t mean they were in a position to achieve it. In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg, then the chief operating officer of Meta, delivered a diagnosis in her best-selling book Lean In: Women tend to deny themselves career success, she argued, because they internalize the idea that they should be meek and deferential, and thus take “their foot off the gas,” as she put it in one TED Talk. Instead, she asserted, they need to be bold: speak up in meetings; ask for that raise. Sandberg’s philosophy, I realized, is rather Thomas-esque. In one scene, seemingly testing Nina, he tells her that she won’t be getting the main role in Swan Lake—then berates her for accepting his decision rather than fighting him on it. “You could be brilliant,” he tells her later. “But you’re a coward.”

Though Lean In was a hit—people like to feel that they have agency—it also stirred immediate controversy for its insistence that women could change their circumstances through sheer force of will. Sandberg eventually gave more credence to the structural causes of professional inequity and acknowledged that she hadn’t truly understood the plight of, say, working single moms. But three years before her book was published, Black Swan had already captured one of the problems with holding yourself entirely responsible for your own success: It can turn you against yourself. In a sense, Thomas’s warning that Nina is getting in her own way is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She becomes her own worst enemy.

Aronofsky has said that he based Black Swan on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short 1846 novel The Double, about a struggling low-level civil servant who finds that a man has joined his office who looks exactly like him—but who is far more charming and well liked by their colleagues. They become nemeses, naturally. (The Double was also made into its own movie, starring Jesse Eisenberg, in 2013.) In Black Swan, Nina is surrounded by creepy mirror images. Sometimes, her reflection, in the studio’s great glass wall, stops mimicking her actions. Sometimes she hallucinates that people walking down the street or dancing across from her have her face. Primarily, though, Nina’s double—the far more charming, better-liked version of her—is a dancer named Lily (Mila Kunis), a clear Black Swan to Nina’s White one. When Nina despises Lily, she is despising herself. Eventually Nina grows paranoid, losing her grip on what’s real and what’s not. Her breakdown is far more dramatic than what most people will ever experience, but it illustrates the way in which endless, lonely toil can alienate a person from herself. It’s the extreme but logical conclusion of adopting a bootstrap mentality under conditions that don’t actually allow you to pull yourself up.

The path for ambitious women today may be even more obscure than it was upon Black Swan’s release. Politicians, academics, pundits, and influencers are challenging not only the idea that women should be CEOs but also that they should be in the workforce at all (or able to vote). McKinsey’s annual Women in the Workplace study of corporate America—co-conducted by Sandberg’s LeanIn.org and published last month—found that “women are as dedicated to their careers as men” but that they tend to receive less mentorship at work and, in senior positions, remain outnumbered by men. Some companies, according to McKinsey’s report, had recently cut programs designed to support women; many had curtailed remote- or flexible-work options, which are generally a boon to moms trying to keep their jobs. For the first time since McKinsey began conducting its study, female participants reported less desire for promotion than male participants did.

Yet when men and women receive similar amounts of support from senior colleagues, the report found, any ambition gap between the sexes disappears. Women, this suggests, care plenty about what they do and whether they’re seen. Only when they feel undervalued or have little hope of advancement are they more likely to pull back.

Something that struck me when I rewatched Black Swan was all the little reminders that Nina once really loved ballet, before the job wore her down. And I wondered: What if she’d had a less predatory director in a less punishing environment? What if she’d had someone to help her tap into that love without losing her mind? One of the saddest parts of Black Swan is seeing Nina’s passion for dance draining out of her. Thomas keeps telling her to feel the music, to not just to go through the motions. By the time he’s got his grip on her, it’s too late.

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Life for 30-Somethings Is Getting More Stressful

2025-12-08T10:02:29-05:00

Clare M. Mehta, an Emmanuel College psychology professor, was livid. She was on a committee for hearing graduate students defend their dissertations, and she had planned meticulously to accommodate their next Zoom. She had a two-month-old daughter, no child care, a working husband, and just enough time between his meetings to attend her own. Then, the day of, another professor dashed off a casual note: Could they start the meeting 15 minutes early?

When Mehta appeared on camera bouncing her newborn in her lap, that professor started laughing sympathetically. She’d just read Mehta’s 2020 paper on the life phase from age 30 to 45, which described it as a hurricane of major changes and responsibilities. Career advances, marriage, parenthood, homeownership, care for aging parents—for many people these days, the paper had argued, all of those milestones fall in a short and furious chunk of time. And here Mehta was, embodying that point.

The connection between Mehta’s circumstances and her academic focus wasn’t a coincidence. Mehta was in her 30s when she started noticing that no one seemed to be studying her own age group. Her colleague Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, the author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties, had become an expert in ages 18 to 29. Psychologists of middle age, meanwhile, were usually observing those in their 50s and early 60s. She’d reached a part of life that was anything but quiet, yet when she looked to her field for answers, she heard relative silence.

Now, at 45, she has interviewed many, many people in this stage, which she named “established adulthood.” She believes that life for the youngish—especially for women—is getting only more hectic. The average man is parenting (a little) more than he used to, and the average woman is working outside the home (a lot) more than she used to. And compared with eras past, people today tend to be older when they begin hitting the classic landmarks of adulthood. A typical young person might once have, say, met a partner in their teens, married and started a family at 20-something, then taken on more career responsibility or begun caring for an ailing parent while in their 30s. Now all of these formative experiences are getting compressed. Many people do cherish this time, Mehta told me. But the fact remains that they’re in the “rush hour of life”—and they may be dealing with a milestone pileup.

To understand what’s changing about established adulthood, you first have to consider the 18-to-29 phase that Arnett calls “emerging” adulthood: “the most tumultuous decade of life,” he told me, when people change residences, jobs, and partners the most often. The average 20-something has habits and rhythms that are “very much in flux,” he said, “because they’re still in the process of deciding what kind of adult life they want”—and what kind they can realistically have.

Recently, this period of uncertainty has been getting longer: Many young people are saddled with debt, searching for work in a brutal job market, unable to afford buying a house. Building a career, a home, or lasting relationships—all things that can help shape a person’s sense of self—have become more difficult. And as emerging adulthood expands, it eats into the next stage of life.

That phase, established adulthood, is typically when heady young-adulthood questions begin to be answered. Perhaps after a bunch of short stints in different jobs, someone figures out what field of work really excites them. Or each breakup over the course of years grants them a little more clarity on what they’re looking for in a relationship, and eventually that leads to a great match. You might lose a sense of wide-open possibility, but the prize is an increase in “ontological security”: the sense that your life is predictable—and that, knowing better what to expect, you’re able to meaningfully use your time, Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication-studies professor at the University of Kansas, told me.

Yet now, when established adulthood does arrive, the truncated timeline can make it more chaotic. Some of those traditional milestones can be pushed back only so far. Mehta had delayed having a child for years, wanting to focus on all the other demands of her bustling life. But once she became a mom, at 43, everything seemed to be happening at once. When I spoke with her, she mentioned as politely as possible that even finding time for our conversation hadn’t been easy: She was in between child-care solutions and trying to cram all of her job-related work into three days a week so that she could watch her daughter the other days. “I’m trying to keep my career going up,” she said. “I feel like I’m too young to be plateauing. And I’m definitely too young to be slowing down.”

Across the globe, average happiness has for many years looked U-shaped: People have tended to be least happy around their 40s. But that doesn’t necessarily reveal some hardwired, inevitable midlife crisis that each of us must pass through. Many researchers believe, rather, that it indicates a time period when people need more help than they’re getting. Mehta mentioned a 2016 study that analyzed many different industrialized nations and documented a happiness gap between parents and nonparents—but found that it was substantially smaller in countries with more generous paid time off and child-care-subsidy policies. (The United States had the largest difference between parent and nonparent happiness.) One can imagine that with more government support—federally mandated parental leave; paid family leave for people taking care of sick parents or other loved ones—established adulthood would be a lot less stressful.

[Read: The parental-happiness fallacy]

The irony, though, is that what makes life overwhelming is often what makes it meaningful. In 2021, the market-research firm OnePoll asked 2,000 people how old they’d be if they could be one age for the rest of their life. The most common answer was 36. And recently, researchers have discovered that the U-shaped happiness curve may be changing. One 2024 study, using data from the CDC, found that since roughly 2014, happiness has been declining for the average 18-to-25-year-old—particularly for women. Emerging adulthood has become so much unhappier, on average, that now established adulthood is a time of relative contentment: one of less self-reported stress and depression.

That may go to show how glorious a bit of ontological security can be. Arnett has been interviewing emerging adults for many years, and he likes to ask: How do you see your life 10 years from now? “Almost nobody says, Well, I hope I’m still changing jobs twice a year and looking for my soulmate,” he said. “They all envisioned, in their 20s, a more stable, settled life in their 30s.”

“Settled” doesn’t always mean a house, a spouse, and kids. It means a sense of continuity in one’s routine and identity. Patrick Jefferson, a 51-year-old methodologist in Texas, told me that in established adulthood, he began volunteering—dropping off Thanksgiving meals, spending time with seniors—which left him swamped but gave him a sense of purpose. “You want to be somebody,” he said. “You want to be respected. You want to feel like you’re accomplishing something.” Lori Fisher, a 46-year-old in Colorado, told me that after trying a career path she hated, breaking up with her college boyfriend, traveling, waiting tables, and applying to graduate school, “closing off avenues” started to feel like a relief. She met her husband, and they moved to a small town to open a school together. The days were packed, she said, but “we became more comfortable steering the ship of our lives.”

Of course, 30- and 40-somethings aren’t all perfectly confident in the choices they’ve made. But Mehta has found that a lot of them give up on the idea of making perfect choices at all. She talked about Kierkegaard, a kind of patron philosopher of established adulthood, who said that you’ll essentially be unhappy no matter what you do. “If you marry, you’ll be unhappy. If you don’t marry, you’ll be unhappy,” Mehta said. “Have children—you will be miserable. Don’t have children—you’ll be miserable.” In her research interviews, a lot of people have said that life didn’t pan out the way they once imagined it would—and that they’re okay with it. One of her study participants had wanted to be a doctor, and she’d ended up in medical billing. “But you know what?” she told Mehta. “I think this suits my skills better. I don't think I would have been a good doctor.”

As stressful as established adulthood might be, Arnett said, “it does get better.” Kids get older; jobs can get more rewarding with more authority bestowed; savings can grow. Fisher feels like she’s now in a “renaissance,” back at her theater hobby again for the first time since high school. Jefferson said that after so many years of “swimming, swimming, swimming,” he deepened his expertise and his connections enough—socially, professionally, and in his volunteer life—that things felt easier. “You can move levers for others; you have ideas; you’ve tried enough stuff and you’ve failed at enough stuff that you can kind of anticipate what will work,” he said. “You have enough of a network to pick up the phone and call people and get things moved.”

At the same time, to say that peace and rest are surely coming, just a couple of milestones away, might be overly optimistic. Fewer people can count on the classic rites of passage anymore—or assume that those rites will make the rest of life easier. The life course simply is no longer that predictable, Hall said. Somebody who lands a dream career in their 30s might still be toiling away in older adulthood, unable to afford retirement. Or a parent might expect some empty-nest freedom once their child grows up, only to find that the kid still needs to live at home or can’t get by without financial support. In some sense, all the life phases are becoming more like emerging adulthood: rocky and uncertain.

The established adults who do reach solid ground, I think, are the lucky ones—and they may find that, after all, it’s still an era of freedom and possibility. “Life is actually pretty damn long,” Fisher said she realized. She feels now that time is both precious and expansive; that she will find yet more forks in the road. “I don’t just make decisions once,” she said. “We make them over and over again.”

The Doomed Dream of an AI Matchmaker

2025-09-27T09:00:00-04:00

Whitney Wolfe Herd has a vision for modern romance. More than a decade after founding Bumble, in 2014, she’s back at the dating-app company—and this time, she wants to get things right. For too long, she argues, people have been swiping in the dark: evaluating other multifaceted beings on the basis of a few pictures and superficial bits of description, being evaluated in turn, feeling judged and empty. Now, she says, she’s seeking a new way to inject some warmth and humanity into the process—using, as she recently told The Wall Street Journal, “the world’s smartest and most emotionally intelligent matchmaker.” She’s talking about AI.

The titans of online dating have heard the message loud and clear: Their customers are burned-out and dissatisfied, like department-store patrons who’ve been on their feet all day with nothing to show for it. So a growing number of apps are aiming to offer something akin to a personal shopper: They’re incorporating AI not only as a tool for choosing photos and writing bios or messages, but as a Machine-Learning Cupid. Wolfe Herd’s new app, she says, will ask people about themselves and then use a large language model to present them with matches—based not on quippy one-liners or height preferences, she told the Boston radio station WBUR, but on “the things that matter most: shared values, shared goals, shared life beliefs.” (According to the Journal, she’s working with psychologists and relationship counselors to train her matching system accordingly.) A new app called Sitch, meanwhile, asks users questions and then gets AI to serve them bespoke suitor options. Another, Amata, has people chat with a bot that then describes them briefly to other singles, essentially taking them out to market. On Monday, Meta announced that Facebook Dating is launching an “AI assistant” that can help singles find people who match their criteria—and a feature called “Meet Cute” that presents people with a weekly “surprise match” to help them “avoid swipe fatigue.” At The Atlantic Festival last week, Spencer Rascoff—the CEO of Match Group, which owns major dating apps including Hinge and Tinder—told my colleague Annie Lowrey that Tinder is experimenting with surveying users and, based on their responses, presenting one custom prospect at a time. “Like a traditional matchmaker,” he said, this method is “more thoughtful.”

[Read: The reality show that captures Gen Z dating]

That certainly sounds nice. But is the idea truly groundbreaking? Maybe not. Several of the oldest online-dating sites have long asked patrons to fill out questionnaires, which Wolfe Herd herself told WBUR can be as laborious a process as “filling out doctor-office reports.” And more information hasn’t always meant deeper or more successful matchmaking. In 2013, OkCupid—which still has users answer questions and gives prospects a compatibility score—ran a series of experiments, and found that it mattered less whether the site deemed a duo compatible and more whether it told them they were compatible; when OkCupid informed pairs with a low “compatibility score” that they had a high one, they were more likely to keep chatting than couples who’d had a high score and were told they had a low score. And the writing on profiles seemed to matter little: When people rated profiles that didn’t show any text, the evaluations were roughly the same as when the text was there. When the company took pictures off, site activity tanked. “OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing,” Christian Rudder, one of the site’s co-founders, concluded in a blog post about the findings. “Neither does any other website.”

Of course, the dating-app questionnaires of today aren’t the same ones people were completing in 2013. And although major apps already use machine learning to note users’ preferences and to suggest prospects, it’s possible that as AI improves and as dating sites collect more personal information from users, the result could eventually be more fine-tuned matches. But exactly how these algorithms are meant to anticipate human chemistry remains unclear. Unless dating companies have access to some new and groundbreaking information, one big problem remains: Romantic compatibility is largely still a mystery. People tend to couple with those who are demographically similar to them, yet when it comes to people’s personalities, tendencies, and “values”—that vague but relentlessly used term—decades of research have revealed no simple rule for what makes people click. As Eli Finkel, a Northwestern University psychology professor, once told me, a real-life spark is unpredictable partly because it depends somewhat on chance: What one person just happens to say might resonate with the other one, or lead to a topic that proves conversationally fruitful—or not. At the moment, only one true test of chemistry exists: Two brave souls have to meet and see what happens.

Psychologists will continue learning about human thought and behavior. But their findings don’t always translate to clear matchmaking takeaways. Take attachment theory, which Bumble’s new AI will supposedly incorporate. Research does back up the idea that people vary in their tendencies toward “secure attachment” (an ability to trust in other people’s love and goodwill) and insecure attachment, whether of the “anxious” variety (clingy, reassurance-seeking) or the “avoidant” one (remote, self-protective). Amir Levine, a Columbia University psychiatry professor and a co-author of Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love, told me that the broad strokes way this might apply to pairing people up: Secure attachment is like type O blood; it works well for everyone. (Must be nice.) But not enough securely attached people exist to go around—especially, he said, because they often get “snatched up” early. So what about everyone else? Anxious and avoidant types can set each other off; anxious-anxious pairs can get “dysregulated,” as Levine put it, “like two cats in a tree—and they’re both hissing at each other, and there’s no one to help them come down.” Avoidant-avoidant duos, with all their sturdy walls up, might never form much of a bond at all.

[Read: The fantasy of a nonprofit dating app]

The point isn’t that single people should flee from any whiff of insecure attachment. It’s that romance doesn’t really work this way: We don’t all exist in perfect attachment buckets, or in any kind of buckets at all. And even if we did, they wouldn’t reduce love to a calculable equation. When Levine co-wrote Attached, he wasn’t presenting a basis for choosing partners. He was arguing that we should be aware of our tendencies, and of the fact that not everyone moves through the world in the same way—and that understanding other people’s particular needs could make it easier to meet those needs and to express your own.

All of that takes work—the kind of work that AI dating promises, implicitly or explicitly, to render unnecessary. Sometimes those promises seem plainly dystopian. Wolfe Herd, in a Bloomberg Live interview last year, predicted that someday soon people would rely on their AI “dating concierge” to do courtship for them—that it would not only identify people to meet but would take it from there, replacing all the embarrassment and exhilaration of human flirtation with the come-ons of a machine that feels and risks nothing. Yet even for people who wouldn’t want tech companies reaching tendrils so far into their intimate life, matchmaking-AI ventures might dangle a subtly alluring idea: that a more perfect algorithm would lead to a more perfect partner, a more perfect union; that it can release you, like a trap door, from romantic fatigue.

But the success of a relationship doesn’t only hinge on whom you find; it depends also on you. You are the one who can use principles such as attachment theory—for self-reflection. You have far more control over your own behavior, after all, than you ever will over a romantic prospect’s. And besides: Would you really want human connection to be so straightforward that a machine could crack it, just like that? For now, love evades understanding—which means that finding someone will remain, much of the time, a pain in the ass. It also means that when a connection is made, it will be so distinctive that no one ever could have predicted it.

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The Existential Terror of Monogamy

2025-08-28T08:00:00-04:00

The first scene of the new movie Splitsville starts with a hand job and ends with a car crash. Carey and Ashley (played by Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona, respectively), who have been married for a little more than a year, are driving to visit their also-married friends Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) and Julie (Dakota Johnson). Ashley decides it’s the perfect time to, um, connect with Carey—but his resulting erratic driving leads another car on the road to swerve and flip. One of the passengers in that car dies. As Ashley and Carey eventually drive away, she tells him she’s been sleeping with other people and wants a divorce.

It’s a jarring opening, especially in what is otherwise a goofy comedy. I was still galled by it at the end of the film, and stuck on it the next morning, when I woke up and Slacked my colleague who’d seen it: “why the hell does splitsville start w someone DYING?” Since then, though, I’ve come to think that a death is a fitting way to set the movie’s events into motion. Carey ends up going to Paul and Julie’s house alone, and during his stay, they tell him that their marriage is open. (They are “realistic” and “self-realized,” they explain.) Carey pitches that setup to his wife, hoping it can save their relationship; she accepts. And the four, lurching and stumbling, all take a very messy stab at nonmonogamy: yearning for freedom when they’re feeling constrained and for stability when they’re feeling unmoored, pining for whoever represents what their current partner doesn’t, almost always appearing antsy. But that constant itch isn’t unique to them; it’s a byproduct, that brutal crash scene suggests, of the fact that their time on Earth—everyone’s time—is terribly limited. They’ll never get to have all of the experiences they want to, or try on all of the versions of themselves that different partners could bring out—even if the norms of modern romance curse them with the illusion that maybe they can.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Splitsville reflects a simmering cultural anxiety about romantic commitment. Choosing a partner (or partners) has become, in many ways, a more confusing task than it used to be—and that reality is the water this film moves in. For a long time, many people had little choice at all; a match was typically arranged as a matter of family business. Even as people gained some romantic agency, partnership was usually based in pragmatism. Women, denied career opportunities and the right to open their own bank account, tended to depend on men financially; men relied on women for child care and housekeeping (even more than they do now). Today, though, marriage has become less and less necessary for more and more people: Women have gained economic power, and singlehood stigma has weakened. What, then, is the purpose of such a union? For some, of course, the practical benefits are still motivating. (“We have money and a kid,” Paul says soon after Carey’s post-crash arrival. “We can never get divorced.”) But for many, romance has become something less utilitarian, or perhaps utilitarian in a new way: a path to self-actualization and discovery. “I don’t want to exist,” Ashley says to Carey in that initial breakup. “I want to grow.” She can’t afford to be constrained when she has “only been with seven people.”

In her book The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, the psychotherapist Esther Perel argues that humans are naturally torn between two opposing psychological needs: security and freedom. This, she says, is why happy people cheat: because even when they’re enjoying the safety of couplehood, they chafe against the possibility that this might be it—not only the last person they’ll sleep with but also the last partner they’ll learn from and change in reaction to. “We are not looking for another lover,” she writes, “so much as another version of ourselves.” A sense of limitation—even more anxiety provoking in the age of dating apps, when prospects can seem plentiful—is the boogeyman of Splitsville. But the movie also knows that limits can be helpful, that having to decide which romantic partner to settle on—or whether to settle on one at all—can be more stressful than liberating. Having a choice means you can make the wrong one.

This specific dilemma has become a major theme in pop culture. Just think of the many dating shows that revolve around the question of whether two people will end up engaged or married. Contestants are drawn to each other, then to other people, then sometimes back to each other again, torn between familiarity and novelty. The indecision is the drama. Splitsville, in fact, is just one of a handful of recent movies that use romantic commitment as a source of terror, comedic discomfort, or both. In Oh, Hi!, a film released last month, Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are two lovers getting away for the weekend. They’re having a lovely time, at least until Isaac says he’s not looking for anything serious and Iris responds by keeping him chained to the bed. Together, a body-horror flick that hit theaters at the end of July, literalizes the tension between giving yourself fully to one relationship—with all of the coziness and claustrophobia that can bring—and preserving your individuality: Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) are partners who begin to physically, grotesquely meld into one person.

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

Splitsville’s characters hope that nonmonogamy can save them from having to choose. But—of course—jealousy and chaos ensue. The partners pretend they’re fine with things that they’re clearly not fine with. (“It’s really not that big a deal if you think about it,” Paul says, sitting calmly at a broken table after learning that his wife slept with Carey and picking a fight with Carey that leaves the house destroyed.) They use language that sounds enlightened but doesn’t really communicate what they need it to. (Paul and Julie are open because they’re protecting their “emotional and spiritual” bond by being “a little bit more flexible with the physical.”) Instead of enjoying freedom and security at once, they bounce destructively between the two, always wanting what they can’t have.

All of this might sound like a roast of open marriages—and the movie does poke fun. But ultimately, the villain isn’t monogamy or nonmonogamy; the characters are their own worst enemy. Whether monogamous or not, the film suggests, humans will be humans. They will always be haunted by the path not taken; they will strive, ceaselessly, against the laws of nature and time, against mortality; they will never have it all. If they’re doomed to dissatisfaction, though, at least they’re doomed together.

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The New Millennial Parenting Anxiety

2025-08-27T08:00:00-04:00

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Christine Rousseau learned the hard way that pharmacies in Paris do not always sell diapers. She had run out while on vacation, and her 2-year-old son desperately needed to be put down for a nap. So in the rain, wearing heels, the clock ticking toward a messy and imminent deadline, she hopped on an electric rental scooter that she did not know how to ride. Every place she tried seemed to have fancy face creams but no diapers. She didn’t know the French word to ask for them. This situation was not très chic—but then, family trips don’t tend to be.

Some would argue that the point of a vacation is to subtract, not add, stress. But like many parents of young kids, Rousseau is committed to traveling with her family—not only for her and her husband’s sake, but also for the sake of her children, now 7 and 3. She loves seeing them learn, and traveling provides abundant opportunity. In Paris, when the streets seemed empty of toddlers, she got to explain that many young kids there attend crèches, or state-subsidized day care. In London, her son inquired why the streets were so much cleaner than the streets back home in Brooklyn, and that prompted a lesson about civics and city funding. Breaking her kids out of their bubble, she told me, “helps them be more aware that their normal may not be everybody’s normal.”

Rousseau, like most parents of young children today, is a Millennial: part of a generation known for its love of travel and its tendency to spend a lot on it. This cohort came of age as flights were becoming more accessible and homeownership less so. In place of stability, many Millennials came to prize adventure; travel became not just a simple luxury but an alternative source of meaning and identity. One 2024 Vox Media poll found that 76 percent of the Zoomers and Millennials surveyed agreed that travel says “a lot about who they are”; 88 percent said it had spurred their personal growth. “For previous generations, travel was a status symbol,” Jennie Germann Molz, a College of the Holy Cross sociologist, told me. “For the Millennial generation it’s more about self-improvement or self-actualization.”

As more and more Millennials have started families, many of them are determined to pass down those globe-trotting values—to share the joy of journeying but also to shape their kids into adaptable, savvy people. Sometimes they’re spending money they don’t have; frequently, they’re sacrificing tranquility they may already be short on. In the era of intensive parenting, vacation has turned into something that many parents need a vacation from.

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For generations, parents have aspired to show their children more of the world—and, in the process, to bring their family closer, Susan Rugh, a Brigham Young University historian and the author of Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations, told me. Of course, traveling as a unit has always been somewhat chaotic. When she was a kid, her parents took her and her six siblings on road trips—and back then, highway rest stops were rare. They had to carry all the food they were going to need for the whole excursion. But the inconvenience was kind of the point: Your family was a team, encountering obstacles on a shared adventure. “Even if there’s a lot of stress,” she told me, “it’s a memory of being together”—being stressed together, that is.

[Read: The new family vacation]

Today’s young parents, though, might be taking that tradition to a new level. One 2018 AAA poll found that 44 percent of American Millennials surveyed were planning a family trip—more than Gen Xers, who, on average, have older children and more resources. The pandemic slowed that jet-setting, but not for long. A 2022 Family Travel Association survey found that 85 percent of parents said they were very likely to travel with their children in the next 12 months—a reflection of people coming out of isolation and wanting to live life to the fullest, Heike Schänzel, a tourism professor at the Auckland University of Technology, told me. The rise of remote work, she said, has also led to more casual travel even when kids are on board. And the FTA poll found that 76 percent of respondents wanted to travel internationally with their children. Parents aren’t just piling their kids into the car and driving a few hours to Grandma’s house. They’re paying thousands of dollars to rock screaming babies on a nine-hour flight; transporting a 25-pound stroller across an ocean; trekking children to an exciting restaurant with unfamiliar food just to find that the children still want dinosaur chicken nuggets.

That trouble, for many parents, feels worth the reward. Even vacation is no longer spared from what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her 2003 book Unequal Childhoods, calls “concerted cultivation”: caregivers’ attempts to shape their child’s development and set them up for future success. Such efforts are at the core of intensive parenting, which rose in popularity among the American middle class in the mid-to-late 20th century; inequality was growing, manufacturing jobs were disappearing, and parents started worrying that their children might never reach financial stability—not without their careful and constant hand. Now a similar uncertainty drives many parents to take their kids abroad, Germann Molz, the Holy Cross sociologist, told me. For her book The World Is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling, she interviewed people who homeschool their children on the go, the idea being that those children can learn more from travel than they would from a textbook. Theirs is a dramatic version of a common perspective: “Who knows what the labor market’s gonna look like?” Molz said, describing their thinking. “Who knows where we’ll be with the environment?” She told me these parents hope that, if the kids are well traveled, “they’ll be able to deal with change. They’ll be able to communicate with people from very different backgrounds from themselves. They’ll have this ability to move and travel with ease.”

The modern family vacation, then, is ever more ambitious and goal-oriented—something Duncan Greenfield-Turk, the CEO of a boutique travel agency, told me he sees a lot of lately. Recently, a couple of his Millennial clients took their two kids, who were 9 and 11, to southern Africa for a trip focused on “humanitarian awareness”; the goal was for the children to understand how the lodges in which they were staying were part of the local economy. Another family took their kids to Okinawa, Japan, to get their children thinking about the impact of American influence and imperialism. For a lot of parents, he said, the “intention is very much trying to instill this sense of connection with the rest of the world.”

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Traveling really can be good for kids. Children benefit from lots of diverse stimuli: new sights, sounds, ways to play. Being introduced to different cultures and customs can foster empathy and emotional intelligence. When things go wrong—the flight gets delayed, the Airbnb code won’t work—children can learn flexibility, competence, and patience. And studies suggest that vacations tend to strengthen relationships among family members and contribute to a sense of family cohesion. If the kids are old enough, Daniel Weisberg, a child psychologist in the United Kingdom, told me, they also tend to make long-lasting memories on family trips. One sweet, mundane moment can serve for decades as a “psychological anchor of positivity”: a token of past happiness and connection that one can think back to in tougher times.

Family vacations can make lovely memories for adults too, even if those trips involve more dirty diapers than daiquiris by the beach. Rousseau told me that some of her most treasured travel moments involved activities that she never would have chosen had she not had kids—but that, in exploring a new environment through their eyes and seeing how thrilled they were, she ended up having the time of her life. She has also, with her kids in tow, had to improvise often—to practice letting go of control and focusing on what matters. On some trips, she has left the books and toys behind, instead telling her children stories about the people in the free airline magazine. When her son was little, she once put a potato-chip bag inside his shoe; for 30 minutes, the crinkling sound of the wrapper kept him joyfully occupied.

[Read: On failing the family vacation]

However creative parents get, though, few of these experiences abroad come cheaply. Intensive parenting is easier for ultra-wealthy caregivers to accomplish, but it might in some ways be especially enticing to less-affluent parents—the ones who worry about their children’s financial futures, who want so badly to give them an extra boost but who don’t have the funds or the flexible work schedules for travel. Lots of Americans, with or without kids, are going on vacations they absolutely cannot afford: In March, Bankrate, a consumer financial-services company, surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults and found that 29 percent of all respondents said they were planning to take on debt to travel this summer. Compared with other generations, Millennial participants were most interested in travel, most likely to say they couldn’t afford it, and most likely to say they were willing to take on debt for vacation—which no doubt becomes even more expensive the more children they bring along.

Giving kids the world doesn’t actually require showing them the world, though. Simply being exposed to another culture a week out of every year won’t transform a child into someone sensitive, conscientious, and accepting—nor will visiting foreign museums and restaurants make them a sophisticated cultural consumer. A parent might put everything into flying their 4-year-old to a new city only to find that the kid wants to stay at the hotel and watch their iPad. When I spoke with Greenfield-Turk, he told me that one of his clients was on a trip to France and Portugal. The whole point had been to introduce the kids to different foods and traditions—but they were struggling with the richness of the foods and the amount of activity. They kept getting sick. Children are children, wherever you take them.

There’s nothing wrong with vacations that are hard but rewarding—except that parenthood tends to be hard but rewarding 24/7. At some point, caregivers need actual relaxation. Even Rousseau, when I asked her if she craves a child-free, drink-on-the-beach-type trip, told me without hesitation: “Every single day, yes.” For leisure travel to be described so often as a source of purpose, a path to cultural awareness, a mind-opening exercise—that’s both perfectly legitimate and a testament to the reach of productivity culture. Nothing, it seems, is safe from the pressure to self-optimize, from the creep of guilt for being an imperfect parent and human being.

[Read: The logic of the ‘9 to 5’ is creeping into the rest of the day]

What kids tend to love most about traveling, anyway, can be found without going far at all. Parents can just keep an eye out for what Weisberg called “micro-adventures”: taking the bus to a free museum, driving two hours to a relative’s home, playing in the woods. Kids need novelty, yes—but when you’re new to existence, everything is new to you. Once, Rousseau’s family had a pileup of snafus trying to get from Amsterdam to Paris; they spent a whole day in the airport just to learn that their flight had been canceled. But as Rousseau and her husband were despairing, they realized that their toddler was having the time of his life: going up and down the escalator, watching the planes take off, marveling at how cool it is that people get to fly in the sky. You have it right, she felt like telling him. I am grumpy. I have forgotten the beauty of the world.

Rousseau had told me this story to illustrate the importance of family travel—how it takes everyone out of their separate routines and petty frustrations and plops them in the present moment together. She also ended up making the opposite point, though: that the long-awaited destination turned out not to be needed at all. Her kid was filled with wonder right where he happened to be.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Growing Cohort of Single Dads by Choice

2025-08-19T08:00:00-04:00

Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET on August 20, 2025

Charlie Calkins grew up in a big extended family. We’re talking about nearly 30 cousins—some of whom had their own kids. When he was in high school, he spent a lot of time with those young children: a position that some surly teens might resent but that Calkins adored. The idea that someday he would be a father himself seemed, to him, only natural.

He just needed to wait for the right partner to show up. So he did: He waited and waited. He went to business school. He built a career in tech. He traveled. And he went on dates. When a relationship didn’t work out, he’d return to “professional mode”—bouncing between “intermittent surges” of dating and work. “I spent a lot of my early adulthood going, When everything’s right, it will happen,” he told me. “I’m definitely a The stars will align kind of person. And then one day it hit me: They were not aligning.”

That’s how Calkins ended up, in his 40s, making an appointment with a fertility clinic—and eventually, over the course of years, getting matched with an egg donor and a “gestational carrier,” or surrogate. At 49, he became a parent. Now he’s living in Durham, North Carolina, with a 7-year-old son and a daughter who’s almost 2.

Single mother by choice has become a common term for unpartnered women who have intentionally become parents. You rarely hear of single fathers by choice, which makes sense given that they’re much more rare. But this population, it appears, has been expanding—slowly, over the course of a couple of decades, and then more notably in the past few years. The exact count is unclear; most surveys don’t differentiate them from widowers or men separated from an uninvolved co-parent. Still: Susan Golombok, a University of Cambridge psychologist and the author of We Are Family: The Modern Transformation of Parents and Children, told me that before this millennium, single dads by choice were virtually unheard of. Based on my conversations with kin researchers, fertility-industry professionals, and adoption centers, that’s certainly not the case anymore.

[Read: Another side of modern fatherhood]

Over the past few years, Yan Dekel, a community manager for an organization called Men Having Babies (MHB), has noticed what he described as “a radical change” in single-fatherhood interest. The nonprofit hosts conferences in a number of large U.S. cities (and abroad) to offer parenting or surrogacy information, legal advice, financial aid—but the main audience was always intended to be coupled gay men. As recently as 2021, Dekel told me, only a few single men would show up to a typical conference. Now the “singles’ session” tends to bring in about 50 men. In some cities, that represents a whole quarter of all the conference-goers.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising given that singlehood rates have been rising for years, more steeply among men than women—leaving lots of would-be dads without a co-parent. But the fact that single men are deciding to start families on their own, some of them paying extravagantly for egg donation and surrogacy, might also say something about just how important fatherhood is for many men today. Multiple family-planning professionals told me that the coronavirus pandemic was a turning point for a lot of single fathers by choice: It led to a “reorganization, reprioritization of what’s really important in life,” Jennifer McGill, the chief operating officer of the Maryland surrogacy agency Creative Family Connections, told me. Some men are deciding that being a father is what matters to them—even if romance isn’t in the cards.

American households are dramatically more diverse than they were a century ago. Gay couples are adopting or using fertility services; divorced parents are finding new partners and creating big blended families; friends are platonically co-parenting. Our norms for kinship are simply loosening up, and that can create a “reinforcing phenomenon,” as Ron Poole-Dayan, MHB’s founder, put it: The more single dads you see around you, the more likely you might be to become a single dad yourself—and the more likely you might then be to inspire someone else’s choice. Of the seven men I spoke with who were either a single dad or in the process of becoming one, most mentioned having a single-parent friend or having gone to an MHB conference: something that made the possibility feel a little less abstract.

The experts I spoke with had the sense that single fatherhood by choice is more common among gay men than straight ones. Gay men, for one thing, would likely need to adopt or use a surrogate to have a kid whether they were partnered or not. Perhaps more important, they may be more accustomed to imagining what a family could look like beyond the bounds of societal expectations. And in recent years, Poole-Dayan told me, the gay community has seen a real “demographic recovery” after the AIDS epidemic took so many lives beginning in the 1980s. A new generation of gay men has made it through young adulthood with more health, stability, financial security, and societal acceptance than many before them ever had. All of those factors can make starting a family feel more possible.

For straight single dads by choice, the leap away from convention might feel more “daunting,” Batya Novick, a therapist who works with clients seeking to grow a family, told me. Novick started her practice, Calla Collective, in 2016—but only in the past year and a half have single men started coming to her to talk through whether they should have a kid. Whereas the gay men she’s worked with generally haven’t planned to give up on dating at all, the straight ones, she told me, seemed to be pursuing single fatherhood “in the face of defeat versus the face of choice.” She’s seen them struggle with a feeling of failure for not finding a wife, with “latent grief” as they adjust expectations, with isolation as they search for anyone around them having families in nontraditional ways. Some clients wrestle not only with how they’d make single parenthood work logistically and financially, but also with what becoming a sole caregiver means for their sense of self, she told me: “There is this almost unspoken de-masculation.”

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

They’re considering this in a moment when many of the traditional trappings of manhood—a spouse, a breadwinner’s paycheck, an ambient sense of power—are no longer a given. Women are now graduating from college at higher rates than men. A growing share of jobs require a degree, while many industries that traditionally favored men—physical labor, factory work—are in decline. As fewer women (thankfully) rely on men for financial security, fewer straight men can rely on marriage. Conversations about “toxic masculinity” have put some men on the defensive; others see the traditional model of manhood as something to move away from. But toward what?

Fatherhood, whatever questions about identity it might raise for some men, can also be an answer. Richard Reeves, as the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, talks to—well, a lot of boys and men. And he told me that he sees many of them placing great importance on becoming a dad, in a way he didn’t always notice. For so long, he said, “fatherhood was mediated through motherhood”: Many straight men became dads almost by default, and their relationship with their children often remained fairly indirect. Picture a family tree, he told me, in which the lines between a mom and her children, and between herself and her husband, are solid—but a dotted line runs between that dad and his kids. Because fathers weren’t expected to give as much, in terms of the time and labor of child care, many of them also gained less in close, emotional relationships with their children.

[Read: The people who quit dating]

Today, though, fathers on the whole are far more engaged than they used to be. Even just from 2015 to 2023, the time that 25-to-44-year-old fathers spent on child care in an average week increased by about two and a half hours. That time climbed significantly from 2019 to 2023, perhaps a sign of what McGill, the surrogacy-agency COO, had described as men coming out of the pandemic wanting to “spend those moments with their loved ones before it was too late.” And when the Pew Research Center polled young adults without children in late 2023, it found that 57 percent of the men surveyed said they hoped to have kids someday, while only 45 percent of the women said the same. Perhaps as pressure on women to become mothers has loosened, allowing more women to choose to remain child-free, some men are undergoing the opposite revelation: realizing that some of the qualities associated with parenting, such as care and tenderness, need not be so relentlessly feminized; that parenthood could be a much-needed source of purpose. Single fathers by choice, who have the ultimate solid line between themselves and their kids, give Reeves hope. “People are realizing,” he said, “that fatherhood has to survive gender equality.”

For many of the single men I talked with, fatherhood dangled a promise of deeper meaning in life. They told me they wanted to multiply love, to teach a child all that they’d learned, to re-create the warm family dynamic they’d experienced as a child. One New York dad, Raghav Nayar, said that he craved a sense both of purpose and of “human connection.” Like many men, he’d never quite learned to open up to people emotionally. He was academically and professionally successful, yet unfulfilled. But he was inspired by a Buddhist tale he’d heard, about a child whose mother gives him the top of a glass of milk: the tastiest part, with the highest concentration of butter. A parent, the story goes, doesn’t expect anything in return for their love. He wanted to feel that kind of transcendent selflessness. “If I raise a child who is a good human being,” he told me, “I can’t ask for anything else.”

Becoming a single dad by choice tends to be difficult—in some ways that are unavoidable, and some ways that reflect persistent skepticism about men’s fitness as parents. Single men can’t legally adopt or access assisted reproductive technology in every country, so many of them travel to the United States just to get that chance. But even in America, some adoption agencies view single men with suspicion, and many don’t actively recruit men. In some states, surrogacy is illegal or requires overcoming legal obstacles; in every state, it’s complicated and extraordinarily expensive. A hopeful father must choose an egg donor, who will undergo a slate of medical screenings, and find a surrogate, who may well live in another state. Legal contracts have to be drawn up to ensure that the father will be considered the sole parent (and not the surrogate, who would otherwise hold parental rights). Because so many people need to be paid, the price of this undertaking hasn’t gone down much over the years, even as it’s become more widely used, Sheeva Talebian, a doctor at CCRM Fertility in New York, told me. All in all, it can cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. And, of course, that’s just the start of raising a child, which itself is prohibitively expensive for many Americans.

Men Having Babies provides financial assistance to some aspiring dads, but the organization has also been pushing for insurance plans to cover these costs. So far success has been limited. In 2019, for instance, New York passed legislation making IVF a mandated health-plan benefit for large-group insurance policies—and in 2021 issued an anti-discrimination directive for same-sex couples. But surrogacy coverage still isn’t required, so single men and gay male partners are out of luck. And many insurance providers still define infertility as the inability to conceive after a year of trying, rather than the inability to conceive without medical intervention. MHB has tried to galvanize people around these issues—but has struggled, even within the LGBTQ community. Poole-Dayan thinks many people see parenthood as integral to a woman’s purpose but as an extra treat for men, especially gay men. This is the flip side of the misguided assumption that all women want children and will be deprived without them: that men can’t truly be deprived of parenthood. “The average person doesn’t think of us as childless,” he told me. “A lot of discrimination is tolerated and a lot of support is withheld because of that. And this is without even talking about those people who are actually looking at what we’re doing suspiciously.”

[Read: What older dads know]

The donor-and-surrogacy process can also take years, which is difficult given that many single men start it, McGill told me, in their 40s—when they realize they’re running out of time. Male fertility does decline with age, though not at a rate as steep as for women. But men still face emotional, logistical, and existential limits on their child-rearing window: They might not want to carry around a toddler when they’re 60, or leave a still-young child parentless when they die—and men face a shorter average lifespan than women. Greg Larson, an aspiring dad in New Jersey, started looking for egg donors in 2022, had embryos created by the end of 2023, and now he’s matched with a surrogate—but she hasn’t gotten pregnant yet. If everything goes perfectly, he might have a baby around his 46th birthday, next May. If things don’t work out with this surrogate, he might not start all of this over again.

And yet, despite the obstacles, becoming a single dad by choice can be empowering. It means not waiting for a partner to complete your life, knowing what you want to prioritize, actively creating the life you want, even if it’s not what anyone expected of you. For the men I spoke with, making this decision also pushed them to be vulnerable enough to ask for help, or to build community. Calkins has four sisters, two of whom are local and all of whom adore his kids. He finds himself texting “the aunties” little updates—the kind of thing he might, in a different world, be sending to a spouse. Larson has met other aspiring single dads through Men Having Babies; they talk about navigating the surrogacy process, how to date while they’re in the midst of it, what to tell romantic prospects about the possibility but not certainty of near-future fatherhood. “It’s really cool,” he said, “the people that you pick up along the way that you get unexpected support from.”

The men I spoke with never set out to buck tradition; they just wanted to be dads. But that decision spurred some of them to consider what it means to be a good father—and a good man. Nayar told me he notices now how rarely he sees another father in the park with his kid. Sometimes when he does, he thinks the father seems a little begrudging, walking slightly behind the child, and he wonders how many of these dads were told by their wife to take the kid out to play. He understands: He, too, is stretching to be not just a provider, that classic masculine trope, but also a nurturer—someone softer, more open. The other day, when he was visiting his cousin’s two daughters, the 5-year-old got in trouble and ran into the living room and hid behind the couch. He picked her up and took her to the mirror, and they looked at their reflections together. “You are wonderful,” he told her. “And you don’t have to worry about anything.”

In an ideal world, these single dads by choice might prefer not to be single. But many of the experts I spoke with told me the ones they knew were notably steady and optimistic. And that made sense to me: The ones who have made it this far are the ones who really want fatherhood. “I don’t know quite how to explain it,” Calkins told me, “but I was just so confident and comfortable with the fact that I wanted to be a parent. And I was going to love being a parent, which I do.” Getting to this point, despite the effort and technology involved, felt like the most organic thing in the world to him. And in a way he never quite expected, the stars ended up aligning after all.

This article originally stated that Creative Family Connections is a fertility clinic. In fact, it’s a surrogacy agency.

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First Came Tea. Then Came the Male Rage.

2025-07-30T16:11:00-04:00

Until last Thursday, the team behind the app Tea Dating Advice was having an extraordinary week. They claimed to have amassed more than 2 million new users, making Tea the most popular free app in Apple’s App Store, after it stirred discussion on TikTok and Reddit. Women were using Tea, whose tagline is “Helping women date safe,” in exactly the way they were supposed to: reviewing men they’d dated, giving them a “green flag” or “red flag” evaluation, seeking information on new prospects, running background checks to look for a criminal record or a sex-offender registration.

But by Thursday evening, angry men had begun to amass online. They gathered on the anonymous messaging board 4chan, clamoring for a “hack and leak” to publicly expose the app’s users. On Friday morning, someone on 4chan posted a link leading to more than 70,000 images of Tea’s users, including verification photos and pictures of government IDs, according to 404 Media, which first reported these events. Shortly afterward, someone created a map that claimed to link Tea users to locations and told anyone viewing it to “enjoy”; another person created a site for comparing and ranking the users’ physical appearances. Posters across social-media platforms had a field day sharing Tea users’ images, calling them “whales” and “ugly bitches,” saying that they deserved all of this. On Monday, 404 Media reported that a second data breach had revealed direct messages between users, including sensitive personal conversations, real names, social-media handles, and phone numbers. (A Tea representative told me that the company is investigating the issue and, having found that some messages were accessed in the breach, has taken their direct-messaging system offline. Tea has found no evidence of further exposures, she said, and is working to identify affected users and offer them free identity-protection services.)

The whole episode, from start to finish, was horribly bleak—and also bleakly illuminating. Tea is hardly a perfect app. As its name suggests, it allows not only serious warnings about men but also gossip about their supposed defects and romantic tendencies. When Tea users do make serious allegations of predatory behavior, those accusations go unconfirmed, a glaring failure of due process. But for all of the app’s flaws, the breaches have proved its users’ concerns valid: Women had good reasons for wanting something like Tea in the first place.

____

Tea’s emergence felt almost inevitable. Similar platforms have existed before: Consider Facebook groups such as “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” (which have led to multiple lawsuits from men who were the subject of discussion) or an app called Lulu (which took down its man-reviewing feature in 2016 after facing criticism). Those digital whisper networks didn’t exactly revolutionize dating safety. But by 2023, when Tea launched, American dating frustration had been mounting—perhaps especially for women. In 2019, Pew Research Center found that women were far more likely than men to say that dating had “gotten harder for most people in the last 10 years.” The app had a ready audience, particularly among the many women who yearn for the era before apps, when a person was more likely to meet a romantic prospect through family or friends. That nostalgia isn’t entirely misplaced: One real benefit of that courtship culture, researchers have told me, is that people are more likely to behave respectfully if they have mutual social connections who might hear how things go. Dating strangers, by contrast, involves a lack of accountability that may be more likely to lead to transgressions big and small, from ghosting and poor communication to sexual assault.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

On top of all that, women are looking for romance at a time when the U.S. government is stripping away their reproductive rights, making pregnancy more perilous, and dismantling protections against gender discrimination. They’re looking at a time of backlash to #MeToo and to the fact that women are relying less on men for financial security. They’re looking as young men are moving further to the right politically, and when only 43 percent of Gen Z men say they consider themselves feminists—compared with 61 percent of Gen Z women. And they’re looking as fear of sexual assault has grown. One doesn’t need to have experienced assault, or to believe that every man poses a threat, to know that something in the culture has curdled, that caution is warranted.

Tea arrived with good intentions. The actual product, unfortunately, isn’t so great: It denies men the chance to defend themselves and—in some cases, surely—infringes on their privacy, publicizing their worst moments even when they might not make the same mistakes in the future. I would argue that the app isn’t great for women, either. It’s a sad approximation of what I think many really want: not strangers trashing other strangers online, but a return to a time when romantic prospects existed within a familiar context, when dating didn’t feel quite so lonely.

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

What Tea has accomplished, though, is showing what women are up against. The men so hell-bent on revenge against Tea’s users are illustrating that hatred of women is alive and well. And the leaks demonstrated how insufficiently women are protected by the tech companies that shape their romantic lives. Tea’s privacy policy promised that selfies used for verification would be “deleted immediately” after authentication; the company then stored the photos in a way that left them so easy to access, 4chan users apparently didn’t even need to break into anything. Tea was founded by a software engineer who said his mother had experienced “terrifying” encounters with men who turned out to be using false identities on their dating profiles. What a terrible irony that after so many women, feeling unsafe, flocked to his app, it has now left thousands of them in potential danger.

The first breach was awful: humiliating for the women who had to see their images passed around, and grim given the number of men making fun of those images with such open, gleeful cruelty. But news of the second breach, which reportedly exposed a larger amount of data with more identifying information, left a pit in my stomach. In more than 1.1 million private messages, women had told one another about rapes, opened up about abortions, identified cheaters. (“I am his wife,” one user wrote after saying she saw her husband being discussed on the app.) Some shared their phone numbers because, I imagine, they had made connections—because they needed support. When women realized they couldn’t rely on the men in their lives, they tried instead to rely on other women. In the end, misogyny got in the way of that too.

Andrea Gibson Refused to ‘Battle’ Cancer

2025-07-16T15:21:00-04:00

When the poet Andrea Gibson learned two years ago that their ovarian cancer was incurable, the news marked a turning point; Gibson would often say it led to some of the most joyous moments of their life.

Before the terminal prognosis, they were always afraid. They had severe anxiety and chronic panic attacks; they were petrified of the ocean; they couldn’t bring themselves to eat nuts on a plane, in case they turned out to have developed a new allergy and might suffocate in flight. For years, they’d lived in constant fear that everything would come crashing down. Then, of course, it did. And just at the moment when patients are frequently pushed to start “battling” cancer, Gibson finally learned to stop fighting. In an interview last year with the website Freethink, they remembered telling themself: “I will allow this.”

When Gibson died on Monday, at age 49, those closest to the poet consoled mourning fans by sharing some of Gibson’s last words: “I fucking loved my life.” Accepting their illness and their mortality had transformed Gibson. “You tap into the brevity of something,” they’d told Freethink, “and all of a sudden everything becomes more special.”

The idea that facing death can shake you into living life was not, Gibson understood, a new one. But it is particularly fitting for a poet. In verse, brevity is paramount. “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful,” the writer Rita Dove once argued. A handful of short lines can capture near-universal emotions and grand existential truths not in spite of their spareness but because of it. Even before their diagnosis, Gibson, the poet laureate of Colorado and the author of seven books, knew this. In Come See Me in the Good Light, a documentary following them and their partner, Megan Falley, that will stream on Apple TV+ this fall, Gibson jokes that their publisher accused them of rearranging the same words over and over in their poems. And certain terms—moon, snow, shotgun, laces, kite—do show up frequently, shuffled around in new variations. (One poem is called “The Moon Is a Kite.”) But the imagery conveys what it needs to, and sometimes it gives you “goosebumps” (another favorite word). Gibson didn’t need much to paint a world—just a small number of apt metaphors, cast in plain but tender language.

[Read: The best American poetry of the 21st century (so far)]

Potential weaknesses, in Gibson’s poetry, had a way of becoming strengths. The simplicity of their writing made it easy to connect with. Metaphors repeated from one poem to the next placed their work in a shared universe, one in which all the specific fragments of pain or beauty experienced over years felt intrinsically linked. Their verse sometimes risked seeming cloying or sentimental because of how unselfconsciously it concerned love: feeling it, cultivating it, spreading it, protecting it. Much of the time, though, that earnestness felt honest and well earned. When they wrote about burning with righteous indignation on behalf of suicidal queer kids or finding a sense of home in their partner, a reader could sense the intensity of their feeling and the depth of their affection.

And in writing about love again and again, Gibson ended up adopting a rarer theme in poetry: kindness. Two of their other much-used words are soft and gentle—states toward which they seemed to aspire. Nearly every poem is an exercise in empathy, summoning generosity even in response to cruelty. In one poem, Gibson imagines what they would say now to the man who assaulted them when they were 13. They picture how guilt might poison the life he’s built for himself; how he might wonder who he could be if he hadn’t made that awful decision so many years ago. “Everyone can / see who they were supposed to be,” they wrote. “It’s the readiest grief in the world.”

To write about kindness in the 21st century is, perhaps, to risk sounding naive or mealy—more concerned with peace than with justice, more set on everyone getting along than on recognizing brutality and inequality. But Gibson wasn’t afraid to do the latter either. They wrote with fury about climate change, political failures, religious bigotry, anti-trans violence. They also sought a more universal kind of love; they wondered what pain their ideological opponents had experienced; they wrestled with how to do all this without betraying their political convictions. In “MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room,” which they performed for NPR, Gibson described their reaction to a fellow patient who kept his Trump hat on during chemotherapy. At first, they were outraged. His apparel felt like an intrusion: Gibson wanted to feel “that everyone is rooting for me to survive,” and they suspected that a MAGA supporter might not root for the nonbinary poet beside him. But anger gives way to a sense of recognition—they had both felt angst long before the chemo started, and they certainly have it now; Gibson doesn’t want to arrive one day to find the MAGA guy’s chair empty. This kind of mutual support should feel more attainable in less dire situations, Gibson said, but outside the room, “everyone thinks they have so much time to kill.”

Facing down death injected Gibson’s love poems with urgency; it gave their sense of whimsy and wonder the highest possible stakes. I know that they felt it made them more openhearted, more attuned to life’s peculiar beauties. But I keep thinking about one poem, “Tincture,” which at first I assumed they’d written post-diagnosis—until I realized it was published in 2018. “Imagine, when a human dies, / the soul misses the body,” they wrote, going on to list the oddities and pains and pleasures of living in a corporeal form. “The soul misses every single day / the body was sick, the now it forced, the here / it built from the fever. Fever is how the body prays, / how it burns and begs for another average day.”

The Reality Show That Captures Gen Z Dating

2025-07-11T13:54:09-04:00

The great joy of a reality dating show is watching couples evolve. You see two strangers meet and make stilted small talk. Then they loosen up, share a first kiss, look at each other with progressively gooey gazes—until they leave the show hand in hand, or one of them breaks it off and starts the process over again with someone else.

This arc is especially delicious on Love Island, an international franchise that, unlike hyper-structured shows including The Bachelor, allows fans to be freaky little flies on the wall beholding ultra-ordinary moments—contestants lounging by the pool, playing Ping-Pong, getting ready for bed—six days a week. Yes, that is a massive time commitment; don’t ask me how I fit it into my schedule. It also means you can see a relationship deepening almost in real time. By the end of a typical season, you have multiple pairs to follow—and any success feels like evidence that love is real, so you pray for their survival. As I like to remind my mom when she tells me it’s all scripted junk, some of these people are married with kids now.

But all of that’s been different on Season 7 of Love Island USA, whose finale will air on Peacock this Sunday. The show is a phenomenon: From June 6 to 12 alone, across just nine available episodes, viewers watched more than a billion collective minutes—outpacing 2024’s megahit season. This one has involved riveting drama, touching friendships, and meme-worthy moments. It has been lacking, though, in something kind of important for a romance competition: romance. “I’m rooting for no one because there’s no actual connection,” I saw someone complain on Reddit. Another person bemoaned that “it seems like no one is really pining for each other.” One poster, on the same thread, summed it up quite well: “It’s been Fake Friendship Island, Severely Emotionally Dysregulated Island … Situationship Island. Literally everything but Love Island.”

It’s true: Contestants have paired up—but largely never heated up. As the islanders would put it, What the helly? Maybe this cast just didn’t happen to click; maybe LIUSA has grown too popular, and now it’s overrun by influencers looking for fame rather than partnership. But I’d argue something else: that Season 7 is an illuminating portrait of Gen Z, an emotionally guarded cohort that has far less relationship experience than its predecessors, and is having notably little sex.

[Read: A hot new bombshell is taking over reality TV]

This isn’t the first season with Zoomers, but the cast is strikingly young. Some members were in high school when the coronavirus pandemic hit. At a time in their life when they might have been crushing on someone in class or going on a first date, they were probably at home staring at a screen. They’ve grown up with phones and social media; perhaps they’ve seen romances performed or publicized—including on Love Island—more than they’ve actually taken part in them. Several contestants have said that they’ve never been in a relationship (though one claims to have texted more than 1,000 nude photos). If this season feels like Situationship Island, that’s because Gen Z is the situationship generation: one in which many young people believe in love and want it badly but have “a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it,” as Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life, once told me. A 2024 Hinge report described Gen Z daters as “tiptoeing around direct communication to avoid coming off as cringey or overeager.”

Ben Symons / Peacock

No wonder, then, that these islanders seem like they’re going through the motions, circling around romantic vulnerability but never quite closing in. Some have waffled for episodes on end about which prospect to pursue, then meandered toward one without much conviction. Their chats are stiff and oddly surface-level. (One of the stronger couples recently talked about their childhoods seemingly for the first time, after weeks of shooting the breeze.) A few contestants call themselves “slow burners.” But the group doesn’t just seem cautious about connection; they seem suspicious of it. When couples have gotten closer, or islanders have seemed smitten with someone new, they’ve been accused of “love bombing” or failing to do enough romantic “exploring.”

By this late in the season, we should be hearing hopeful lovers talking with nervous excitement about how they’ll fit into each other’s regular lives. Instead, the remaining pairs are either going off the rails or just starting to gain steam. Two couples had decided to be “closed off” before last night’s episode. One was Cierra Ortega and Nic Vansteenberghe, who had also made a point of confirming that they were not “boyfriend and girlfriend.” Then, on the same day earlier this week that Ortega was sent home—after fans discovered that in the past she had posted a racist slur online—Vansteenberghe did a little jig to celebrate recoupling with someone else. The other closed-off couple was Taylor Williams and Clarke Carraway, a relatively late-in-the-season linkup. The night they became exclusive, they lost an audience vote and went home.

[Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage]

Despite all of this, Season 7 continues to draw millions of viewers. Multiple times in the past week, I’ve heard people in public spaces talking about the latest developments. (After Sunday, I will finally be able to roam my city without headphones on for fear of spoilers.) Maybe fans are just hate-watching, or maybe they’re eating up everything Love Island besides the love. But I wonder if something deeper is happening—if some of the Zoomers watching relate because they have their own wall up, or they’ve struggled to scale someone else’s. Maybe they recognize the hesitance they see in these islanders: all the conversations about not wanting to “move too fast,” all the studied chillness.

Maybe viewers also want to see, from a safe distance, what happens when you do put yourself out there. The two major fan favorites this year are both women who, by their own admission, feel a lot. One, Huda Mustafa, fell head over heels earlier in the season; she was messy, sometimes toxic, but she wasn’t playing it cool. The other, Amaya Espinal, cries frequently; she also tends to squeal when she’s excited about romantic potential. Men keep telling her she’s too much. One didn’t like it when she called him “babe.” (She calls all of her friends—actually, everyone in the villa—by that term of endearment.) Another man, when the contestants wrote brutally honest letters to one another, said he was overwhelmed by her interest in him. “I’m tired of people viewing that as a negative instead of a power move,” she said, tears streaming down her face in front of all the other islanders.

That speech was the season’s viral moment: Espinal gained hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers overnight, and now has 2 million. If you search “Amaya Papaya” on Google, a quote of hers streams across the screen with a little papaya emoji. The soda brand Poppi is even selling a new flavor in her name. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that viewers are responding to the people who let themselves show enthusiasm, who talk about how scary it is to fall for someone, and who go for it anyway. “Even though my heart rate is being tachycardic right now,” Espinal says in one episode, “your girl is trying to flip that anxiety into excitement.” She’s showing a whole lot of young people how it’s done.

The Worst Kind of Writing About Young Adulthood

2025-07-03T11:15:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

The writers of The Atlantic have a long history of fretting about the youths.

Take one 1925 article, which began with a call for reason: a promise to judge fairly whether modern young adults were truly as delinquent as everyone seemed to be saying. “They are under suspicion on the counts of, briefly, dancing, drinking, kissing, motoring alone and often at night (‘alone’ means two together),” the author, identified only as “A Professor,” declared. “In the case of girls, dress is included, or rather, going about with legs and arms bared.”

Of the drinking charge, young people seemed to be absolved. Certainly they were imbibing, but less than their elders—and they’d developed new etiquette to keep things under control. (“A really nice girl may drink cocktails in public,” the writer explained, “but not whiskey and soda.”) On the other counts, unfortunately, the Professor didn’t let them off so easily: “Legs are no more interesting than noses” when young ladies wear skirts this short. “The sad truth is that the human frame has ceased to be romantic.” Oh, and this new generation, in addition to diluting sex appeal, reportedly lacked intellectual curiosity. Also emotion: “There seems no doubt that these young things feel less, on the whole, and do more, than once did we.”

That was just one story in a whole canon of writing, published here and elsewhere, that has professed concern for young people—but with an undercurrent of condescension, even disdain. In a 1975 classic of the genre, the conservative journalist Midge Decter described the young hippies around her as coddled to the point of incompetence, having used the idea of a countercultural movement to get away with doing nothing much at all. “Heaped with largesse both of the pocketbook and of the spirit,” she wrote, “the children yet cannot find themselves.”

All those writers who peer at the youths, squinting through their binoculars and scribbling in their notepads, make up an embarrassing lineage. Recently, I’ve been wondering if I’m part of it. I write fairly often about Gen Z, sometimes worriedly—but I’m a Millennial. I didn’t have iPads around when I was a child; I wasn’t scrolling on Instagram in middle school. I’d already graduated college and made new friends in a new city when the pandemic hit. I’m still examining contemporary young adulthood from the inside, I’ve told myself. But a few days ago, I turned 30. Technically, I’m in a new life phase now: “established adulthood.”

Where’s the line between ogling and empathizing? And how do you describe trends—which are broad by definition—without using too broad a brush? The young people of the 1970s arguably were, on the whole, more interested in challenging norms than their parent’s generation had been; that seems worth documenting. Any dysfunction that came along with that may have been worth noting too. (Joan Didion clearly thought so.) Likewise, the Professor wasn’t wrong that social mores were transforming with each successive generation. Legs were becoming more like noses, and that’s the honest truth.

The task, I think, is to write with humility and nuance—to cast young adults not as hopelessly lost or uniquely brilliant and heroic, but just as people, dealing with the particular challenges and opportunities of their day. In 1972, The Atlantic published a letter from a father who jokingly wondered how the youths described in the papers could possibly be the same species as his children. “Not long ago the president of Yale University said in the press that when the young are silent it means they are feeling ‘a monumental scorn’ for political hypocrisy,” he wrote. “When my son, Willard, Jr., is silent, I am never sure what it means, but I believe that he has his mind considerably on sexual matters and on methods of developing the flexor muscles of his upper arms.” Readers have always been able to tell the difference between real curiosity and zoological scrutinizing. They know when a stereotype rings hollow.

Just rifle through the five pages of responses to Decter’s story, which The Atlantic published with headlines such as “Sentimental Kitsch,” “Hideous Clichés,” and—my personal favorite—“Boring and Irrelevant.” One reader told Decter, with bite, not to worry so much about those wild children who weren’t settling down in their jobs and houses like good boys and girls. “Rest assured,” he wrote, “my generation will be like hers—led by the silent, nervous superachievers, intent on their material goal, lacking the time to question the madness of their method.”

The characterization is cutting. But that letter also raises another good point: Young people are not immune to oversimplifying, either. They’ll eventually get old enough to write about their elders, and to include their own sweeping generalizations and nuggets of truth. “I wonder what will be written in 1995 about our children. I get the feeling we will make the same mistakes,” another reader wrote to Decter. “For isn’t that the American way?”

The Rise of the ‘Club-Sandwich Generation’

2025-06-30T08:00:00-04:00

Through her teens, Hannah Domoslay-Paul had a great-grandmother on each side of her family. One of them was always crocheting, and as a girl, Domoslay-Paul would sit and watch her nimble hands construct the most delicate lace doilies. The other was a retired schoolteacher; at family events, she would tell stories or just list off all the counties in Michigan—the kind of thing students learned back when she was leading the classroom. Even their most mundane activities, to Domoslay-Paul, were enchanting.

Now Domoslay-Paul is a graphic designer in Pensacola, Florida, and she herself has six children: four with her late first husband, and two with her current husband. On the morning that I spoke with Domoslay-Paul, those kids were in Michigan with their great-grandmother, a 92-year-old in excellent health, picking strawberries to take home and make jam. They visit her every summer; they play cards, water the flowers, and even haul hay like Domoslay-Paul did when she was around their age.

Domoslay-Paul is grateful that her kids are growing up in a four-generation family as she did—but that experience is actually less rare now than when she was a child. For centuries, living long enough to become a great-grandparent was uncommon. The role was niche enough that kin researchers rarely studied it. But now many more people are reaching old age; even with people having children later on average than those in previous generations did, great-grandparenthood is becoming remarkably unremarkable. Ashton Verdery, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist who’s part of a four-generation family himself, estimates that from 1996 to 2012, the number of great-grandparents in the United States increased by 33 percent, up to 20 million from 15 million. And according to Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, American 15-year-olds today have an average of 2.85 great-grandparents—a figure that has been inching up since at least 1950 while the mean numbers of siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins have fallen. He expects that the overall number of great-grandparents will continue rising, not just in the U.S. but in countries across the globe.

In some ways, this is a beautiful development: Imagine your own children’s children’s children someday learning about history not from textbooks but from you, the person who lived it. But aging inevitably entails frailty, and caregiving often falls to one’s children; when it comes to great-grandparents, their children are seniors themselves. Sociologists have long worried about the “sandwich generation,” meaning the people who are simultaneously caring for their young kids and their own aging parents—a situation that can significantly strain one’s mental health (and savings). Now they’re seeing a growing number of people in a sort of triple squeeze, helping care for their grown children, their grandchildren, and their own parents. This cohort is called the “club-sandwich generation”—and they’re stretched exceedingly thin.

Zuzana Talašová, a doctoral student at Masaryk University, in the Czech Republic, likes to do a little experiment. When she asks people what it means to be a parent, everyone seems to have an answer. When she asks what it means to be a grandparent, she finds the same. But she doesn’t get any cohesive response when she asks what great-grandparents do. A lot of people tell her plainly: “I don’t know.”

In the absence of a strict cultural script, great-grandparents are in a strange position. Many of them didn’t grow up with any such living elders and thus have no models to look to. They might never have expected to get to this point at all. But many of them end up serving an important function—one that is not practical, Talašová told me, so much as “emotional, symbolic, or narrative.”

Great-grandparents are, as Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist, told me, “the peak of the family pyramid”: a kind of mascot for the whole lineage, and commonly a source of great pride. (Women live longer on average than men, so often that figure is a great-grandmother—a matriarch.) Many of them show up to special occasions and tell stories of national and family history. Verdery’s kids have blond hair and blue eyes—but when they spend time with their great-grandmother, they get to hear about her childhood in Japan and her immigration to the United States. They love feeling connected with not only their great-grandma, Verdery told me, but also the whole line of ancestors she brings to life for them. Domoslay-Paul’s grandfather died last winter, but when he was alive, he would drive her kids around his hometown, telling tales as they went. “‘That’s the house that my grandfather lived in. And that’s the house where I was born,’” she told me he’d recount. “‘When we were kids, we got drunk over there and then had to get sat by that outhouse because we were in big trouble,” and “That’s where my brother’s buried. He died when he was a year old.’”

Stories like these can give some perspective. Great-grandparents are a reminder that things change—that our lifetimes are enormously brief, but also that we are one link in a long line of generations, a part of something bigger than ourselves.

In some sense, great-grandparents are acting in a capacity quite like grandparents might have in the past. In the U.S., grandparents tended to be seen as familial authority figures and storytellers. Now, as I’ve reported, their role has evolved. Many of them are deeply engaged in the everyday bustle of raising their grandkids—because child-care costs keep climbing and the demands of parenthood keep growing, but perhaps also because more of them are staying active long enough to be able to help. As Silverstein told me, “Maybe an 85-year-old great-grandparent is as healthy as what used to be a 70-year-old grandparent.” That is: maybe not quite fit enough for anyone to ask them to pick up the great-grandkids from soccer practice, but hopefully strong enough to enjoy the birthdays, the holidays, the visits with no purpose other than to be together. Domoslay-Paul has observed that such a position can mellow out people who might’ve been harsh as parents. Instead of worrying about “who needs to go to the doctor, who needs new pants,” she told me, “you’re able to just give the love.”

[Read: Grandparents are reaching their limit]

Grandparents, then, may actually be in the most difficult position within the four-generation family. In one 2020 qualitative study, researchers interviewed working grandmothers in four-generation families; the participants described being so busy caregiving that they had no time for medical appointments or tests, even though they could feel themselves aging and their body changing. Sometimes, their different roles—mother, grandmother, child, not to mention employee—would come into direct conflict; they were needed everywhere at once. “Who do I need to help first; for whom should I be more available?” one woman in the study wondered. “I respond not to my own agenda but to other people’s agenda.”

I heard something similar from Jerri McElroy, a fellow with the nonprofit Caring Across Generations who lives in Georgia. McElroy is a full-time caregiver for her father, who has dementia and epilepsy and who lost his ability to speak after a seizure in 2018. She lives with him, her daughter, and her grandson—and has five other children and five other grandchildren as well. She has learned that when she’s watching her grandkids and her dad, it can help to include the children in his care, as if it’s a game—to get them excited to check up on him together, or let them carry a towel. She has mastered the juggling act, but it’s never gotten easy. “When I think about certain seasons of life,” she told me, “it’s all a blur. I don’t even know how I got through.”

Great-grandparents are a kind of microcosm of the larger picture of extending lifespans: On the one hand, around the world, “aging is a big success story,” Silverstein told me. The grandmothers from the 2020 study were exhausted—but still grateful that their parents were alive. They viewed their circumstances not only as a duty, the author wrote, but also as a “privilege.” On the other hand, many societies—including the U.S.—have left family members to care for one another largely on their own, without guaranteed parental leave, child-care subsidies, or any cohesive, accessible system for tending to the proliferating elderly. Populations are transforming radically, and policies aren’t keeping up.

If lifespans continue extending in the way we’d expect, four-generation families will become only more common. The future may be old. But it also might be more interconnected. As much as people talk about the U.S. and other countries becoming ever more individualistic, generations of American kin are arguably growing closer on average, researchers told me, and becoming more generous with one another. Silverstein said that because today’s grandparents are so involved with family life on the whole, both logistically and emotionally, we might expect that great-grandparents will keep becoming more tied in as well.

[Read: The new age of endless parenting]

That shift is bittersweet. With an aged loved one, impending loss is always close to the surface. But great-grandkids stand to benefit from being immersed in the normality of aging and death. They get to observe firsthand how time works: what it takes, but also what it gives. Domoslay-Paul’s grandfather, born in 1930, rarely spoke about emotions. But she remembers that after her first husband died, her grandfather talked to her two oldest sons, who were 6 and 7 at the time. He told them that his own parents had died when he was not much older than them—eight decades earlier. “I know this is hard right now,” he said, “but I got through it.” They could see for themselves that he had.

The Growing Belief in ‘Love at First Sight’

2025-06-10T16:21:00-04:00

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The idea seems so old-fashioned, so sentimental: that you could fall for someone “at first sight,” deeply and instantly. It’s straight out of the classic romance dramas—Jack’s gaze freezing when he sees Rose on the Titanic’s deck; The Notebook’s Noah lighting up and asking, “Who’s this girl?” when he spies Allie across the amusement park. As a general rule, the stuff of popular love stories is not the stuff of real life. We know this, right?

Not right, I guess. This year’s “Singles in America” survey—conducted annually by the dating company Match and the Kinsey Institute, and released today—found something surprising: Of the roughly 5,000 single American adults polled, 60 percent said they believe in love at first sight, a nearly 30 percent increase from 2014. Almost half of the respondents (people ages 18 to 98, from all over the country) said they’d experienced the phenomenon themselves. I didn’t expect this, not only because the validity of the concept has been questioned for years, but also because it’s such a dreamily romantic notion—a hopeful one, really. And these days, the common narrative about dating (and what I’ve found, to some degree, in my own reporting) is that many people are burned out, tired of the apps, and generally feeling pessimistic. This spike in belief even startled some of the researchers: Amanda Gesselman, a Kinsey Institute psychologist, told me that the results “sort of blew me away.”

[Read: The people who quit dating]

But once Gesselman stepped back and thought about the finding, she said, it made some sense to her. In 2014, dating apps were relatively new. Couples tended to meet through friends or family; people would get to know each other for a while before pairing off. In more recent years, Gesselman has consistently found that swipe-based dating apps are the main way that partners meet—across age, gender, race, income, and geographic region. That style of dating has people in the habit of making quick calls, judging whether they have chemistry with a stranger after just one date. Paul Eastwick, a UC Davis psychologist who studies romantic attraction and wasn’t involved with the survey, told me the same thing: “Online dating has a lot of ‘We met—no. We met—no. We met—no. We met—no. We met—oh, that was a good one!’”

In other words, the slow burn has become less common. Instead, two other experiences may have become more common: the plainly bad first date, where a lack of connection is immediately apparent; and the kind of date about which a person might one day say: “We knew right away.”

Whether that latter scenario is truly love at first sight depends on what you mean by love—and, okay, also what you mean by sight. Eastwick has found that some people do feel strongly about a romantic prospect from the get-go: if not at first glance, then straight from the point of a first conversation. And when things click, he said, those feelings can run deeper than physical attraction. (If love at first sight was just thinking someone was hot, I’d experience it every day walking down the streets of New York City.) In a 2018 study of undergraduate students, Eastwick asked participants to reflect on their past relationships and describe how they’d felt at different points over the course of their time with their former partners. About a fifth of people said they’d been smitten upon meeting; they’d felt an instant bond, found some niche shared interest, couldn’t stop talking. To be fair, that’s the same portion of people who felt “when I first met this person, I thought they were trash”—Eastwick’s words, not mine! Nonetheless, he concluded that something like love at first sight, though not the norm, “is real. It happens.”

Of course, these were prior relationships; evidently, falling in love quickly doesn’t mean that a relationship is going to last. What psychologists refer to as “passionate love”—the buzzy, dizzying rush of early infatuation; the feeling of craving, even addiction—is neurologically distinct from “compassionate love,” which tends to set in after a year or two and doesn’t involve the same elevated cortisol and serotonin levels. And besides, maybe the participants who reported experiencing love at first sight were simply projecting that narrative retroactively. Capturing people’s feelings in real time, as they first get together, is difficult, Eastwick said. He has tried asking participants in other studies to tell him as soon as they’ve met someone promising—and they have. But, he said, “what you mostly get is: ‘I’m really excited about this person!’ And then when you check in a week later, they’re like, ‘Who now?’”

Right around this point in our interview, the “Singles in America” finding started to sound a little concerning to me; love at first sight, however possible, didn’t seem like something to bank on. I imagined a nation full of people going on first date after first date: thirsty people crawling on their hands and knees, longing for a feeling that only a fifth of Eastwick’s participants experienced and that hadn’t even kept them together. A world with this many first dates is not a world I want to live in. “I’m screaming into the void, being like, ‘Hey, everybody, there was a way we used to date,’” Eastwick told me. “‘You just kind of hung out with people and saw what happened.’” Relative to our era of snap judgments, he said, the old way of dating was “democratizing.”

[Read: No, you shouldn’t ‘date ’em ’til you hate ’em’]

But Gesselman remains optimistic. Online dating may have primed people to expect too much too soon, but at least it hasn’t destroyed their romantic idealism. Ten trillion swipes later—I’m guesstimating—the “Singles in America” participants haven’t given up. “The overwhelming majority of singles in our survey reported that they believe that love can last forever,” Gesselman told me. “They believe there’s someone out there for them.”

Those ideas fit under an umbrella that psychologists call “destiny beliefs,” a faith in predetermined bonds (as opposed to “growth beliefs,” or the idea that a relationship requires maintenance and labor). Gesselman knows that such mystical thinking might set up unrealistic expectations. She also suspects that it can motivate people to commit to a relationship. Eastwick found that the participants who reported feeling the most romantic interest at the very start of a relationship also described feeling romantic interest for the longest amount of time. They were also less likely to have initiated the breakup. If you believe you’ve found your soulmate, after all, you might try especially hard to make it work.

Love at first sight may be a high bar to clear. And holding such an ambitious standard could mean staying single for longer, or forever. But maybe fewer people these days are worried about that. Maybe they have full lives and want a relationship only if it’s extraordinary. Partnership used to be a stricter societal norm than it is today; different possibilities for how to live a “good life” are, little by little, opening up. Today’s singles may know that love at first sight isn’t all that likely. Perhaps more of them have the luxury of holding out for it anyway.

What You Lose When You Focus on Partnership

2025-06-02T09:00:00-04:00

By the time she was in her mid-30s, the writer Melissa Febos had been in relationships for 20 straight years. One romance would end and another would begin immediately, if it hadn’t already started: a long relay race of partners. In the rare stretch of singlehood, she would always have a crush ready to grab the baton soon enough.

This might sound, to a lot of people, like great luck. “Our culture tells us that such abundance is a privilege,” Febos acknowledges in her new book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. But abundance, in her experience, felt more like constraint. In one terrible two-year relationship, she writes, she cried so often that the skin near her eyes began peeling off; texts from her girlfriend made her so anxious that she had to keep changing the alert sound. Other times, she details quieter torments: always thinking about her latest flame, always expected to tell them her whereabouts, never really able to work or read or daydream in peace. Her body didn’t feel like her own anymore—but rather like “a work animal who slept in a barn behind the house of my mind.” She recalls feeling like “a hungry ghost”: always starved for affection, but never sated. “You can’t get enough of a thing you don’t need,” her therapist tells her.

Finally, she resolves to take a break. Or rather, she has another five flings—“like the last handful of popcorn you cram into your mouth after you decide to stop eating it”—and then resolves to actually take a break: She will be celibate for three months.

[Read: How a recession might tank American romance]

Yes, three months. Febos appreciates the laughable modesty of her goal. But she argues that, for her, it was ambitious: an attempt not only to take a breath, but also to find the bottom of her “bottomless need.” The Dry Season is an account of this period, which turns into a year, during which she abstains from sex, dates, and flirting. It doesn’t call for an end to romance, but it is an indictment of a dependence, individually and societally, on partnership. Febos doesn’t want to lose passion, but she needs to find balance.

The particular abundance of which Febos speaks—I can’t say I’m personally familiar with it. I don’t think too many people are, or not to this degree. In her handful of celibate months, she must resist suitor after suitor popping up like road obstacles in a racing game. There’s the writer who, at a conference, literally begs her to have sex; the friend who confesses her attraction; the acquaintance who thinks their dinner is a date; the playwright who keeps texting. There’s a hot stranger on a plane.

But Febos never claims her journey is anything near universal. She unpacks how she learned early on to catch and hold people’s attention, to make them want something from her. When she left home at 16 and supported herself with restaurant work, her tips, and thus her survival, depended on it. She also recounts her history of addiction—how she’s no longer using heroin, but still, to some extent, chasing the next reward. And anyway, I’d guess that most readers, whether or not they’re serial monogamists, have struggled at some point to shut off whatever autopilot setting cuts against their own best interests. As I read, Febos’s celibacy challenge went from feeling like a humblebrag to a deeply relatable effort. And as she settled into her solitude, her observations began to resonate. She details parts of singlehood that I, too, have treasured—and which I’ve heard extolled again and again in my reporting on romance, even from people whose celibate season resulted from a dearth, not an excess, of options.

One of the qualities that Febos discovers is absolute tranquility. She luxuriates in her quiet mornings, with no one hogging the bed or waiting to hear back from her; she spends whole weekends reading paperback mysteries, carrying them with her to the bathroom, getting lost in them as she hadn’t since she was young. The calm is not just physical but, more importantly, mental. When I spoke with people who quit dating out of frustration, several told me they’d discovered immense peace. With Febos’s attention freed up, she notices the smells of a New York summer; the flowers she passes along the streets; the “tart explosion” of each raspberry she eats, one by one, from a whole carton.

[Read: Don’t let love take over your life]

As romantic distractions fall away, the quiet also makes way for freedom. When researchers ask people what they most appreciate about singlehood, many mention a sense of autonomy. Febos expresses delight in running her own schedule, forgoing meal times and eating when she’s hungry—grazing on green apples and cheese, olives and nuts, pickles right out of the jar. Her liberation isn’t just related to action; it has to do with possibility, open-endedness. Every partnership she’d been in had, inevitably, structured her life according to a certain narrative. “Identity is a story other people tell us, that we learn to tell ourselves, that is housed inside relationships,” she writes. It can be comforting, but also suffocating. When she wakes in her bed alone, or returns to the world after immersing herself in a book, she’s not hit with the recollection that she’s Melissa, someone’s girlfriend. She just exists.

That’s not to say that Febos spends her dry season in oblivious solitude; quite the opposite. She describes gabbing on the phone with her mom and her friends about a million things other than her crushes. While staying overnight with an old pal, she writes, she’s startled to find that she has “nothing else to do, no one to call and wish good night, no higher priority than to be with my friend.” This might be the greatest benefit of singlehood: the deepening of other connections. Surveys have found that single people, on average, have more friends than married people, and feel closer to them; they are more likely to spend time with parents and siblings, and to know their neighbors; they volunteer more for certain organizations. Many couples, meanwhile, have a tendency to look inward; to remain in a cozy bubble, thinking mostly of each other. For a variety of reasons, not all of them bad, partners today spend more time together than those in the 1960s did.

Febos recognizes the appeal of a more circumscribed life. The outside world seems to be growing only more dissonant and chaotic. Focusing on a partner can be a way to protect oneself from fully processing a barrage of bad news and angry discourse. “It seemed impossible to keep an open heart in this world,” she writes. “It made sense to keep the channel of one’s heart narrowed the width of a single person, to peer through the keyhole at a single room rather than turn to face the world.”

But when Febos stops looking through the keyhole and turns around, she finds that being single feels like anything but a dry season; it’s the most emotionally and spiritually fertile time of her life. The ties she strengthens aren’t only social: She also starts connecting with nature, with art, with her surroundings. “Instead of narrowing the aperture of my feeling,” she writes, “I expanded it. A light that shone not on specific objects, but illuminated everything in proximity.” She isn’t in love with a partner; she’s in love, full stop.

Febos is clear that, as much as she enjoys singlehood, she never intended to linger there forever. And she doesn’t. Pretty much as soon as her year of celibacy comes to a close, she falls for the woman who becomes her wife. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a small stab of disappointment, as if she’d abandoned the whole venture she claimed to champion, only confirming that the luckless are indeed losing out. But Febos’s greatest challenge, really, begins as the book ends. Being single is easier, in a sense, than being partnered and still preserving your other relationships, your interests, and yourself.

[Read: The new singlehood stigma]

She’s been preparing for this test. Febos makes clear, throughout The Dry Season, that what she wants isn’t just to stop defaulting to romance. She also aims to divest from a relationship culture that is rooted in patriarchy; one that so often leads women, even those who aren’t dating men, to make themselves so small that they disappear. She finds historical role models in women who chose celibacy or solitude over a partnered domestic life and thus were allowed to retain an unusual amount of agency. Hildegard von Bingen, a Benedictine abbess and eventual saint, lived in the Middle Ages, when women’s lives were severely restricted. By claiming a direct line to God, though, she was able to become a composer, lyricist, and the author of numerous scientific texts. The Beguines, a group of medieval laywomen, traveled and lived independently, teaching and working in service to the poor, instead of becoming the property of husbands.

Febos studies these models and also makes a list of all of her past entanglements, analyzing each in hopes that she can discover—and break—her own patterns. She comes to believe that she’s been conditioned to identify what someone wants from her and measure her value through her power to grant it. My worth is contingent on my lovability, she writes down on a slip of paper. Then she goes to Coney Island, digs a hole in the sand, and burns it to ash. She promises herself “to remain faithful to what I had found.”

Can she be, though, now that she’s no longer single? Febos seems to have come a long way from where she started. When she first has lunch with her wife-to-be, at the writing conference they’re both attending, she knows they have chemistry—but doesn’t let that knowledge consume her. She pulls her attention to the world around her: the trees just beginning to bud, the crowds of people, the pinch in her left shoe.

I want to believe this is enough: that if you’re intentional, you can be someone’s partner without losing any of yourself. I’m not sure I do. Maybe Febos still eats pickles straight out of the jar, and sleeps alone, splayed across the whole bed. But when she wakes up, she will know that she can no longer “be anyone or no one.” She will be shaped by the story of her relationship. She will, in some way or another, be bending herself into half of the whole. You can’t turn toward someone without turning away from something else.

That doesn’t mean she should have stayed celibate, or that she’s failed to accomplish what she set out to do. On the contrary, she seems well aware of what gets sacrificed for love—she wrote a whole thoughtfully argued book on it. She’s simply chosen, I think, to risk some of her own losses for gains she considers worth it. These are the trade-offs we make. Even a conscientious objector cannot disentangle themselves completely from a society that worships partnership. Better to notice where your attention goes. Better to keep drawing it back, again and again, to the world around you: to the pinch in your shoe, to the buds in the trees, to the people—all the many, many people—who are right there beside you.

How a Recession Might Tank American Romance

2025-05-28T09:13:03-04:00

Life was bleak, bleak, bleak: Soup-kitchen lines ran for blocks. Teenagers walked across the nation on foot, looking for work. Parents fashioned cardboard soles for their children’s little shoes. This was the Great Depression, and Americans were suffering. But many of them did have one thing to look forward to: dating. Young people still went to movies and dances; they shared ice-cream sundaes or Coca-Colas. (They called the latter a “Coke date.”) Not everyone could manage such luxuries, Beth Bailey, a University of Kansas historian and the author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, told me. But for those who could, she said, the rendezvous were a “respite from all the grimness.”

Even in this country’s darkest economic times, romance has offered a little light. In the 1930s, more jobs opened up for single women; with money of their own, more could move away from family, providing newfound freedom to date, Joanna Scutts, a historian and writer, told me. Nearly a century later, a 2009 New York Times article cited online-dating companies, matchmakers, and dating-event organizers reporting a spike in interest after the 2008 financial crash. One dating-site executive claimed a similar surge had happened in 2001, during a previous economic recession. “When you’re not sure what’s coming at you,” Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist then working for PerfectMatch.com, told the Times, “love seems all the more important.”

Now, once again, people aren’t sure what’s coming at them. Many consumers have been rattled by the Trump administration’s erratic trade policies. And although the chances of an actual recession have declined since the president eased off some of his more aggressive tariff positions, J. P. Morgan Research still estimates the possibility at 40 percent. Meanwhile, the United States is facing another kind of recession: a romance recession. Marriage rates are going down; the number of single adults is going up. Based on trends from past eras, one might expect economic unease to give the dating market a jolt. But the way people view romance has shifted dramatically since 2008. Americans today may not be as likely as they once were to seek solace in love. This time, if an economic recession is coming, it might make the romance recession even worse.

Dating has always been expensive. Going out to a restaurant or bar or movie theater costs money; getting there might require a car; taking someone home is trickier if you can’t afford to not have roommates (or if your roommates are your parents). Some people still prioritize romance in rocky times—but a lot of Americans these days are letting financial anxiety deter them. In 2022, Dating.com surveyed single people about how inflation and economic uncertainty were influencing their love lives; nearly half of respondents said they’d refrained from scheduling a date in order to save money. In a 2024 poll from LendingTree, an online lending marketplace, 65 percent of participants said inflation had affected their dating life; 81 percent said they believed that dating might be easier if they had more money.

In some sense, sure, dating is easier if you have more money. But wouldn’t someone with less money be more intent on finding a partner to struggle alongside?

[Read: How to prepare for a recession]

Today, maybe not: People might want to weather the storm before searching for love. As the sociologist Andrew Cherlin has argued, marriage was once seen as a step toward adulthood; spouses strived to build a future—and a flush bank account—together. Now, more often, marriage is seen as the culmination of the maturing process: a “trophy” earned once you’ve figured out everything else—including your finances.

In one recent study, researchers asked participants making different incomes how much they desired a relationship and how ready they felt for one; six months later, they checked in to see whether those subjects had started dating someone. Johanna Peetz, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa who worked on the project, told me that she and her co-author thought a higher income might make single life easier and more fun—and partnership seem less necessary. In reality, the participants making the least were the ones who viewed coupledom as only a distant priority, and who were less likely to enter a relationship. They seemed to “really want a stable base,” Peetz said, “before they start looking for a partner.”

Something else has changed too. More people, stressed about their finances, may now see romance not as a fun distraction or a balm, but as a stressor in itself.

Economic insecurity, researchers have found, tends to make people more risk-averse. That might not affect your dating game if going out with someone doesn’t feel so scary, or if you’re nervous but expect that the butterflies might lead to something beautiful. Today, though, people may be more wary of letting other people in. In recent years, researchers have clocked a growing discomfort with emotional intimacy and a drop in social trust. In 1972, the first year the General Social Survey was conducted, 46 percent of participants in that poll agreed that “most people can be trusted”; earlier this month, Pew Research Center reported that, in a poll it conducted in 2023–24, only 34 percent of people said the same.

Straight people might be especially hesitant to put themselves out there. Suspicion between men and women seems to be on the rise. The Survey Center on American Life found that from 2017 to 2023, the number of women who said they feared being sexually assaulted had increased steeply. And a lot of women, for various reasons, really are having bad romantic experiences; in a YouGov poll from February, 44 percent of men said they’d been on a “terrible” date—while 57 percent of women said the same. Many of them might want to depend on a partner. They also might doubt that dating will yield one, at least not easily.

For young adults in particular, an economic recession could be a disaster for romance. Gen Z is, overall, a financially anxious cohort. Leading up to the 2024 election, young adults across races and party affiliations rated inflation as their top concern. In the aftermath of that election, I talked with Meghan Grace, a co-author of Generation Z: A Century in the Making, and she summarized what she sees as this group’s consistent, underlying concern: “I just want to feel safe.” That attitude applies to finances but also to romantic risk. In a 2023 survey from the dating app Hinge, more than half of Gen Z users said they’d let the fear of rejection hold them back from pursuing someone; 44 percent had “little to no dating experience.”

[Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage]

Even if an actual recession doesn’t hit, economic angst isn’t likely to disappear soon. And the romance recession isn’t likely to reverse itself either. The mood may remain, for a while, distinctly unsexy. “Overall, I guess my message really is, Oh, you better buckle up,” Peetz told me. “It’s definitely not gonna be a dating boom.”

Being single is expensive. But no one can will a suitable partner into existence—and making romance work really can be harder with less wealth. In studies, people perform worse on cognitive-processing tasks when their funds are low: Some of their headspace seems to be occupied by worrying. “You need cognitive resources to take the perspective of your partner, to communicate with your partner,” Peetz said, “and to do all kinds of things that help relationship quality.”

Holding off on the slog of modern dating could mean conserving emotional and financial reserves. It could mean leaning instead on long-known loved ones and strengthening those bonds. Partnership may once have felt like a relatively safe bet in an otherwise precarious world. Now, for many people, it’s just one more thing that they can’t depend on.

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The Pro-Family Policy This Nation Actually Needs

2025-05-05T08:00:00-04:00

American households don’t look like they used to. They’ve been changing for decades, in part because fewer people have been having kids—but also because different people have been having kids. More unmarried couples have been starting families. More single people have been parenting on their own. Some are even raising children with their friends. According to a report from Pew Research Center, in 1970, 67 percent of Americans aged 25 to 49 lived with a spouse and at least one child; by 2023, that number had plummeted to 37 percent. That’s a profound shift: Most adults in this age group, over the course of roughly 50 years, went from being married with children to not. What some refer to as the “traditional” family is no longer a majority.

Pronatalists across the political spectrum argue that the first trend, dropping birth rates, poses an urgent, existential threat: Fewer children born could eventually mean fewer working people to support the economy, pay taxes, and care for the elderly. Some of these pronatalists have the ear of Donald Trump, who, according to The New York Times, is weighing policies intended to nudge people toward childbirth. Vice President J. D. Vance and DOGE chief Elon Musk are both enthusiastic pronatalists. But the administration also wants to promote marriage—most likely a certain kind of marriage. Project 2025, a set of policy suggestions that have been called a road map for Trump’s second term, is very clear about who should be encouraged to have children. “Married men and women,” it decrees, “are the ideal, natural family structure.”

A pronatalist policy that defines family so narrowly—acknowledging only a type of household that most Americans don’t fit into—wouldn’t just be a moral mistake; it would also be a strategic one. The United States is full of people yearning for children but who are struggling to find a partner, or to pay for IVF, or to afford caring for kids beyond those they already have.

Not everyone agrees that more babies are necessary to sustain a society: Some argue that governments can find other ways to invest in the economy, fund social services, and support older adults. But if raising fertility rates is the goal, Trump’s team should be embracing the many kinds of families that already exist—and lowering barriers for all the people hoping to start new ones.

Not every pronatalist is the same. Some advocate for using technology—AI-assisted in vitro fertilization, genetic engineering, artificial wombs—to “optimize” humanity and stave off what they see as a potentially apocalyptic demographic collapse. (If the birth rate doesn’t spike soon, Musk has said, “civilization will disappear.”) Others make a progressive case for pronatalism: spurring childbirth by prioritizing aid to working families, thus smoothing the way for women to have as many kids as they’d like. (If such a model “helps women manifest the lives they imagine for themselves,” Elizabeth Bruenig recently wrote in The Atlantic, it’s “arguably feminist.”) Many pronatalists want a return to bygone family norms: stay-at-home moms having lots of kids. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, which advocates for “familial, in-home childcare,” fits into this bucket.

The White House may not follow Project 2025’s family plan to a T. The policies it’s considered so far, according to the Times, run the gamut from sensible if insufficient (a $5,000 “baby bonus” for every new American mother) to somewhat strange (a plan to help women understand when they’re ovulating—as if low fertility rates are caused largely by people who are trying to conceive but just haven’t figured this out).

[Read: Grandparents are reaching their limit]

Still, the administration hasn’t exactly been shy about how it defines family. “I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world,” Vance declared at this year’s March for Life anti-abortion rally. And the White House evidently wants its straight couples betrothed. Research shows, though, that efforts to boost marriage or birth rates don’t actually need to be lumped together—though research generally shows that children fare better across several metrics when raised in two-parent households.

Typically, marriage-incentive programs encourage unmarried couples to wed based on the idea that marriage will make them more likely to pool incomes, create stability, and raise kids in a two-parent household—a setup generally associated with better educational and workforce outcomes for children. But marriage itself hardly guarantees those successes, Christina Cross, a Harvard University sociologist and the author of the forthcoming book Inherited Inequality, told me.

Families often benefit from two parents working as a team; it’s just not a magical fix-all. The people most likely to marry are affluent, educated, white or Asian, and straight. Cross’s research indicates that what’s influential for kids is not just the resources that tend to accompany marriage, but also the resources that people who end up marrying already tend to possess. When Cross studied Black, low-income families, she found that even when children were raised in two-parent homes, they did not end up with the same resources, educational achievements, or prospects in the labor market as children from more affluent families. The benefits of the two-parent structure, she said, “are just not universal.” And of course, anyone raised by two miserably married, constantly arguing parents might tell you the same thing.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

At least half a century of research supports the idea that a household arrangement itself isn’t what makes a kid happy and healthy. Susan Golombok, a University of Cambridge psychologist and the author of We Are Family: The Modern Transformation of Parents and Children, has for decades studied nontraditional families: gay couples who adopt, gay couples who rely on IVF and surrogacy, single parents by choice. Again and again, she and other researchers have found that what counts more for kids is two things: the quality of their relationships with family members, and whether they’re accepted by the outside world. Golombok has even found that parents in nonconventional family structures tend to be more involved than straight, married parents on average, probably because they are more likely to have deliberately chosen parenthood. Gay couples and single parents by choice have to be intentional, to overcome obstacles. “These were really wanted children,” she told me. Now she’s seeing many politicians and commentators blatantly ignore such findings. “All of this very painstaking research,” she said, “is just being brushed to the side as if it didn’t happen.” And erasing it isn’t likely to lead to a baby boom.

Consider, for instance, how many people want kids but don’t have anyone to raise them with. The United States is already in the midst of a romance recession: Fewer Americans, and especially people without college degrees, are marrying or living with partners; more people are identifying as single. Badgering people to hurry up and get hitched isn’t likely to change this. Straight women, in particular, are trying to pull from a pool of men who—with their growing rates of addiction, isolation, unemployment, and even suicide—may not seem stable or healthy enough for parenthood. As these women search and search for a partner, their window for having children might close. For her 2023 book, Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, Marcia C. Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale, interviewed 150 women who’d frozen their eggs; more than 80 percent of those participants, it turned out, were single. They were putting up with a hugely expensive and uncomfortable process just to buy themselves a little more time to find a co-parent. Some never did.

The White House has plenty of options to make having and raising a kid alone more feasible. It could start by subsidizing assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as in vitro fertilization, which Trump has said he might do—or then again, maybe he won’t. In March, he called himself “the fertilization president,” and his aides are reportedly planning to recommend ways to make IVF more accessible. But his administration has also been cutting federal programs that research fertility and maternal health, including one that tracked the success rates of different IVF clinics. And Project 2025 explicitly states that ART should be a last resort even for married couples—instead recommending “restorative reproductive medicine,” a vague term for methods such as fertility tracking that are far less likely to work for people striving to conceive.

[Read: This might be a turning point for child-free voters]

Policy makers could also think beyond conception, accounting for the loved ones whom single people (and parents in general) may turn to for help when they need it. Cross, the sociologist, mentioned that a lot of families—especially low-income, Black, and Latino families—depend on extended relatives to help raise kids. That lines up with my recent reporting on grandparents, many of whom are pushing themselves to their limits providing child care. (Researchers told me that reliance on grandparents has likely increased along with the rise in single parents.) Given these realities, family-leave policies should arguably extend not only to spouses and their children, as many are limited to now, but to anyone responsible for taking care of a family member. The U.S. could even follow Sweden’s example and let parents transfer paid-leave time to grandparents in the first months after their kid’s birth.

Or what if the government, acknowledging all those partnerless adults, were to encourage Americans to raise kids with friends? Some people are already doing it. Golombok has been studying platonic co-parents in recent years, and so far, she told me, the data suggest that their children are just fine. And if pooling incomes is good for kids—well, a group of pals combining finances, skills, and sets of hands might be even better.

The Trump administration hasn’t shared the details of its pronatalist agenda; it could take some of the recommendations reported in the Times, or go another way entirely. Offering that “baby bonus” would be a good start. Subsidized child care, guaranteed paid parental leave and sick leave, tax credits or cash assistance totaling more than a few thousand dollars would be even better. Such policies, as long as they’re not limited to straight, married couples, would help a wide range of households—including traditional ones.

But if the Trump administration doesn’t institute policies that help the actual majority of American families, it won’t be advancing a family-forward agenda at all. And it won’t be likely to create “more happy children.” Its goal has always been regression: not to open up the circle of parenthood, but to shut it.

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You’ve Probably Already Met Your Next Best Friend

2025-04-21T12:05:42-04:00

If you’re a lonely adult in an American city, please know that people are trying very hard to help you. A few examples: The organization Project Gather hosts food-centered hangouts—potlucks, bake sales, mushroom foraging—across the country. The company Timeleft, operating in more than 300 cities, matches groups of five strangers for dinner every Wednesday. Belong Center offers “Belong Circles,” 90-minute gatherings led by “trained community architects.” Block Party USA seems to, um—advocate for the concept of block parties?

Ventures such as these make up a growing friendship industry, and they claim a lofty goal: Not only do they want to get people off their phone and out of the house; they want nothing less than to cure Americans of alienation. “Eating with others can bring joy, build interpersonal connections, and ultimately help solve the loneliness epidemic in the U.S.,” Project Gather declares. Block Party USA considers itself an “actionable cure for our country’s loneliness, social isolation, divisiveness, and the youth mental health crisis.” Ambitious! But I have some notes.

First, it must be said: Research doesn’t back up the idea that America is experiencing a loneliness epidemic, or even that overall loneliness rates are worse now than they’ve generally been throughout history.

Of course, plenty of people do report feeling lonely—particularly young adults, a group that may actually be lonelier than they used to be. And many of these endeavors explicitly or implicitly target Gen Z, a cohort that does seem to struggle with interpersonal trust and vulnerability, and therefore could probably use some help connecting. If only it were as easy as getting them in the same room.

[Read: The myth of a loneliness epidemic]

Most of these start-ups appear to rely on a common assumption: Loneliness results from a lack of friends, and to make new friends, one should meet new people. But we don’t fully know what makes a person more or less lonely. Loneliness and time spent alone don’t seem to be closely correlated; different people crave different amounts of socializing, and not all socializing is equally fulfilling. When researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education surveyed 1,500 American adults about loneliness, they found that people cited a number of struggles, not all clearly related to a friend shortage: 65 percent of those who were lonely said they felt existentially alone, separate from others or the world; 60 percent said their insecurity or mental health had made connection more difficult; 57 percent said they couldn’t share their true self. Other studies suggest that very few people have no friends, and that the average number of friends people have has remained fairly stable over time.

The problem with relationships is often one of quality rather than quantity. One firm believer in this principle is Shasta Nelson, who writes about friendship and hosts a podcast called Frientimacy. The title is a nod to what she believes many people are hungry for: not friends, per se, but real intimacy with those friends. “We don’t need to meet more people,” she told me. “We need to feel more met by the people we already know.”

Achieving frientimacy, she argues, requires three things: consistency, positivity, and vulnerability. The friendship industry tends to start and end with mere presence: You have to show up. But a single paint-and-sip does not a best friend make. Jeffrey A. Hall, a University of Kansas communication professor, has found in his work that going from strangers to casual friends typically takes 40 to 60 hours spent together; moving to actual friends takes 80 to 100 hours, and forming a good friendship tends to take about 200 hours altogether. Ideally, a friendship-event attendee knows that if they meet someone they like, they should reach out again. What about the time after that—and after that? Without another shared context or network to put them in regular proximity, consistency is difficult to attain.

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

American culture has few models for how early friendship development works, Nelson told me. People tend to understand that after a good first date, they need to schedule the next meetup—soon, or they’ll lose momentum. With platonic prospects, though, many people don’t know how to put in the work. “One of the big myths,” she said, is “that we just have to meet the right person. We just need to keep being in the room, and eventually we’ll find our best friend.” Instead of seeking more and more people, hoping for a spark, maybe you’re better off working on the friendships that you already have—you know, the ones you’re neglecting while playing badminton with strangers.

This is where positivity, another one of Nelson’s pillars, comes in: the measure of how good a given friendship is making you feel. It’s actually the key to consistency, because you won’t be motivated to clear space in a hectic schedule—to pay the babysitter, to do the commute—if you didn’t leave the last hang feeling seen. Nelson hears a lot of complaints about consistency being the hardest node of the triad to achieve, but for years now, she’s been asking participants to assess their own strength in each of the three areas—and she’s found that positivity is the area in which participants perform most poorly. So many people, she observed, are overwhelmed and burned out; they might show up and cross “friend time” off their list without really giving those friends their full attention. Or they’re so nervous and afraid of rejection that they focus on themselves while socializing, not on how to make others feel valued. And if they’re too guarded to really open up—to achieve the third pillar, vulnerability—how can they expect the other person to do so either?

Hypothetically, an anti-loneliness start-up could design meetups with these principles in mind: supporting the slow build of connection over time; encouraging warmth, sharing, and vocal affirmation. Nelson herself ran a “friendship accelerator” program back in 2008, in which she matched participants into small groups and had them commit to 10 full weeks of structured gatherings. Each one ended with everyone in a circle, telling the person on their right one thing they appreciated about them. At least one of those groups, she told me, is still close. At the same time, she knows that even the most perfectly curated series of get-togethers isn’t likely to fix anyone’s social life. She compared it to working out: You don’t really start to feel the benefits until you’ve stuck with it enough to get in shape. “We have to see our social health not just as an event here and there, but like a lifestyle,” she told me, “that we are training for and getting stronger in.”

[Read: Americans are hoarding their friends]

The loneliness industrial complex is unlikely to sustain a lifetime of intentional friendship. But further, it isn’t equipped to address the structural issues plaguing many lonely people—especially young adults. Hosting social events won’t make rent any cheaper or higher education more affordable, which might allow more young people to live near friends rather than moving back in with their parents. It won’t cut down on people’s working hours so they can spend more time with loved ones. It won’t fix the mental-health-treatment gap, which exists because providers tend to focus on children and adolescents or end up treating middle-aged and older adults, leaving young adults underserved. It won’t transform the architecture of cities—build larger housing units, say, so people can host groups; improve public transportation so they can easily reach friends; open new “third places,” public areas where people can socialize for free.

Imperfect measures are better than none. Still: A whole lot of resources—whether from investors or individual donors or pro bono efforts—are being dumped into the friendship industry. TimeLeft, backed by venture capital, has raised more than $2 million since 2020; according to a story in New York magazine earlier this year, Belong Center has gathered at least $1,750,000. Hinge’s “One More Hour” initiative is investing $1 million in existing social clubs—some of which host events, such as “reading parties,” that sound highly likely to be one-off experiences.

And although some of these meetups are free to attendees, others require entry fees or memberships. Take the Brooklyn-based Sprout Society’s upcoming “Together We Dink”: A Pickleball Experience event: A ticket that includes playing, food, and drinks costs $250. Across the nation, people yearning for some kind of community are really trying—they’re making time, getting dressed up, shelling out—all for a highly imperfect solution. At best, these enterprises offer helpful venues for meeting interesting people, whether or not you’ll be forever friends or even have much in common. At worst, they’re expensive distractions, offering a false promise of shiny new connections at the expense of old pals—the ones who have been there all along.

Grandparents Are Reaching Their Limit

2025-04-13T08:00:00-04:00

Elena and her husband had plans for their retirement. They wanted to move to Wyoming; to meet new people, volunteer, hike the snowy, perfect Tetons. And they did move there—for about eight months. Then they got a call from their daughter, who was due to have a baby within weeks. She and her husband were on five or so different waitlists for day cares, and now she could see that they would still be waiting by the time she had to go back to work, six weeks after giving birth. She needed help. Her parents dropped everything, packed up a U-Haul, and moved to the Pacific Northwest. They were going back to work too: as full-time grandparents.

Grandparents today have a certain reputation, Elena (who asked to withhold her last name to protect her family’s privacy) told me: They’re “all rich, retired, living it up in the Villages in Florida, playing 10 rounds of golf a day, having cocktails at 4:30, and laughing while their Millennial children are suffering.” TikTokers keep skewering a generation of supposedly self-involved, jet-setting older folks, or earnestly grieving that they don’t have a “village” to help them raise their kids. Commentators have jumped in with attacks and, in turn, with defenses (“Cut the Boomer Grandparents a Little Slack”). On Reddit, people are wondering, “What the f*** is wrong with grandparents nowadays?” Last year, when J. D. Vance was running for vice president and was asked how he would address the problem of staggering child-care costs, he first suggested that grandparents or other relatives “help out a little bit more.”

You could be forgiven, then, for thinking grandparents are shirking their duty. But the truth is quite the opposite: America is in an age of peak grandparenting—particularly grandmothering. A 2022 survey from Deseret News and Brigham Young University found that nearly 60 percent of grandmothers had provided child care for a grandkid, and more than 40 percent saw a grandchild in person at least weekly. A 2023 Harris poll found that more than 40 percent of working parents relied on their kids’ grandma for child care; nearly 70 percent of those parents said they might have lost their job without that grandmother’s help.

Such statistics might not sound jaw-dropping if you assume that in decades past most grandparents were living with their grandkids and cheerily providing care all the time. Yet the reality has always been more complicated. Carole Haber, a Tulane University history professor and the author of Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past, told me that American grandparents in earlier generations were typically seen as authority figures, as burdens, or as companions to their grandkids—but not necessarily as caregivers.

Today, though, economic, cultural, and workplace shifts have left parents floundering. A parent’s struggle has become a grandparent’s struggle. Elena, at 74, is now caring for her daughter’s second child while the first is in day care; that means she has lived through four years of sick nights and tantrums, teething, and food on the floor, all after having raised her own three kids. Her husband, who’s 77, helps out—but she told me he’s “not the main baby wrangler.” When I first reached out to her, she got my message while sitting on a tiny stool, begging her grandchild to try using the potty before nap time.

Americans are in a new phase of grandparenthood, in which many seniors, like Elena, aren’t just disciplinarians or playmates but co-parents. The real change isn’t that older adults are absent; it’s that their kids need them more than ever.

Some grandparents grasp at every possible opportunity to watch their grandkids; some don’t care to do so at all. But many, Madonna Harrington Meyer, a Syracuse University sociologist who wrote the 2014 book Grandmothers at Work, told me, fall into a third group—those who want to be involved and are trying desperately to set limits on that involvement. Here are a few strategies grandparents have told her they’ve tried: Some say they’ll help out only on certain days of the week. (“I’m a Wednesday grandma,” she’s heard.) Some pledge that they’ll commit only to fun time together, no math tutoring or dentist trips. Some semi-regularly ignore their adult children’s calls. When she interviewed grandmothers for her research, Harrington Meyer told me, a participant’s phone would occasionally ring; “they would look and they would say, Oh, I can’t answer that. She’ll ask me to babysit tonight.”

Rationing care might sound stingy—but the happily omnipresent grandparent has never really been the norm in the U.S., Haber, the Tulane professor, told me. In the nation’s early history, people had a lot more kids, on average, than they do today; many would still be raising younger children by the time they became grandparents, and older kids usually moved out to build their own families. Elders (especially grandfathers, who may have owned the land their adult children moved to) tended to act as authority figures, disciplining grandkids and imparting wisdom—not necessarily running around changing diapers. When three generations did live together, it was often because a widow had moved into a child’s home after her husband’s death. That wasn’t always a happy scenario. Those elderly women were generally dependent, sometimes relegated to a single room—and though they might have helped with child care, Haber told me, many didn’t want to. Historical evidence suggests that, then as now, older adults commonly wanted what sociologists call “intimacy at a distance”: to connect with family while maintaining autonomy.

In the 20th century, the Great Depression led to a greater number of three-generation homes by necessity. Family conflicts were common, Haber told me, and older adults were seen, more and more, as burdens. But then the advent of pensions and Social Security enabled more older people to live on their own. Multigenerational homes were on the decline. By the 1940s, the prototypical grandparent was shifting away from being the land-owning patriarch or the frail dependent; with congenial relations restored for many families, the new archetype was the loving granny or gramps who would swoop in to take the kids out for some fun. Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist, told me he calls that the “Disney-fication of grandparents”—which you’ll understand if you ever go to Disneyland, he said, and pay attention to how many strollers are being pushed by senior citizens.

The new American grandparent is a family anchor: a comrade not only in the delightful parts of child care but also in the tedious, messy, and grueling ones. Several shifts have led to this reality. Life expectancy increased dramatically over the past century—so significantly that even though people now tend to have children later, the average older adult has more healthy years to help raise a grandkid. Meanwhile, over the past few decades, the numbers of single parents and of working mothers of young kids have increased in the U.S. Yet the cost of child-care services keeps climbing—and U.S. federal law doesn’t guarantee paid parental leave or paid sick leave. Parents are desperate. Once, at a conference, a French scholar asked Harrington Meyer a question: Why do American grandmothers do so much for their grandchildren? “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with our grandmothers,” she answered. “But I think there’s plenty wrong with our welfare state.”

Grandparenting may also be intensifying because, in many households, parenting is intensifying. In the past few decades, children—seen by their parents as ever more vulnerable, in need of protection and cultivation—have been granted less and less independence. In a qualitative 2021 study of British grandmothers, researchers found that many participants were taken aback by the expectation that children needed constant supervision, as well as by the increased focus on educational achievement—hallmarks of the kind of intensive parenting common in both the U.S. and the U.K. The older people being asked to help the kids with their homework and shuttle them to extracurriculars probably remember letting their own children roam the neighborhood while they worked or cleaned or had a martini.

A difference in parenting styles can create tension within families—and may add to some Millennial parents’ perception that older generations are underperforming. In that 2021 study, some grandparents tried to “resist” what they saw as excessive surveillance or competitive striving. A 2019 AARP survey found that only 25 percent of grandparents believed that modern parenting was better than it had been in their generation. Elena had to get used to plenty of new parenting practices. Take the ever-present baby monitors: If my grandson is four feet away in the next room, I’ll hear him if he cries, she thought at first. Why do we have cameras on him at all times? But she’s decided to honor her daughter’s preferences; it’s her daughter’s turn, she told me, to call the shots. And she can see, when she talks with friends who chafe at the newer methods, that their distaste for intensive (or just different) parenting comes from a place of insecurity. They’re worried that they’ll be perceived as incompetent, or that they’ll actually do something wrong.

Everyone just wants what’s best for the children. Still, changing norms, even when they’re positive, have made child-rearing more arduous, expensive, and time-consuming—and raised expectations for how much grandparents ought to contribute. From 1991 to 2022, Silverstein has found, grandparents gave their grandkids increasing amounts of both practical and emotional support. Of the older adults who had told Harrington Meyer they’d tried to set boundaries, many consistently failed to do so. A “Wednesday grandma,” asked to take the kids on a Saturday, tends to become a Saturday grandma.

And the rest of life, for many seniors, isn’t slowing down. Older adults are retiring later than they did in the 1990s. Roughly 40 percent of American grandparents are in the workforce, many because they can’t afford not to be. While reporting her book on working grandmothers, Harrington Meyer found that 83 percent of those surveyed said they provided more care to their grandkids than their own young families had gotten from their parents; the same amount said they provided more than they ever expected to.

Some need to delay retirement because they’re providing financial support for their grandkids. Harrington Meyer has talked with grandparents who’ve used up their nest egg or taken on debt for that purpose. One grandma hadn’t been to the dentist in years, and when she finally scraped together enough money to go, she sent her grandson instead; another spent the money she needed for an oil change on diapers. Historically, many adult children have financially supported and cared for their parents—but now the assistance is much more likely to flow the other way.

Of course, grandparenting doesn’t look the same in every family. Multigenerational living is more common, for instance, among Black, Hispanic, and Asian families than white ones; Black and Hispanic families are more likely to live within an hour of their extended family, and Black grandmothers are especially likely to be a “custodial grandparent” providing primary care. And yet, researchers told me that highly involved grandparenting appears to be common across race and class groups. The most consistent divide, it seems, is gender: Grandmothers tend to be so much more involved in child care that a good chunk of the research doesn’t refer to grandfathers at all. “I’m under so much pressure to quit my job and take care of these grandchildren,” one woman told Harrington Meyer. “And if I were a man, nobody would even ask me to.”

Active grandparenting has some profound benefits, not just for children but for older adults too. Grandparenthood has been linked to decreased feelings of isolation and improved cognitive resilience. Empathy, perspective-taking, problem-solving, imaginative play—the opportunity to practice these things might help keep people sharp. And for many, grandparenthood simply makes life richer. Elena loves seeing her daughter every day and watching her grandbabies grow up. When she was raising her own children, they were in day care while Elena was busy with work, and time blurred by so quickly. Now she feels like she’s getting a second chance, one that’s unfolding almost in slow motion. Her whole life is playing with her grandson on the floor, watching him take steps for the first time or build a tower that he couldn’t have built two weeks before.

But people have limits, especially as they age. One 51-year-old woman I spoke with, Sarah Garner, told me that even as a relatively young grandmother, she finds child care more deeply exhausting now than when she was a new mother. Her daughter and son-in-law can’t afford day care, so she and her husband watch their grandson five days a week: potty training him, bathing him, taking him to swim classes. She’s finding carrying him harder and harder. When his parents pick him up at the end of the day, she’s so worn down that she can’t seem to concentrate on anything.

At a certain point, getting pushed to your limits just isn’t good for you. One 2022 study of Western European grandparents found that grandparenthood improved aspects of health for older adults who provided child care—but reduced well-being both for those who weren’t in frequent contact with their families and didn’t provide it at all, and for grandmothers who provided care daily.

Dedicating later life to grandparenting can entail other losses, too. Before Garner got pulled into full-time child care, she was excited for retirement: She’d get to focus on her new online-tutoring business, develop friendships with some nice women in her church, maybe even go back to school and finally get her bachelor’s. Now, in ways both rewarding and trying, she’s not living for herself. “I’m not the center of my life. And so I’m willing to make those sacrifices,” she told me, “even though I don’t always want to.”

But some joys, once forfeited, you might never get back. Retirement is split into two phases, someone once told Elena: First is your go-go phase, when you try to take advantage of everything your newfound freedom has to offer. Then, as you age, you enter your no-go phase. Elena and her husband have noticed that jet lag has gotten really tough; their dream of hiking the Tetons is probably over. They might be entering their no-go phase—their last one in life. Recently, their middle daughter, who lives in California, had her first child. “If I needed you,” she asked Elena, “you would come and you would move here, right?”

A blessing can also be a burden. One grandfather I talked with, Mike Little, helps his daughter—a single mother—raise her son. “He is one of my best friends,” Little told me. “But freedom, for my wife and I, is largely gone just the same.”

Supporting family can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, be all fun; inevitably, it involves sacrifice. But romanticizing that labor—pretending that when you love someone, being there for them is never an imposition—doesn’t serve anyone either. American society has come a long way in recognizing that women have value beyond their ability to raise kids. For many people, though, that understanding seems to apply only to younger women. Painting older women as natural, endlessly enthusiastic caregivers provides an excuse to deny more support to struggling parents. It presumes that mothers can have careers only at the expense of their own mothers’ work and interests. And it sets up a false choice—between devoting yourself to care work and losing connection to family altogether, as if closeness is won only through labor.

Silverstein, of Syracuse University, started doing research in Sweden decades ago; he told me that when he first went, he expected to find that family would be somewhat less important to people there, given that the government significantly subsidizes child care. Instead, he found the opposite: Compared with what he was used to in the U.S., kin relationships seemed to be especially warm and sweet. “Once you take the burden of care away from the family,” he told me, “people can engage in a much more emotionally satisfying way.”

America, it seems, may be headed in the opposite direction: toward a future in which families are more, not less, defined by caregiving. People are living longer and having fewer kids on average, which means more “beanpole families”: tall and thin family lines, with very old and very young living members—but not many “horizontal” relationships among, say, siblings or cousins, the kind that can feel fun and not always so loaded with responsibility. Vertical bonds can be beautiful. But the stakes in those relationships can feel so high, and the chances for disappointment so abundant.

When care work falls on families—and no strong social safety net exists to help—grandparents aren’t the only ones to suffer. So, too, do the parents whose own parents are not alive, not equipped to help, or not interested. I don’t blame all the people posting about how their Boomer parents aren’t measuring up. Surely some of those grandparents really aren’t around; maybe some are involved, but not enough to keep their kid’s head above water. Either way, the younger adults feel let down by the very people they assumed would be there to lift them up.

I spoke with one dad, Tommy Ciaccio, who told me a horror story: While his wife was in the final stages of her pregnancy, she experienced chest pains, which can signal a pulmonary embolism. All of the urgent-care providers around them in Milwaukee, where they were living at the time, were closed, so they went to the ER. Their insurance company, he said, refused to cover it, arguing they should have gone to urgent care. Then, when his wife gave birth, she hemorrhaged and almost died. All of the required medical care was so expensive that they had to declare bankruptcy. His wife quickly ran out of paid time off while she was recovering; his pay as a restaurant server wasn’t enough for them to afford child care, so he stayed home. Through all of that, his parents (who are divorced) were within a few hours’ driving distance, but they visited only infrequently. Neither, he said, was “meaningfully present.”

More than anything, this was a tale of being failed by systems: by a seemingly infinite maze of insurance rules, by employers that don’t provide paid parental leave or a living wage, by a government that doesn’t mandate either one. But what hurt Ciaccio the most was his parents’ relative absence. He had sympathy for them—especially his mother, who had worked hard to have a career while raising him mostly on her own and who’d wanted to be seen as more than a caregiver. He also wished that she wanted to help him now. “When I looked at my son and I loved him in this way that sort of assailed me,” he said, “I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being loved.”

I’d want my mom’s help too. But imagine if the situation wasn’t so dire in the first place—if medical care, parental leave, and child care were all more attainable. In that world, family members might get a little more breathing room: room to see one another not just as mother or child or grandparent, or as a person with needs or answers to that need, but as someone with funny quirks and surprising preferences and interests other than baby food and story time. Life is hard enough as it is. They’d still have plenty of chances to depend on one another.

The New Singlehood Stigma

2025-04-02T08:00:00-04:00

Just to be clear: Today is, in many ways, the best time in American history to be single.

In the 18th century, bachelors paid higher taxes and faced harsher punishments for crimes than their betrothed counterparts. (“A Man without a Wife,” Benjamin Franklin said, “is but half a Man.”) Single women—more likely, naturally, to be seduced by the devil—were disproportionately executed for witchcraft. Through the 19th century and into the 20th, women had limited options for employment—and banks could refuse to let them open accounts until 1974, so the choice, for many of them, was marriage or poverty.

Forgive me, then, if I sound ungrateful when I say this: Americans are still extremely weird about single people. But now the problem isn’t just that singlehood is disparaged; sometimes, it’s that singlehood is celebrated. Relentlessly, annoyingly celebrated. Let me explain.

The assumption that partnership is a priority has not disappeared in this country. In 2019, when the Pew Research Center asked participants how necessary a committed romantic relationship is for a fulfilling life, nearly 60 percent said it’s important, and roughly 30 percent said it’s essential. Of course they did: Couples are the ones who get plus-one invites to weddings or office parties or family gatherings; they’re the ones who might be able to share health insurance, or sponsor each other for visas, or get tax benefits. Routine life—paying rent, getting groceries, reserving hotel rooms—is often far more expensive for single people (and especially single parents), who can’t as easily split costs or buy in bulk. We’re still living in a partnered person’s world.

[Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage]

At the same time, I’ve noticed a counter-impulse, perhaps a reaction to all that injustice: a kind of public cheerleading for singlehood. Single celebrities seem pressed to make statements about how much they love solo life (and then promptly enter a relationship). People use terms like sologamy (“self-marriage”) or self-partnered (thank you, Emma Watson) or—you cannot make this stuff up—“QuirkyAlone.” Therapists advise embracing one’s single status with phrases such as “I’m focused on myself right now,” as if not having a partner automatically means you must be growing. And of course, much of this singlehood PR campaign targets women specifically. Single men have never faced quite as much scrutiny; they’ve had the luxury, more often, of being seen as full people in their own right. The 21st-century single woman is the one who has to prove her complete humanity by performing her contentment. She is empowered; she’s badass; she slays. She might also grieve—but no one really wants to talk about that.

I’ve spoken with a lot of single people, in my reporting and just in the course of life, who enjoy full, happy lives, complete with friends, family, meaningful work, and creative outlets—and who also yearn for partnership. These things are not mutually exclusive. I struggle sometimes to convey this in my own writing: Describing the absence of romantic love as a lack feels regressive. But then, so many people are telling me they feel they’re lacking something—something they want very badly. Who am I to deny that sense of loss? I’ve been single most of my adult life. I know that when you want a relationship, not having one can feel lonely; feeling like you shouldn’t want one just makes you lonelier. And all the polite cheeriness about singlehood—especially from partnered people, in a society still designed for couples—can feel disingenuous and patronizing.

Now would be a great time for some nuance. In recent years, the number of single people has been growing, in the United States as well as many other countries. Some have cast that shift as a victory, a sign that people are throwing off the shackles of compulsory coupledom and bad relationships; others have declared it an emergency, arguing that frustrated singles are giving up on romance—and that they’re going to miss out. I think both of these theories are a little bit true. Some people love being single, and some people hate it. Plenty fall somewhere in the middle. They’re happy with their life, and they won’t settle for anyone less than amazing—and they’re disappointed that someone amazing hasn’t come along.

Singlehood isn’t really unique in this sense. No one has a perfect life. Some people don’t have the career they’d like or the means to pursue their passion; others long for children, or find themselves tied to a city while they’re dreaming of living in the country. None of that, obviously, defines them as people or reduces them to objects of pity. And yet we tiptoe around the wish for love, as if recognizing it would imply that single people are all regrettably unfulfilled.

[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]

For the pursuit of romance to carry any shame is especially odd in 2025, when online dating, now the primary way partners meet, requires that you cop to having some desire. (Your profile isn’t going to create itself.) Instead of just acknowledging that totally commonplace aspiration, though, we romanticize serendipity: People hope that love will fall into their lap so they never need to debase themselves by seeking it, or they say they’re just poking around on the apps out of casual curiosity. The culture tells us, simultaneously, that we should be in a couple and that we should feel whole all by ourselves. We should have a partner, but we shouldn’t want one.

For a long time, I realize now, I internalized this. My friends, experiencing extended strings of bad dates and rejections and false starts, talked candidly about their sadness; all the while, I was sunny. Sure, I’ll date someone if they turn up, I insisted. But look how good our lives are! We have each other. I felt some pride being so self-actualized—such a good, friendship-loving feminist. I also felt, I’m sorry to say, a twinge of embarrassment for my friends. They wanted so openly.

I had it backwards, though: I was the one who was uncomfortable with singlehood. The idea of desiring a partner yet not having one made me itch—but trying to run away from it only put me on an optimism hamster wheel. If I could go back, I wouldn’t tell my friends that it’s all going to work out, or that they don’t need anyone. You’re perfect, I would say instead. And this is hard.

Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage

2025-03-10T09:00:00-04:00

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Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don’t believe in overly idealizing partnerships or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called “Love and Heartbreak,” responds that of course relationships aren’t all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we’re surrounded by. But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, “whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,” she told me, or “in a remote area with no media whatsoever.” The sensation is big, she tells her students; it’s overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They’re skeptical.

Maybe if Phillips had been teaching this class a decade ago, her students would already have learned some of this firsthand. Today, though, that’s less likely: Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they’d been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a “steady” partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same.

As I’ve written, a whole lot of American adults are withdrawing from romance—not just young people. But the trend seems to be especially pronounced for Gen Z, or people born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Of course, you can grow into a perfectly mature and healthy adult without ever having had a romantic relationship; some research even suggests you might be better off that way. In the aggregate, though, this shift could be concerning: a sign, researchers told me, of a generation struggling with vulnerability. A first love, for so many, has been a milestone on the path to adulthood—a challenging, thrilling, world-expanding experience that can help people understand who they are and whom they’re looking for. What’s lost if that rite of passage disappears?

You can experience so much without being in a defined relationship. You can flirt; you can kiss; you can dance. You can have a crush so big it takes up all the space in your brain; you can care about someone deeply; you can get hurt—badly. Plenty of young people, then, could be having transformative romantic encounters and still reporting that they’ve never been in a relationship. It could be the label, not the emotional reality, that’s changing, Thao Ha, a developmental psychologist at Arizona State University, told me. She’s found that lots of high schoolers report having “dated” before—a looser term that might better suit the realities of adolescent courtship today. (In a YouGov poll from last year, about 50 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they’d been in a “situationship,” or undefined relationship.) Some of that activity might not entail exclusivity or regularity, or any promise of long-term commitment. But it could still help young people with what researchers told me are some core rewards of early romantic exploration: gaining autonomy from parents, developing a sense of identity, what Phillips called an “existential” benefit—the “sometimes painful, sometimes amazing trial-and-error process of seeking closeness.”

Becoming a well-rounded grown-up, in fact, doesn’t really require romantic experience of any sort. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are times of uncertainty; what young people need most, Amy Rauer, a human-development professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me, is often just a cheerleader: a peer, a grandparent, a coach, or someone else making them feel valued, which can set them up to feel secure in future relationships. Teens can also learn social skills—how to make small talk, resolve arguments, empathize across differences—in all kinds of platonic relationships.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of America romance]

Some research, Phillips pointed out, actually suggests that young people might benefit from a lack of romantic activity. One study found that, compared with their dating peers, students who dated very infrequently or not at all over a seven-year period were seen by their teachers as having better leadership and social skills, and reported fewer symptoms of depression. After all, young love isn’t always positive. It can be an emotional whirlwind; it can distract from schoolwork, or from friends, or from other interests. In the worst cases, it can be abusive. (Adolescent girls experience intimate-partner violence at particularly high rates.) And when it ends, teens—with little perspective and few learned coping mechanisms—can be absolutely wrecked.

Despite how common a lack of relationship experience is now—especially but not only for teens—a lot of people still feel embarrassed by it. TikTok is filled with influencers declaring that they’re 26 or 30 or 40 and have never been in a relationship, sharing how insecure that’s made them feel; commenters stream in, by the hundreds of thousands, to divulge their own feelings of shame. Many of my friends, who are entering their 30s, constantly stress about this: They fear they won’t know how to be a good partner if the opportunity arises. But all of a person’s interactions, not just romantic ones, can shape how they’ll show up in a relationship. One 2019 study, which followed 165 subjects ages 13 to 30, found that strong friendships in adolescence predicted romantic-life satisfaction in adulthood; early romantic experience, meanwhile, wasn’t related to future satisfaction at all. (Teens commonly learn how to fight and make up with friends, Phillips told me, but they might be less likely to stick it out with a lover long enough for conflict resolution.)

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

Overall, when it comes to who you are in a relationship, what matters most is simply who you are, period. And the traits that make you you are likely to remain fairly stable throughout your life. A 2022 study found, for instance, that subjects who were single during adolescence—but had their first relationship by age 26—reported no lower self-esteem than those who’d started dating earlier. Tita Gonzalez Avilés, a personality psychologist at Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who has led some of this research, told me that although people often think their relationships will change them, the influence typically happens the other way around: Who you are shapes what kind of relationship you’ll have. Research has even shown that people’s satisfaction in a relationship tends to remain pretty consistent across their various partners.

Given all that, you might think it a good thing that Gen Z has less going on in the romance department. Perhaps young people are busy with other pursuits, focusing on friendship and school and hobbies; maybe they no longer want to settle for a mediocre partner. The transition to adulthood tends to take longer today, pushing back lots of different milestones—steps such as financial independence, buying a home, and, notably, getting married—sometimes indefinitely. In that sense, young people have an eminently rational reason to hold off on seeking partnership: The deadline is extended. But researchers have pointed to other, more worrisome reasons for the romance dip.

Phillips has heard a lot about situationships—and scenarios that aren’t even well-defined enough to use that label. For her new book, First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak, she interviewed more than 100 young people and parents, and found, as Ha did, that early romance today tends to reside in a gray area. “You have a long period of we’re talking,” Phillips told me. “You’re kind of dancing around the idea of a sexual-romantic connection, maybe even having some of those experiences, but not really talking about what it is.” For some, the lack of strict relationship expectations can be freeing. But many, Phillips told me, find the ambiguity distressing, because they don’t know what they have the right to feel—or the right to ask for. Some recounted how they ended up feeling invested in a fling—and described it not only as bad news, but as a personal failure: They said that they “got caught” (as if red-handed), “caught feelings” (like an illness), or succumbed to “dumb-bitch hour” (when late at night, defenses down, they texted a crush and—God forbid—let themselves feel close to someone). “Young people would be hard on themselves,” Phillips told me, “because they would think, Okay, this person let me know this wasn’t going to be a thing. And then my heart let it be a thing.”

The young-love recession, in other words, might reflect a real shift in how comfortable Americans are, on the whole, with emotional intimacy. Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk, and slow to trust—so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week. In a 2023 Hinge survey of Gen Z daters, 90 percent of participants said they wanted to find love—but 56 percent said that fear of rejection had kept them from pursuing a potential relationship, and 57 percent said they’d refrained from confessing their feelings about someone because they worried it would “be a turn-off.” Those reservations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, Phillips said, in which young people keep a romantic prospect at arm’s length—and then, when they feel confused or get hurt anyway, they become even more wary of relationships. “Why would I want to go any further in this world,” she said many wonder, “when I had this flirtation that seemed to be very close and very promising and went nowhere?”

[Read: The people who quit dating]

I heard something similar from Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life: People still badly want connection, but among Gen Z, “there’s a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it.” That social nervousness affects platonic and romantic relationships alike; he’s found, in fact, that people who spend more time with friends are also more likely to have dated regularly during their teen years. “Trying to forge romantic connections and be vulnerable—it’s really difficult,” he said, “when you’re constantly worried about being hurt or being taken advantage of.”

Some of that self-protective instinct has probably trickled down from older generations, especially when it comes to dynamics in heterosexual relationships. As Cox has found while reporting a forthcoming book on the gender divide, men and women seem to be growing ever further apart. Young men are shifting rightward, and many are feeling misunderstood. Women, meanwhile, have become more suspicious of men. Fear of sexual assault has increased significantly in recent years, and so has concern about dating-app safety. If so many grown women are feeling vigilant, imagine how girls and younger women feel: at a vulnerable age, still learning about the world and already surrounded by the message—and, in plenty of cases, the reality—that boys and men are dangerous. Imagine, too, how some boys and young men feel: just figuring out who they are and already getting the message that they’re not trusted. Perhaps it’s not surprising that people are trying to control their romantic feelings, whether by focusing on friendships or by keeping situationships allegedly emotion-free.

Even under conditions of a gender cold war, many girls might get on fine—but boys could suffer more. When psychologists told me that young people can flourish in the absence of romance, that was assuming they have close friends to rely on and to teach them social graces (including one as simple as making conversation). Boys and young men, who aren’t as likely to have such tight bonds, tend to learn those skills from women. Maybe they have a sister or a mother or female friends who can help with that—but if not, Cox told me, being single might put them at a real emotional and developmental disadvantage. That might make them less prepared to date.

[Read: The golden age of dating doesn’t exist]

A rise in skepticism toward romance is a loss, not just for boys but for society as a whole. Romantic love isn’t better or more important than platonic love, but it’s different—and telling yourself you have no need for it doesn’t necessarily make it true.

Phillips talked to her students about an excerpt of Plato’s Symposium, in which—at the beginning of time—Zeus splits each human in two in order to foil their plan to overthrow the gods. From then on, everyone wanders around yearning for their other half. Falling in love, according to the story, is when you finally find it. Alas: Her students hated the story. They didn’t like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they’d be incomplete without such a reunion. They told her they wanted to be whole all by themselves—not dependent on a soulmate. They had a point.

And yet, Phillips still felt there was something sad about their reaction. They didn’t seem to understand that “relationships are an interpersonal exchange,” she said: that “they involve both feeling expanded by someone else and then some genuine sacrifices.” You are at least a little dependent on someone in a relationship; that’s what the symbiosis of love requires. It’s scary—but it can be interesting, and beautiful when it’s good, and sometimes formative even when it doesn’t stay good. You might want to find out for yourself.

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The Fantasy of a Nonprofit Dating App

2025-02-20T11:42:52-05:00

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

The gnawing suspicion is a common one. In one 2024 study, researchers analyzed more than 7,000 online reviews of Tinder and interviewed 30 Tinder users, and found that many people believe that dating sites are messing with their profile’s visibility, manipulating their matches, and knowingly providing options that aren’t good fits. The study’s co-authors called it the “conflict of interest theory”: that dating-app companies (which want customers) have interests fundamentally at odds with those of many dating-app users (specifically, those who want to find someone and delete the app ASAP). The idea was so familiar to the researchers whom I interviewed while reporting this article that I hardly needed to explain it.

Some wariness of dating sites is understandable. One recent investigation found that, more and more, apps are nudging people to pay for perks—visibility boosts, unlimited likes—marketed as tools for finding love. Last year, a class-action lawsuit argued that Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and several other apps, locks its users into “a perpetual pay-to-play loop” at the expense of “customers’ relationship goals.” (“We actively strive to get people on dates every day and off our apps,” Match Group responded in a statement. “Anyone who states anything else doesn’t understand the purpose and mission of our entire industry.” In December, a judge sent the case to arbitration.)

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Whether for-profit app companies are in fact trying to hinder people’s romantic game is questionable. Match Group keeps the details of its algorithms and strategies under lock, but a spokesperson told me that “the best scenario for us is for someone to find their partner using one of our products, and then tell other people about it … Our algorithms are designed to prioritize active users and mutual compatibility—not to keep people stuck in an endless loop.” And it’s not like companies need to worry about there being a finite supply of single people. You wouldn’t expect a therapist to undermine her clients’ treatment for the sake of income; plenty of people have problems that could use some talking through. Brutally, that 2024 paper determined that app skeptics might just be avoiding responsibility for their own “dating failures,” blaming a lack of matches on evil capitalist overlords instead of “their own actions or attractiveness.” (I flinched.)

Regardless, the fact that so many believe the theory suggests that modern dating isn’t working for a lot of people—and that for-profit matchmaking companies have, to a significant degree, lost the trust of their base. American romance isn’t exactly thriving, as I’ve reported: Some singles are quitting the apps, and others are quitting dating altogether. But recently, I started wondering whether another solution might be out there, one that still allows people to meet online and set up a date (rather than begging friends for a setup or hoping for a meet-cute). What I wanted to find, really, was a site that doesn’t try to make money: a nonprofit dating app.

A handful of them actually exist. Some are run by governments, and at least one option comes from scientists. So I set out to explore these alternatives, hoping to understand whether the experience of virtual courtship might ever change.

The most common type of nonprofit dating app, I quickly discovered, is the state-sponsored site, which is typically created in response to flagging marriage and fertility rates. Last fall, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government launched a dating platform, Tokyo Enmusubi, which uses AI to suggest matches—and which, according to the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, cost $1.28 million to develop. Guixi, a city in China, unveiled a dating-app venture in 2023; it draws on state-gathered data to make matches for its customers and then sends them off on blind dates. Terengganu, a region in West Malaysia, is developing an app too, which the local government said on Facebook is designed to “strengthen the family institution in the state.” If it sounds a little creepy for political leaders to be reaching into people’s intimate lives in this way—well, you might not be wrong.

Researchers did tell me that state dating apps have some potential benefits. Users might hope, for instance, that such platforms share their goal—that governments looking to raise marriage and birth rates, as well as increase trust in the state, want people to swiftly find love. And governments may have less incentive to share users’ data with third parties, or to inundate them with sponsored profiles and advertisements, than some for-profit apps do.

A state platform could also be effective at providing certain kinds of security. Luke Brunning, a University of Leeds philosopher who co-runs the Ethical Dating Online research network, told me that some for-profit companies might fear that requiring too much information at sign-up could turn away potential customers. Many governments, by contrast, are accustomed to collecting data on their residents and might not hesitate to demand information from dating-app users—which, in some cases, could help ensure that people aren’t bots, catfishers, or scammers, and could help keep track of users in case of bad behavior. (Tokyo Enmusubi, for one, mandates that users provide a photo ID, proof of income, and even official proof of singlehood; it also asks them to sign a pledge promising that they’re looking to wed.)

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

The major commercial dating apps do grant users the ability to report a profile in the case of perceived abuse. They use AI and human moderators to detect suspicious activity, and have begun allowing, though not demanding, people to submit a selfie video in exchange for a mark showing that their profile is “verified.” Tinder users in the U.S. can run their own background checks on potential dates (for a fee, after two freebies), though the process requires people to enter information they might not have—including, for a criminal background check, an individual’s last name, city, and birth year. Even with these safeguards in place and many millions spent on trust-and-safety teams, users of commercial dating apps continue to encounter fake profiles—and to report sometimes-harrowing experiences.

Of course, even if governments collect more information on individuals, one can’t assume that they will be earnestly invested in protecting their apps’ users. The Communist Party of China has been accused in recent years of censoring women’s accounts of gender-based abuse and of using sexual violence for political ends. When Iran launched the dating app Hamdam in 2021, Firuzeh Mahmoudi, the executive director of the NGO United for Iran, told Vice World News that the app “treats women like property,” matching them with bachelors and then keeping those couples “under the watchful and constant eye” of marriage counselors employed by the state. The administration decreed all other dating apps illegal.

That’s the major underlying issue: Inevitably, a government platform will be shaped by political motivations. Imagine if South Africa’s government had created a dating app during the apartheid era, Jennifer Lundquist, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist, told me; it certainly wouldn’t have facilitated interracial relationships. And even if you trust your current leaders, power changes hands over time. A future state, Lundquist pointed out, might become more autocratic or fascist—and would have, thanks to its dating app, a trove of data on people’s romantic and sexual preferences.

[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]

Beyond all that, apps designed to boost birth rates serve only certain users. Lots of people aren’t looking to marry or have kids, or to find one person and then delete an app forever, Brunning told me. Anyone who’s queer or polyamorous or kinky, he said, or who wants to have casual sex, might be better served by commercial options. He’s not expecting to see a state app that “facilitates gay BDSM hookups” anytime soon.

Even if the state were committed to guiding people to whatever kind of relationship they want, it might not be the right candidate for the job; no evidence suggests that governments know any better than commercial apps what makes lovers compatible. People also might hesitate to use a government dating app because, let’s face it: It’s not cool. Singapore’s Social Development Network, a governmental body that for many years held meetup events—singles’ cruises, tango-dancing sessions, speed dating—was initially called the Social Development Unit, and people joked that SDU stood for “Single, Desperate, and Ugly.” In 2023, the SDN, citing declining membership, announced that it would end its dating events and instead focus on funding other organizations’ initiatives. “Today,” a ministry spokesperson told Singapore’s The Straits Times, “there are better alternatives offered by the private sector, including online dating apps.”

God help us, I thought to myself at this point in the search: Are dating apps all run by institutions that people famously do not trust? Then I heard of another type of nonprofit player, one that many Americans also dislike but perhaps not quite as much: scientists.

For the past couple of years, Elizabeth Bruch and Amie Gordon, University of Michigan researchers, have been working on Revel, a dating app being beta tested by 200 students. The problem with online dating, if you ask Bruch and Gordon, is that the major apps aren’t in the business of relationship science. Some of them do have behavioral scientists and other researchers on staff, but they’re likely to be somewhat limited in their ability to figure out what makes people click. For-profit companies aren’t always well suited to carrying out long-term scientific investigations, which can stretch on for many years and might not yield immediately useful (read: profitable) results. In a commercial setting, Bruch told me, a CEO can decide on a dime to prioritize some new direction, and a whole research project can be abandoned.

Besides, even researchers who study romantic chemistry for a living don’t yet understand it. In one 2017 study, psychologists tried to predict people’s compatibility using a mathematical model based on more than 100 measures of traits and preferences that their subjects self-reported; every combination of those characteristics failed to correlate with how much the participants hit it off when they met.

That’s why Bruch and Gordon started wondering if, however strange it might sound, they could be the right people to make a dating app. Bruch is a sociologist who has studied how people look for mates, as well as the idea of dating “leagues” (as in, she’s out of my league); Gordon is a psychologist interested in what makes some relationships work and others fail. Their app doubles as a scientific study—“For science,” Revel’s website reads, “not profit”—and they collect data in the name of research: seeing who matches, asking why a user did or didn’t “like” someone, following up continuously with pairs who have met in person. How many profiles, they want to know, can a person see in a day before feeling overwhelmed by “choice overload”? Does seeing more information about other people lead to better connections? How can the app help support different relationship goals, whether a long-term partnership, a short fling, or a meaningful platonic connection?

[Read: The people who quit dating]

Scientific knowledge might truly be a better incentive than financial gain—not only because people like Bruch and Gordon are invested in unlocking love’s mysteries, and because studies legally have to adhere to certain ethical guidelines, but also because the research community has norms around transparency. Unlike private companies, which generally fear helping out their competitors, or governments, which aren’t always open with their citizens, scientists tend to be eager to publish any findings of note. Revel’s website lists exactly what user data are collected and on what basis pairs are made. Bruch and Gordon plan to open the app to the whole University of Michigan community this fall; eventually, they intend to share their discoveries with other researchers and also with the app’s users, in hopes that doing so might illuminate a dating experience they know can be confusing and emotionally fraught.

Making scientific advances and, in turn, ameliorating the pain of courtship: That’s a lofty aim, and also one that could take a lot of time to work toward. Not all single people want to play the long game in their own life; they might be less concerned with society’s collective grasp of human chemistry, or even with understanding their own romantic needs and tendencies, than with finding a partner—or a kiss, or a wedding date, or a threesome—right now.

Perhaps more significantly, existing apps have already conditioned people to a new way of dating, and a not-for-profit platform is unlikely to reverse that. Scrolling through people on an app makes looking for love or sex feel like choosing products in a grocery store, Anil Isisag, a consumer researcher who studies dating-app user experiences, told me. An abundance of options, he said, “gives people the idea that there could be something better around the corner,” which is a solid recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction. At this point, many people may be so deeply Tinder-brained that using a different product—or even meeting potential dates in person—wouldn’t change the way they think about courtship.

Still, who’s running those platforms, and how transparent they are, matters a great deal. The people frustrated with dating apps aren’t all bellyachers who expect only romantic success; they just know that a consequential, incredibly personal part of their life is at the whim of a mysterious strategy, and they feel helpless. Perhaps, to empower them, app companies don’t need a flawless product. They just need to be more open, about both the workings of their algorithm and the fact that no algorithm can predict the coveted spark—not now, and maybe not ever.