I agree somewhat with this take, but I suspect there’s also a large part being played by the availability of tech at home.
Simply put, for many people (especially young men) there’s no reason to leave the house when infinite video games, streaming, and pornography are right at home with you.
So I do think some part has to be played by a decreased willingness to date and take risks, when the attractions of staying at home have never been stronger. I’m more willing to believe in a real “dating recession” caused by these dynamics. More data would help a lot!
My observation (as a 32 year-old, so technically younger millennial) is that tech hasn't dramatically reduced people's desires to leave the house, or to date or have close friends, but it has reduced many people's desires to chit chat with strangers and acquaintances. A big difference between what I observe in how people age 25-35 socialize and what I hear from older folks is that we're much less likely to shoot the shit with randos at bars and cafes and concerts, or even house parties. The reason is that it's actually more fun and easy to watch YouTube or listen to podcast, or just hang out with your close friends, than to talk to a random person you may have nothing in common with.
The problem here is that even if you try to be different and be chatty, most people in bars and cafes will either be with close friends/romantic partners, or have headphones in, so it's much more difficult than when that kind of behavior was more normalized.
For our generation, connecting with new people requires deliberate effort--building a dating app profile or going to that run club--whereas for previous generations it just happened organically because everyone was doing it all the time because they had nothing else to do. This simply makes it harder, and many of us will meet eligible dates (or potential close friends) less often in person.
I think the framing of "more fun" isn't quite right. In my mind it is more about the variance.
All the stuff at home is low-variance. You mostly know what you're going to get. Sure, the TV show won't be as good as meeting someone who you instantly click with. But it also won't be as bad as a super awkward night where you don't actually meet anyone you enjoy talking to.
And some combination of the modern productivity mindset (an evening of solely lame conversations feels like you wasted hours of your precious time to never get them back), the metastasising of an alleged need for "me-time" to "decompress", and now widespread intolerance for less than optimal experiences (e.g. widespread checking of restaurant reviews before ordering mediocre takeout Indian) means people are opting out of high-variance experiences because it feels like they have too much downside risk for the rare and limited upside.
I've said a version of this before. I'm being somewhat sterotypical for both genders.
If you're a 20-something male, you can play an insanely immersive video game on your multiple large monitors (or 72" TV screen) for hours at a time talking to other people if you choose and then afterwards, go online and find pornography involving the type of person you're attracted too doing the exact thing you want them too (and I'm not even getting into AI).
If you're a 20-something female, you can binge 6 hours of a well made reality TV show while talking via group chats or other forms of convo with your (larglely) female friends then pull up your Kindle with very well written erotic novels on it and get yourself off.
OTOH, for both men and women, again, being sterotypical, it's hard out there.
If you do go out as a man, you might spends hours getting turned down spending a decent amount of money and you might not be overly attracted to the person you do end up with and in the end, there's the risk of pregnancy, and whether or not they get too quickly attached.
If you go out as a woman, there's all the obvious issues of safety, the general annoyance of dealing with men you're not attracted too bothering you, and if you do sleep with someone, your chances of an orgasm aren't great, and there's the risk of pregnancy and of course, a much greater risk of violence.
This Tweet to a certain extent is correct w/ some slight shifts for both genders -
Dating is optional. My bill are paid. My house is calm. My bed is big. You’re not competing with another man, you’re competing with how comfortable I am alone.
To a certain extent, dating is like losing weight. Everybody claims to do it, but not everybody actually wants to put in the work. Like, I say I need to lose x pounds. But then there are Girl Scouts selling cookies outside of Fred Meyer.
I should note that Cartoons Hate Her put up this hypothesis a while ago on her Substack - that the real competition for women's attention wasn't other, better men - it's HBO, Instagram, and group chats.
Love the "Girl Scouts selling cookies" analogy. I'm wrestling that monkey now as I try to get into riding shape again after a crash last year...
In this model, you have the "push" of entertainment and connection coming to you online while the "pull" of interacting in the real world is mostly, uh, negative. Or at least the negatives outweigh the positives, at least as perceived. Yike! I want to argue, but you make a solid case...
Questions. First, how much do you think that social media has increased the perception of negatives to dating/interacting in the real world. Or is this your own real-world data? And, as a hypothetical, what WOULD it take to get you out the door again?
"Simply put, for many people (especially young men) there’s no reason to leave the house when infinite video games, streaming, and pornography are right at home with you."
Yes there is. When I was 20 still had video games and porn. I still went out every weekend, why because sex with real girls, is better than solo time.
If you are over 35, the availability of video games and porn is orders of magnitude greater than it was 15 years ago. On-demand, unlimited, free porn is a rather new thing.
Netflix streaming didn’t even exist until 2007, in a nascent form.
This was not possible in the aughts. You're right that it was *available* if you were willing to put in effort, but who was willing to put in the effort? Certainly not the people with social lives.
To the extent this is actually happening more that just anecdotally ... it explains a wild knock on effect. I'm an elder Millennial and holy smokes my lifelong bachelor friends are now only "dating" 20-somethings. They all just fly around between LA, NYC, and Miami and I always kindof thought they had tapped into more of a pay to play scene that is mostly transactional because gosh ... some are 50 now but maybe they've just stumbled up a goldmine where Gen Z guys just aren't that interested in dating and it's just supply / demand. Wild times.
I mean, if it's not directly that, I bet older men who could fly around to LA, NYC, and Miami on a whim have always been able to attract younger women for a variety of reasons.
Indeed. I have a teenaged son. He has a girlfriend. So do a lot of his friends. I would say that the vast majority of them are actively dating. Anecdotal, but, yeah, I’m not seeing this big loneliness epidemic/dating deficit.
I'm directly responsible for matchmaking between friends that led to two marriages. One couple even named their first child after me (I had long been requesting 10% of their wedding gifts as a finders fee, but the whole name thing makes up for it). The other marriage is now in the process of dissolving, rather acrimoniously, so matchmaking isn't necessarily the key to a perpetuity of happiness.
If you had gotten the 10% from the second couple, how long would you have provided a warranty? Would you have guaranteed the whole 10%, or would you have used a depreciation model like they do with tires --- 1 year full, 2 years half, 3 years quarter?
"Got some bangers coming next week, including an answer to the long-awaited question "who exactly should Democrats throw under the bus in pursuit of your precious moderate-to-win strategy?"
The answer may surprise you!"
Ben might have to work overtime on the moderation ...
One (1) complaint is admissible: "damn, Barack, I understand why you did, but I really wish you hadn't savaged Trump at that stupid-ass correspondents' dinner. I bet you do too."
Everything else is strictly and categorically forbidden.
The thing is, I can only imagine Jerry Stiller’s lines coming out of Bernie Sanders. Can you see, in your mind’s eye, Ruben Gallego yelling “I GOTTA LOTTA PROBLEMS WITH YOU PEOPLE”?
Pretty sure the answer is going to be Jewish people based on conversation I had with Matt on Tuesday. Don’t want to spoil the take but if it’s the one I think it is I have some disagreements (mainly about what the implications of “stop supporting Israel” are for Jewish people writ large).
Throwing Jewish and/or Israel under the bus is in no way cultural moderation, which is Matt's biggest argument. The people who would look more favorably on the democrats if they did this are definitely not the moderate voters Matt wants to cater to.
I think it’s a sort of category error to think of swing voters as moderates. There are more right wing anti-semites than there are left wing anti-semites. And a lot of them are the sort of cranks that aren’t strong partisans because they are anti-social freaks (see Nick Fuentes). Pew polling showed independents are the least likely to view prejudice against Jewish people as a serious problem, compared to both Republicans and Democrats.
In theory there's no reason "moderation" has to uniformly mean movement *to the right.*
If a right-coded position can increasingly be viewed as extreme, unreasonable or simply out of touch, moving *left* might actually be the true moderation (ie, movement toward the center).
AIUI growing numbers of Americans now question the desirability or wisdom of the nature of their country's relationship with Israel (full-throated military alliance+massive aid). "Normalizing" that relationship so that it's more in line with how we treat most other countries (cordial, sure, but not slavish devotion) in my view constitutes moderation.
Reading the tweet and thinking about it, consistent with today's column, I would say boomer dems. They can take the rhetorical heat and will vote for a dem any way.
I have three kids, aged 22, 21, and 15. Growing up as a very shy kid in the 80's, I had more dates by my junior year of high school than my three kids now have combined.
My kids are similar ages. One is despondent that he has never been in a relationship, but when I chat with my mom friends, more than half of them have kids in the same situation, so I wasn't terribly worried. Until I read this piece, that is.
Just as a check on this, are you comparing the number of dates your kids have been on to your total number of dates, or the number of dates your parents were aware of?
It was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure my parents knew about all my dates until I got my driver's license in my junior year of HS. After that, not so much.
For my kids, my two youngest still live at home and tend to be homebodies, so I'm pretty confident they aren't secretly dating. They do spend a lot of time in their rooms playing games, but at least it's usually with friends. My oldest is in her senior year of college - she's had some dates and two short-term boyfriends, and is pretty open about what's going on in her personal life. It's certainly possible she's secretly dating or maybe has a friends-with-benefits situation.
But it also seems like my peers and I dated a lot younger than kids today. I had my first girlfriend in 8th grade, and our dates consisted of school events, an occasional trip to the bowling alley, and hanging out at (usually) my house.
As I got older, getting away from dependency on parents was one of the reasons my peers and I wanted to get driver's licenses as soon as possible. With no internet and the only communication a landline home phone with no privacy (because it was in the kitchen), there was a strong incentive to gain some freedom from parents. Because otherwise, being at home was pretty boring, unlike today.
And now being on the other side, I'm a bit torn about it. If they get their license, our car insurance rates go WAY up. This is one of the disagreements I have with my wife - she's fine with delaying the license for as long as possible to save money, while I'm more on the side of getting them mobile and out doing stuff.
When I was in high school (graduated in 2022) and observing who did and didn't get their license right away, it struck me that the people who weren't getting their license were mostly the sort who were going to be homebodies anyways. My parents were pretty adamant that my brother and I get our licenses the moment we turned 16, but we were already both pretty inclined to do it because it was convenient for going to extracurriculars and seeing friends. Meanwhile, the kids at school whose parents drove them around didn't really seem to be doing that sort of stuff.
I always think it's underconsidered how much this is a media phenomenon. Thirty years ago, older people got their idea of what teen culture was like from MTV, which if anything overstated how active the average teenager's social life was. Now, they get their idea of it from social media--that might seem more accurate because it feels more like a primary source, but it's not as if social media is some random cross section of society. The people who post the most on social media are probably going to be a lot more neurotic, lonely, or superficial than anyone else, so the picture we're getting of the kids could be really distorted by that alone, even absent the further distorting effects of algorithms, etc. It would be like if you tried to figure out teen trends from myspace posts in 2002--you'd think they were all depressed!
If someone gets their Gen Z stereotypes from the shows Euphoria or Sex Education they would get a very different story than what the stats tell us. I've had older people talk to me about watching these shows and how they had no idea how much teen culture has changed. I'm not sure we are doing things very differently now.
Seems like even ignoring the dating apps, the social media ethos can be really inhibiting. Looking back on teenage dating, it was an opportunity to work out the kinks, develop an understanding of the potential counterparties (I was going to say "quarry", but that sounded a bit predatory), refine one's manners, etc. As a teen I didn't want to admit that; in retrospect it seems obvious that I should have expected little more than to become comfortable with women In a world where your faux pas can go live to the world, for discussion among friends and less-than-friends next day.... And then the online landscape is naturally distorted by the unhappy, the neurotic, the failed efforts - that's natural selection AND the algorithms. Not sure I would have made it...
All I can say, as an introverted 44-year-old, is that I’m so lucky that my future husband and I met each other in grad school! I would be SOL if I had to rely on dating apps.
Same. My mom drove me crazy getting worked up about every guy I even mentioned interacting with when I was in college. (This was extra painful, since they were very much not into me!) But now I'm thinking I'll advise my own kids to take dating in college+ school seriously, and maybe even to ditch our own church in favor of the sorts with singles' groups. It seems much harder in later adulthood to find IRL people you might potentially marry.
One of my least-popular takes is that 2010s OkCupid was actually bad, but it appealed to hyperliterate internet denizens by letting them write blogs instead of just going on dates. To the extent Hinge et al. reproduce parts of it with the question prompts they are also bad, they just give people reasons to dismiss connections that might have worked. You can get enough of an idea from five photos and five sentences as to whether someone is in your target market and then after that all you can do is talk (ideally in person) to find out if there is a connection.
I would take it even further back to the sites of the 00s like Friendster and MySpace. Though not designed as dating sites, it was still really easy to connect with and meet strangers or acquaintances. Once apps became officially for dating, I feel like it puts more pressure on the interactions.
But it doesn't matter either way...we can never go back :(
In my more cynical moments I think that the old internet was great when it was mostly populated by intelligent nerds and eccentrics, and so platforms catered to their needs and tastes. Then when the masses got online, every platform had to cater to the lowest common denominator, and so everything got worse.
I think it's a little more boring than that--we just weren't good at using it yet. Fundamentally, our feeble monkey brains are evolved to know 20 or 200 people, know those people pretty well, have interconnected relationships that reward cooperation and generosity and tact, and have those mostly be the same people our whole lives.
The internet just isn't like that and really can't be that, not once everyone figures out how to use it effectively.
I see what you mean, and I think there's something to it. But also I think a big shift was on the old internet you had to put in more effort, and so it rewarded people who were smart, literate, and took connecting online seriously. Like old OkCupid had lengthy quizzes and basically had you write a blog post about yourself, and that worked at the time, but normies were never going to flock to an app that required that much work.
Similarly, blogs and forums required you to actively seek out specific people and communities and become a part of them, while social media passively feeds it to you.
You were still interacting with strangers, and that still created bad dynamics we're poorly adapted to (like old schools trolling), but it seemed more fruitful for users than the passive, algorithmic, standardized, low barrier-to-entry internet of today.
Fair, though I feel like the golden age didn't die until roughly 2013-2014, much longer than the Eternal September of the 1990s! (But maybe I'm biased because I'm too young to have used the internet much in the 1990s.)
There was definitely a slower but equally significant consolidation of the Internet as a million individual idiosyncratic websites + news aggregators and Google indexing them collapsed into “reddit and enless SEO spam.”
I met my wife on OKCupid in 2013 and went out with quite a few women I met on it in that era. The dynamic seemed a lot better than what I hear about now, particularly with my friends who have gotten divorced and are now diving back into it. I will say not all of it sounds totally unfamiliar. I recall peaks and valleys with the site (which I really did access as a site not an app) but would also still meet women at bars or social events and whatnot.
I think Halina has a point about the social infrastructure. One thing that helped with my wife and I was that we easily could have met offline. She grew up in the same general area as I did, we both went to the same college at the same time, and we even found we had some friend/acquaintance overlap. It helped establish an instant connection that I found could be tougher in DC with so many transplants. IIRC I'd match with a lot of the Lisa Simpsons who'd come from all over the country during the Obama years. A lot of great, interesting women, but all missing that je ne sais quoi.
I have been toying with the possibility of a take that people need to be more aggressive matchmakers, so it was good to read this. Keep up the good work Halina, both in writing and matchmaking.
I think there's a general consensus (I've read a fair bit on the subject) among people who are good at making friends as adults that most people need to be more aggressive in pursuing new friendships. (As in, when you meet someone vaguely interesting, immediately ask for their number and find a reason to hang out again in the next few days instead of waiting months for something to happen "naturally".)
What a great piece! This 100% matches the anecdotal data I've seen. In my particular case my hetero male friends with careers in tech (~80% male) or adjacent are mostly spinning their wheels (serial dating, staying in bad relationships or long dry spells) with "luck" being the only way the get out. Whereas the hetero males who were in social circles and/or careers with balanced gender ratios (e.g. health, public policy) basically did fine.
Furthermore, anecdotally ecosystem effects can create 10X or 100X differences in dating success. The guy who was spinning his wheels above can move cities and suddenly date functionally and find a great girlfriend in order of weeks instead of order of years.
I think a good chunk of the rest is explained by some amount of reduced going out. On the margins if "hanging out with friends" is "smoke weed and play Mario kart" you are less likely to meet a partner than if it's "go bowling and have few drinks" or whatever.
This is also highly important - a lot of complaints about dating come from two groups of people online -
1.) Men in tech related fields that went through school basically interacting w/ no women, went through college doing the same, and now have a job that's 90% male and are immirsed in non-work interests that are overwhelmingly male.
2.) Women who live in some of the few cities where men have the advantage on the numbers (NYC) and also by the same token, are overwhelmingly in female-dominated industries.
The 27 year old male nurse or female mid-level sales analyst at some Fortune 500 company are both doing fine, outside of the other shifts.
Corollary to 2 is that women have numerical advantage in a lot of smaller cities. A pretty high percentage of my male friends (successful non-tech professionals, 40-ish) are single though they’ve aged out of the complaining phase.
I can't guess at the effect size but I feel like women that age are much more likely to have checked out of dating than men. Maybe they're divorced and enjoying freedom after years of a not great marriage. Maybe they've got custody of kids and that soaks up all their time. Maybe they broke up with a long-term boyfriend because he was never going to commit and really wanted a house cleaner more than life partner and they're a bit over men for a minute.
All of that reduces supply and probably contributes to it being harder for a man in their 40s
You put a finger on much of the cultural commentary distortion on many fronts (non-data driven anectdotal) - I think it's a broader effect than even just dating but what you cite on dating aligns very well with visible data (allowing sure you've simplified)
Distortion online visibility of what are really sub-demographics
Yeah though I think there is a weaker version of 1.) that still has the same defecto effect for some men. If a social circle is 60 percent men, 33% of the men [(60-40)/60] will be unable to pair off mathematically speaking. That 33% is interacting with many women in some sense of the term while still facing a structural headwind in finding a partner. The easy warm proximity channels are closed and they need to do the harder channels which require real skills and proper strategic thinking.
I like McKay Coppins! I had no idea he wrote anything about sports gambling.
No I just mean you can totally just go to NBA games (in states where it's legal) and wait until the last second to place a bet on what the next play is going to be and just print money. But after like 8 games, they will throttle your app speed and implement bet size limits on the bet you've been crushing.
“The theory behind dating apps was simple: build platforms to match people at scale, and more people will find partners. Match.com launched in 1993. eharmony followed with algorithm-based matches in 2000. Tinder arrived in 2012 with quick, high-volume swipes geared toward hookups. Hinge came out that same year with a focus on long-term relationships, promising it was “designed to be deleted.” By the 2010s, the dating app was the dominant technology of romantic search”
I know that it’s discussed later in the article, but the fact that OkCupid is not on this list-cum-history is a very “this could only have been written by a Gen Z person” tell. A Millennial would never make that omission.
Spicy take! I'll take your word that the framing has been a generational problem in most discourse...usually when I hear about it, it's been the horse before the cart. That is, the agreed-upon Fix That Did Not Work leads to shitty systemic incentives that have greatly changed if/how young people date. And tail millennials + zoomers are the first cohort where they mostly wouldn't have known anything else, so they're the guinea pigs in the coal mine.
Gonna be ageing out of "prime dating years" in a few months, without ever having once gone out on a date, even including hanging out in a basement, or perhaps the fruit of the date palm. Pack it up, pack it in, it's so over. I know I could bend the knee to the atrocious apps and at least get something shitty that way, but...fuck, it really is the worst experience on so many levels. Especially as a phone luddite who tries not to use the magic rectangle whenever possible. Classic OKCupid was at least tolerable for us desktop pedants. Alas.
I think it'd also be remiss not to address the other pachyderm on the premises, that being the shifting attitudes about relations between the sexes. It's not *just* that apps eroded the market dominance of e.g. meeting someone through work - it's *also* that the very concept of dating a coworker came to be seen by many influential voices as fraught, inherently suspicious, Something Not Done. Same thing with "age gap" discourse. When potential romance is shunted out of real life into apps that aren't a great replacement anyway, then that makes it harder and harder to meet "organically" even if someone is so inclined. The infrastructure erodes, the muscle memory is lost, the social proof weakens.
Oysters have a folk history as a certain kind of romance-related drug, completely incidentally.
I do wonder about this. The last long term relationship I had before my wife lasted for about 4 years and we met in the office. This involved me making a move at an after work happy hour, something I'd done on a handful of other occasions. I get the sense that is no longer something that's done, though at the time it seemed quite normal and even on other occasions when I got shot down there was never a scandal about it.
Are we witnessing tech based evolutionary pressure. In the old days extrovert or introvert people got married and had kids whether they wanted to or not. These days introverts who aren't so keen on going out and meeting people aren't reproducing. With those genes soon be edited out?
As I'm past my dating years and so is my circle of friends I now get my dating Intel from online discourse. And based on that the only people getting dates are 6 feet, millionaires, chiselled jaw chads with a sixpack. The next generation will be the hottest ever.
One, dating apps are great when used as an addition to traditional ways of meeting people. As a replacement, they aren't enough. Option expanding great, option replacing, nope.
As for the dating recession, one thing we do know more is that people are just socializing a lot less. See Derek Thompson's excellent article.
When I was early 20's I went out every Friday and Saturday night (and often other nights). I was alone and didn't want to be. I took a couple of drinks of liquid courage, and then tried to approach women. I did that for years.
That just doesn't seem to be happening like it used to.
The problem with the “option expanding” vs “option replacing” distinction is that when you expand your options, you stop using the old ones quite as much, and then those old ones stop being as useful for anyone, and they go into a downward spiral, leaving you with only the “expanded” options.
I think the clearest indication that there indeed is a dating recession is the data around sex. Like, yes, most people date with the eventual intension to marry but marriage is a whole thing and refusing to take a drop in marriage rates as indication people are no longer dating feels correct.
OTOH - dating is often an emphemism for fucking. If you're not fucking, you're not dating. And there the data is pretty clear -
There was a bit of kerfuffle on the internet back in August surrounding a piece published with the title “Failure to Launch: Why Young People are Having Less Sex.” Using a survey of Californians aged 18-30, the percentage reporting no sexual partners in the prior year reached an all-time high of 38%.
Here’s an even more eye-raising statistic: in 2021, among that same age group, just 9% of women reported having at least 2 sexual partners. It was 12% of younger men. The widespread belief that these young adults are having a ton of casual sex is demonstrably false.
But, let me expand the scope of the inquiry even further. It's not just young people having less sex; this trend spans virtually all adult age groups. People are having less sex.
Yes, I thought it was a bit striking that this piece never mentioned sex at all. So much of what people suggest for dating just seems overly intellectual- "find someone that shares your interests, get your friends to match you with their friends," blah blah blah... it really doesn't have to be that complicated. Just find someone you're sexually attracted to, and do what comes naturally.
But of course that's a lot harder when everyone is trying (and failing) to meet online, and so much of what drives sexual attraction only works in person.
I've also noticed a weird sort of horseshoe effect. Women on the right don't want to have unmarried sex because it's a sin, women on the left don't want unmarried xex because it's patriarchal. There seems to be increasingly few women who go out actively looking for a sexual partner just for fun.
"Suspending" the Jones Act strikes me as terrible public policy, for the somewhat obvious reason that it implies that it will eventually snap back into place and thus the only companies that are going to be willing to momentarily insert themselves into domestic shipping are ones willing and able to immediately retreat from it again.
That's a recipe for expensive wastage. Hiring the shipping equivalent of temp agencies is not going to solve our problems.
I agree somewhat with this take, but I suspect there’s also a large part being played by the availability of tech at home.
Simply put, for many people (especially young men) there’s no reason to leave the house when infinite video games, streaming, and pornography are right at home with you.
So I do think some part has to be played by a decreased willingness to date and take risks, when the attractions of staying at home have never been stronger. I’m more willing to believe in a real “dating recession” caused by these dynamics. More data would help a lot!
My observation (as a 32 year-old, so technically younger millennial) is that tech hasn't dramatically reduced people's desires to leave the house, or to date or have close friends, but it has reduced many people's desires to chit chat with strangers and acquaintances. A big difference between what I observe in how people age 25-35 socialize and what I hear from older folks is that we're much less likely to shoot the shit with randos at bars and cafes and concerts, or even house parties. The reason is that it's actually more fun and easy to watch YouTube or listen to podcast, or just hang out with your close friends, than to talk to a random person you may have nothing in common with.
The problem here is that even if you try to be different and be chatty, most people in bars and cafes will either be with close friends/romantic partners, or have headphones in, so it's much more difficult than when that kind of behavior was more normalized.
For our generation, connecting with new people requires deliberate effort--building a dating app profile or going to that run club--whereas for previous generations it just happened organically because everyone was doing it all the time because they had nothing else to do. This simply makes it harder, and many of us will meet eligible dates (or potential close friends) less often in person.
That's what drinking and drugs are for. Makes it much easier to chat up random people.
Yeah, if it were 20 years ago. I don't trust the drugs these days.
Fair. I would be much more concerned now days. Still, you could probably do things like shrooms
I think the framing of "more fun" isn't quite right. In my mind it is more about the variance.
All the stuff at home is low-variance. You mostly know what you're going to get. Sure, the TV show won't be as good as meeting someone who you instantly click with. But it also won't be as bad as a super awkward night where you don't actually meet anyone you enjoy talking to.
And some combination of the modern productivity mindset (an evening of solely lame conversations feels like you wasted hours of your precious time to never get them back), the metastasising of an alleged need for "me-time" to "decompress", and now widespread intolerance for less than optimal experiences (e.g. widespread checking of restaurant reviews before ordering mediocre takeout Indian) means people are opting out of high-variance experiences because it feels like they have too much downside risk for the rare and limited upside.
That’s a reasonable take. I think problem the trend described in the piece and the easy access to home entertainment feed off each other.
My advice to those in my generation who bemoan the dating culture is to just have some agency and go date!
I think this is basically true.
I've said a version of this before. I'm being somewhat sterotypical for both genders.
If you're a 20-something male, you can play an insanely immersive video game on your multiple large monitors (or 72" TV screen) for hours at a time talking to other people if you choose and then afterwards, go online and find pornography involving the type of person you're attracted too doing the exact thing you want them too (and I'm not even getting into AI).
If you're a 20-something female, you can binge 6 hours of a well made reality TV show while talking via group chats or other forms of convo with your (larglely) female friends then pull up your Kindle with very well written erotic novels on it and get yourself off.
OTOH, for both men and women, again, being sterotypical, it's hard out there.
If you do go out as a man, you might spends hours getting turned down spending a decent amount of money and you might not be overly attracted to the person you do end up with and in the end, there's the risk of pregnancy, and whether or not they get too quickly attached.
If you go out as a woman, there's all the obvious issues of safety, the general annoyance of dealing with men you're not attracted too bothering you, and if you do sleep with someone, your chances of an orgasm aren't great, and there's the risk of pregnancy and of course, a much greater risk of violence.
This Tweet to a certain extent is correct w/ some slight shifts for both genders -
https://x.com/simphiweyinkoc_/status/2031957679174725889
Dating is optional. My bill are paid. My house is calm. My bed is big. You’re not competing with another man, you’re competing with how comfortable I am alone.
To a certain extent, dating is like losing weight. Everybody claims to do it, but not everybody actually wants to put in the work. Like, I say I need to lose x pounds. But then there are Girl Scouts selling cookies outside of Fred Meyer.
This totally generates a Debbie Downer horn and I hate that it's likely accurate.
I should note that Cartoons Hate Her put up this hypothesis a while ago on her Substack - that the real competition for women's attention wasn't other, better men - it's HBO, Instagram, and group chats.
Love the "Girl Scouts selling cookies" analogy. I'm wrestling that monkey now as I try to get into riding shape again after a crash last year...
In this model, you have the "push" of entertainment and connection coming to you online while the "pull" of interacting in the real world is mostly, uh, negative. Or at least the negatives outweigh the positives, at least as perceived. Yike! I want to argue, but you make a solid case...
Questions. First, how much do you think that social media has increased the perception of negatives to dating/interacting in the real world. Or is this your own real-world data? And, as a hypothetical, what WOULD it take to get you out the door again?
"Simply put, for many people (especially young men) there’s no reason to leave the house when infinite video games, streaming, and pornography are right at home with you."
Yes there is. When I was 20 still had video games and porn. I still went out every weekend, why because sex with real girls, is better than solo time.
If you are over 35, the availability of video games and porn is orders of magnitude greater than it was 15 years ago. On-demand, unlimited, free porn is a rather new thing.
Netflix streaming didn’t even exist until 2007, in a nascent form.
This just shows that you didn't know how to use the internet when you were younger.
Getting banned from the Internet for downloading illicit PC-98 eroge screenshots really doesn't compare to what's available on demand now.
> On-demand, unlimited, free porn
This was not possible in the aughts. You're right that it was *available* if you were willing to put in effort, but who was willing to put in the effort? Certainly not the people with social lives.
Have you met any teenage boys?
To the extent this is actually happening more that just anecdotally ... it explains a wild knock on effect. I'm an elder Millennial and holy smokes my lifelong bachelor friends are now only "dating" 20-somethings. They all just fly around between LA, NYC, and Miami and I always kindof thought they had tapped into more of a pay to play scene that is mostly transactional because gosh ... some are 50 now but maybe they've just stumbled up a goldmine where Gen Z guys just aren't that interested in dating and it's just supply / demand. Wild times.
I mean, if it's not directly that, I bet older men who could fly around to LA, NYC, and Miami on a whim have always been able to attract younger women for a variety of reasons.
I can think of hundreds, probably thousands, of reasons...
Well-to-do older men have never had problems attracting a certain kind of young woman
As a Chicagoan, you know the Viagra Triangle wasn't invented yesterday.
Yes but (and I hate answering yes but 😬) … the viagra triangle was built around 30-40 something women. This is different.
Indeed. I have a teenaged son. He has a girlfriend. So do a lot of his friends. I would say that the vast majority of them are actively dating. Anecdotal, but, yeah, I’m not seeing this big loneliness epidemic/dating deficit.
I'm directly responsible for matchmaking between friends that led to two marriages. One couple even named their first child after me (I had long been requesting 10% of their wedding gifts as a finders fee, but the whole name thing makes up for it). The other marriage is now in the process of dissolving, rather acrimoniously, so matchmaking isn't necessarily the key to a perpetuity of happiness.
I'd give the 10% rather than name my child purqupine.
Aside from making yourself way too googlable, that's a badass middle name! I might go down to the courthouse tomorrow.
You have a batting average of .500 that ain't bad.
We actually don't know how many failed matches didn't make it to marriage
Even if it was 1:20 he'd be in then yenta hall of fame.
I met my wife at a dinner party designed for her to get set up with another friend of the host.
If you had gotten the 10% from the second couple, how long would you have provided a warranty? Would you have guaranteed the whole 10%, or would you have used a depreciation model like they do with tires --- 1 year full, 2 years half, 3 years quarter?
Lmfao
Get ready - https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2032548153602228437
"Got some bangers coming next week, including an answer to the long-awaited question "who exactly should Democrats throw under the bus in pursuit of your precious moderate-to-win strategy?"
The answer may surprise you!"
Ben might have to work overtime on the moderation ...
Ready to go!
If it's Obama I'll delete my account for a second time. Just getting that pre-commitment out there as an OG 2008 Hopefilled Obama-Stan.
One (1) complaint is admissible: "damn, Barack, I understand why you did, but I really wish you hadn't savaged Trump at that stupid-ass correspondents' dinner. I bet you do too."
Everything else is strictly and categorically forbidden.
Yes, there are some disrespects I will not tolerate.
As far as I'm concerned the only mistake Obama ever made was allowing Ticketmaster and LiveNation to merge.
Based on that phrasing, I’m going to guess that the group to be thrown under the bus is some sort of moderates.
Extremely Gary Oldman in "The Professional" voice: "EVERYONE!!!!"
Same. Establishment Dems.
I would put my money on adherents to One Billion Americans Thought.
I vividly recall a tweet, long deleted, in which he said that the answer was "everybody". We'll see if he still holds to that.
So it will be like the Festivus airing of grievances then!
The thing is, I can only imagine Jerry Stiller’s lines coming out of Bernie Sanders. Can you see, in your mind’s eye, Ruben Gallego yelling “I GOTTA LOTTA PROBLEMS WITH YOU PEOPLE”?
Pretty sure the answer is going to be Jewish people based on conversation I had with Matt on Tuesday. Don’t want to spoil the take but if it’s the one I think it is I have some disagreements (mainly about what the implications of “stop supporting Israel” are for Jewish people writ large).
Throwing Jewish and/or Israel under the bus is in no way cultural moderation, which is Matt's biggest argument. The people who would look more favorably on the democrats if they did this are definitely not the moderate voters Matt wants to cater to.
I think it’s a sort of category error to think of swing voters as moderates. There are more right wing anti-semites than there are left wing anti-semites. And a lot of them are the sort of cranks that aren’t strong partisans because they are anti-social freaks (see Nick Fuentes). Pew polling showed independents are the least likely to view prejudice against Jewish people as a serious problem, compared to both Republicans and Democrats.
In theory there's no reason "moderation" has to uniformly mean movement *to the right.*
If a right-coded position can increasingly be viewed as extreme, unreasonable or simply out of touch, moving *left* might actually be the true moderation (ie, movement toward the center).
AIUI growing numbers of Americans now question the desirability or wisdom of the nature of their country's relationship with Israel (full-throated military alliance+massive aid). "Normalizing" that relationship so that it's more in line with how we treat most other countries (cordial, sure, but not slavish devotion) in my view constitutes moderation.
Reading the tweet and thinking about it, consistent with today's column, I would say boomer dems. They can take the rhetorical heat and will vote for a dem any way.
I have three kids, aged 22, 21, and 15. Growing up as a very shy kid in the 80's, I had more dates by my junior year of high school than my three kids now have combined.
I dunno, something seems to be going on.
My kids are similar ages. One is despondent that he has never been in a relationship, but when I chat with my mom friends, more than half of them have kids in the same situation, so I wasn't terribly worried. Until I read this piece, that is.
My kids are in their early to mid 20s, I think your kid's and your mom friends are the norm.
Just as a check on this, are you comparing the number of dates your kids have been on to your total number of dates, or the number of dates your parents were aware of?
It was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure my parents knew about all my dates until I got my driver's license in my junior year of HS. After that, not so much.
For my kids, my two youngest still live at home and tend to be homebodies, so I'm pretty confident they aren't secretly dating. They do spend a lot of time in their rooms playing games, but at least it's usually with friends. My oldest is in her senior year of college - she's had some dates and two short-term boyfriends, and is pretty open about what's going on in her personal life. It's certainly possible she's secretly dating or maybe has a friends-with-benefits situation.
But it also seems like my peers and I dated a lot younger than kids today. I had my first girlfriend in 8th grade, and our dates consisted of school events, an occasional trip to the bowling alley, and hanging out at (usually) my house.
As I got older, getting away from dependency on parents was one of the reasons my peers and I wanted to get driver's licenses as soon as possible. With no internet and the only communication a landline home phone with no privacy (because it was in the kitchen), there was a strong incentive to gain some freedom from parents. Because otherwise, being at home was pretty boring, unlike today.
AIUI kids these days just don’t care about getting their driver’s licenses, which is a huge step change from when I was a kid.
And now being on the other side, I'm a bit torn about it. If they get their license, our car insurance rates go WAY up. This is one of the disagreements I have with my wife - she's fine with delaying the license for as long as possible to save money, while I'm more on the side of getting them mobile and out doing stuff.
When I was in high school (graduated in 2022) and observing who did and didn't get their license right away, it struck me that the people who weren't getting their license were mostly the sort who were going to be homebodies anyways. My parents were pretty adamant that my brother and I get our licenses the moment we turned 16, but we were already both pretty inclined to do it because it was convenient for going to extracurriculars and seeing friends. Meanwhile, the kids at school whose parents drove them around didn't really seem to be doing that sort of stuff.
Driving sucks, so I get it. I never got enough hours on my learner's permit to take the test. Then I just took it at 18.
Yo tambien! Was it just that we had fewer alternatives, or more push from parents to get yr ass out there and meet people? I find it perplexing...
I always think it's underconsidered how much this is a media phenomenon. Thirty years ago, older people got their idea of what teen culture was like from MTV, which if anything overstated how active the average teenager's social life was. Now, they get their idea of it from social media--that might seem more accurate because it feels more like a primary source, but it's not as if social media is some random cross section of society. The people who post the most on social media are probably going to be a lot more neurotic, lonely, or superficial than anyone else, so the picture we're getting of the kids could be really distorted by that alone, even absent the further distorting effects of algorithms, etc. It would be like if you tried to figure out teen trends from myspace posts in 2002--you'd think they were all depressed!
If someone gets their Gen Z stereotypes from the shows Euphoria or Sex Education they would get a very different story than what the stats tell us. I've had older people talk to me about watching these shows and how they had no idea how much teen culture has changed. I'm not sure we are doing things very differently now.
Seems like even ignoring the dating apps, the social media ethos can be really inhibiting. Looking back on teenage dating, it was an opportunity to work out the kinks, develop an understanding of the potential counterparties (I was going to say "quarry", but that sounded a bit predatory), refine one's manners, etc. As a teen I didn't want to admit that; in retrospect it seems obvious that I should have expected little more than to become comfortable with women In a world where your faux pas can go live to the world, for discussion among friends and less-than-friends next day.... And then the online landscape is naturally distorted by the unhappy, the neurotic, the failed efforts - that's natural selection AND the algorithms. Not sure I would have made it...
All I can say, as an introverted 44-year-old, is that I’m so lucky that my future husband and I met each other in grad school! I would be SOL if I had to rely on dating apps.
Good luck, young people!
Same. My mom drove me crazy getting worked up about every guy I even mentioned interacting with when I was in college. (This was extra painful, since they were very much not into me!) But now I'm thinking I'll advise my own kids to take dating in college+ school seriously, and maybe even to ditch our own church in favor of the sorts with singles' groups. It seems much harder in later adulthood to find IRL people you might potentially marry.
I once again shout from the rooftops, bring back mid-2010s OKCupid, you bastards!
One of my least-popular takes is that 2010s OkCupid was actually bad, but it appealed to hyperliterate internet denizens by letting them write blogs instead of just going on dates. To the extent Hinge et al. reproduce parts of it with the question prompts they are also bad, they just give people reasons to dismiss connections that might have worked. You can get enough of an idea from five photos and five sentences as to whether someone is in your target market and then after that all you can do is talk (ideally in person) to find out if there is a connection.
Shrug. I bet I went on dates with 30 or 50 women I met on the platform over five-ish years. I met a fiancé there. I never wrote a blog.
Your Honor, The State introduces into evidence Exhibit No 1: GRINDR.
I would take it even further back to the sites of the 00s like Friendster and MySpace. Though not designed as dating sites, it was still really easy to connect with and meet strangers or acquaintances. Once apps became officially for dating, I feel like it puts more pressure on the interactions.
But it doesn't matter either way...we can never go back :(
In my more cynical moments I think that the old internet was great when it was mostly populated by intelligent nerds and eccentrics, and so platforms catered to their needs and tastes. Then when the masses got online, every platform had to cater to the lowest common denominator, and so everything got worse.
I think it's a little more boring than that--we just weren't good at using it yet. Fundamentally, our feeble monkey brains are evolved to know 20 or 200 people, know those people pretty well, have interconnected relationships that reward cooperation and generosity and tact, and have those mostly be the same people our whole lives.
The internet just isn't like that and really can't be that, not once everyone figures out how to use it effectively.
I see what you mean, and I think there's something to it. But also I think a big shift was on the old internet you had to put in more effort, and so it rewarded people who were smart, literate, and took connecting online seriously. Like old OkCupid had lengthy quizzes and basically had you write a blog post about yourself, and that worked at the time, but normies were never going to flock to an app that required that much work.
Similarly, blogs and forums required you to actively seek out specific people and communities and become a part of them, while social media passively feeds it to you.
You were still interacting with strangers, and that still created bad dynamics we're poorly adapted to (like old schools trolling), but it seemed more fruitful for users than the passive, algorithmic, standardized, low barrier-to-entry internet of today.
Sure. I think both arguments are true (monocausal things in the human experience are kinda rare!).
EXCUSE ME PLEASE SIR
I have a very agile monkey brain.
Eternal September.
There’s a term for this: Eternal September.
Ed.: scrolled down and ninja’d by Ms. Trench.
Fair, though I feel like the golden age didn't die until roughly 2013-2014, much longer than the Eternal September of the 1990s! (But maybe I'm biased because I'm too young to have used the internet much in the 1990s.)
There was definitely a slower but equally significant consolidation of the Internet as a million individual idiosyncratic websites + news aggregators and Google indexing them collapsed into “reddit and enless SEO spam.”
I do miss Angelfire and geocities...
Facebook was pretty good before selfies and news, even though there were still lots of idiots on it
Does this mean that in twenty years everyone will be nostalgic for the social media apps of our current time?
If so, I tremble to think what would have had to happen to make that true.
I met my wife on OKCupid in 2013 and went out with quite a few women I met on it in that era. The dynamic seemed a lot better than what I hear about now, particularly with my friends who have gotten divorced and are now diving back into it. I will say not all of it sounds totally unfamiliar. I recall peaks and valleys with the site (which I really did access as a site not an app) but would also still meet women at bars or social events and whatnot.
I think Halina has a point about the social infrastructure. One thing that helped with my wife and I was that we easily could have met offline. She grew up in the same general area as I did, we both went to the same college at the same time, and we even found we had some friend/acquaintance overlap. It helped establish an instant connection that I found could be tougher in DC with so many transplants. IIRC I'd match with a lot of the Lisa Simpsons who'd come from all over the country during the Obama years. A lot of great, interesting women, but all missing that je ne sais quoi.
Here here!
I have been toying with the possibility of a take that people need to be more aggressive matchmakers, so it was good to read this. Keep up the good work Halina, both in writing and matchmaking.
I think there's a general consensus (I've read a fair bit on the subject) among people who are good at making friends as adults that most people need to be more aggressive in pursuing new friendships. (As in, when you meet someone vaguely interesting, immediately ask for their number and find a reason to hang out again in the next few days instead of waiting months for something to happen "naturally".)
So your idea tracks that.
What a great piece! This 100% matches the anecdotal data I've seen. In my particular case my hetero male friends with careers in tech (~80% male) or adjacent are mostly spinning their wheels (serial dating, staying in bad relationships or long dry spells) with "luck" being the only way the get out. Whereas the hetero males who were in social circles and/or careers with balanced gender ratios (e.g. health, public policy) basically did fine.
Furthermore, anecdotally ecosystem effects can create 10X or 100X differences in dating success. The guy who was spinning his wheels above can move cities and suddenly date functionally and find a great girlfriend in order of weeks instead of order of years.
I think a good chunk of the rest is explained by some amount of reduced going out. On the margins if "hanging out with friends" is "smoke weed and play Mario kart" you are less likely to meet a partner than if it's "go bowling and have few drinks" or whatever.
This is also highly important - a lot of complaints about dating come from two groups of people online -
1.) Men in tech related fields that went through school basically interacting w/ no women, went through college doing the same, and now have a job that's 90% male and are immirsed in non-work interests that are overwhelmingly male.
2.) Women who live in some of the few cities where men have the advantage on the numbers (NYC) and also by the same token, are overwhelmingly in female-dominated industries.
The 27 year old male nurse or female mid-level sales analyst at some Fortune 500 company are both doing fine, outside of the other shifts.
Corollary to 2 is that women have numerical advantage in a lot of smaller cities. A pretty high percentage of my male friends (successful non-tech professionals, 40-ish) are single though they’ve aged out of the complaining phase.
I can't guess at the effect size but I feel like women that age are much more likely to have checked out of dating than men. Maybe they're divorced and enjoying freedom after years of a not great marriage. Maybe they've got custody of kids and that soaks up all their time. Maybe they broke up with a long-term boyfriend because he was never going to commit and really wanted a house cleaner more than life partner and they're a bit over men for a minute.
All of that reduces supply and probably contributes to it being harder for a man in their 40s
You put a finger on much of the cultural commentary distortion on many fronts (non-data driven anectdotal) - I think it's a broader effect than even just dating but what you cite on dating aligns very well with visible data (allowing sure you've simplified)
Distortion online visibility of what are really sub-demographics
Yeah though I think there is a weaker version of 1.) that still has the same defecto effect for some men. If a social circle is 60 percent men, 33% of the men [(60-40)/60] will be unable to pair off mathematically speaking. That 33% is interacting with many women in some sense of the term while still facing a structural headwind in finding a partner. The easy warm proximity channels are closed and they need to do the harder channels which require real skills and proper strategic thinking.
Oh look, it's me, spinning my wheels :(
Totally unrelated, if you keep winning on Draft Kings, they DO eventually figure it out.
You read McKay Coppins’ Atlantic article too?
I like McKay Coppins! I had no idea he wrote anything about sports gambling.
No I just mean you can totally just go to NBA games (in states where it's legal) and wait until the last second to place a bet on what the next play is going to be and just print money. But after like 8 games, they will throttle your app speed and implement bet size limits on the bet you've been crushing.
Nah, I think there's someone else's direct experience that he's talking about....
“The theory behind dating apps was simple: build platforms to match people at scale, and more people will find partners. Match.com launched in 1993. eharmony followed with algorithm-based matches in 2000. Tinder arrived in 2012 with quick, high-volume swipes geared toward hookups. Hinge came out that same year with a focus on long-term relationships, promising it was “designed to be deleted.” By the 2010s, the dating app was the dominant technology of romantic search”
I know that it’s discussed later in the article, but the fact that OkCupid is not on this list-cum-history is a very “this could only have been written by a Gen Z person” tell. A Millennial would never make that omission.
No POF either! Not as good as OKC in my experience, but that one feels TOTALLY memory-holed.
POF?
Plenty of Fish, now also apparently owned by the Match tumor.
Thanks, I only have vague memories of that one being a thing. (I used Yahoo, Match, and eHarmony, the latter of which I met my wife through.)
Spicy take! I'll take your word that the framing has been a generational problem in most discourse...usually when I hear about it, it's been the horse before the cart. That is, the agreed-upon Fix That Did Not Work leads to shitty systemic incentives that have greatly changed if/how young people date. And tail millennials + zoomers are the first cohort where they mostly wouldn't have known anything else, so they're the guinea pigs in the coal mine.
Gonna be ageing out of "prime dating years" in a few months, without ever having once gone out on a date, even including hanging out in a basement, or perhaps the fruit of the date palm. Pack it up, pack it in, it's so over. I know I could bend the knee to the atrocious apps and at least get something shitty that way, but...fuck, it really is the worst experience on so many levels. Especially as a phone luddite who tries not to use the magic rectangle whenever possible. Classic OKCupid was at least tolerable for us desktop pedants. Alas.
I think it'd also be remiss not to address the other pachyderm on the premises, that being the shifting attitudes about relations between the sexes. It's not *just* that apps eroded the market dominance of e.g. meeting someone through work - it's *also* that the very concept of dating a coworker came to be seen by many influential voices as fraught, inherently suspicious, Something Not Done. Same thing with "age gap" discourse. When potential romance is shunted out of real life into apps that aren't a great replacement anyway, then that makes it harder and harder to meet "organically" even if someone is so inclined. The infrastructure erodes, the muscle memory is lost, the social proof weakens.
Oysters have a folk history as a certain kind of romance-related drug, completely incidentally.
I do wonder about this. The last long term relationship I had before my wife lasted for about 4 years and we met in the office. This involved me making a move at an after work happy hour, something I'd done on a handful of other occasions. I get the sense that is no longer something that's done, though at the time it seemed quite normal and even on other occasions when I got shot down there was never a scandal about it.
It still happens, I think people are better at hiding it.
Are we witnessing tech based evolutionary pressure. In the old days extrovert or introvert people got married and had kids whether they wanted to or not. These days introverts who aren't so keen on going out and meeting people aren't reproducing. With those genes soon be edited out?
As I'm past my dating years and so is my circle of friends I now get my dating Intel from online discourse. And based on that the only people getting dates are 6 feet, millionaires, chiselled jaw chads with a sixpack. The next generation will be the hottest ever.
Couple of thoughts.
One, dating apps are great when used as an addition to traditional ways of meeting people. As a replacement, they aren't enough. Option expanding great, option replacing, nope.
As for the dating recession, one thing we do know more is that people are just socializing a lot less. See Derek Thompson's excellent article.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-partying-in-the-usaand?utm_source=publication-search
When I was early 20's I went out every Friday and Saturday night (and often other nights). I was alone and didn't want to be. I took a couple of drinks of liquid courage, and then tried to approach women. I did that for years.
That just doesn't seem to be happening like it used to.
The problem with the “option expanding” vs “option replacing” distinction is that when you expand your options, you stop using the old ones quite as much, and then those old ones stop being as useful for anyone, and they go into a downward spiral, leaving you with only the “expanded” options.
I think the clearest indication that there indeed is a dating recession is the data around sex. Like, yes, most people date with the eventual intension to marry but marriage is a whole thing and refusing to take a drop in marriage rates as indication people are no longer dating feels correct.
OTOH - dating is often an emphemism for fucking. If you're not fucking, you're not dating. And there the data is pretty clear -
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-data-is-clear-people-are-having
There was a bit of kerfuffle on the internet back in August surrounding a piece published with the title “Failure to Launch: Why Young People are Having Less Sex.” Using a survey of Californians aged 18-30, the percentage reporting no sexual partners in the prior year reached an all-time high of 38%.
Here’s an even more eye-raising statistic: in 2021, among that same age group, just 9% of women reported having at least 2 sexual partners. It was 12% of younger men. The widespread belief that these young adults are having a ton of casual sex is demonstrably false.
But, let me expand the scope of the inquiry even further. It's not just young people having less sex; this trend spans virtually all adult age groups. People are having less sex.
Yes, I thought it was a bit striking that this piece never mentioned sex at all. So much of what people suggest for dating just seems overly intellectual- "find someone that shares your interests, get your friends to match you with their friends," blah blah blah... it really doesn't have to be that complicated. Just find someone you're sexually attracted to, and do what comes naturally.
But of course that's a lot harder when everyone is trying (and failing) to meet online, and so much of what drives sexual attraction only works in person.
I've also noticed a weird sort of horseshoe effect. Women on the right don't want to have unmarried sex because it's a sin, women on the left don't want unmarried xex because it's patriarchal. There seems to be increasingly few women who go out actively looking for a sexual partner just for fun.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/know-jones-act-trump-considers-210457154.html
Haven't seen much discussion of this here, but Trump might actually suspend the Jones act. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons once again!
Suspend the Jones Act? Sounds like . . . cabotage . . . . [Rockin' guitars fade in]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9-qPrOE_VM
Every time!
Every two weeks my YouTube algorithm is like "I really think you should have another listen"
"Suspending" the Jones Act strikes me as terrible public policy, for the somewhat obvious reason that it implies that it will eventually snap back into place and thus the only companies that are going to be willing to momentarily insert themselves into domestic shipping are ones willing and able to immediately retreat from it again.
That's a recipe for expensive wastage. Hiring the shipping equivalent of temp agencies is not going to solve our problems.