Why GenZ isn't dating

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think the problems that have always existed have increased to an extreme degree. There has always been looks and money obsessed people it’s just more visible and accepted now.

This^. Most people dated and married people they met at school, college, work, through friends etc.

There weren't unlimited options to swipe on apps. There weren't unlimited supply of images of lives of beautiful, handsome, wealthy and famous, unlike today's Instagram, TikTok etc.

People were always shallow, just worse now.

[Anonymous]

Comparison is the thief of joy. People mostly compared relationships to similar people around them, didn't closely observe privileged but now they do. What's worse is comparing their reality to other people's choreographed highlights.

[Anonymous]

As usual the GenZers of this forum's parents are the best, the exception always just like their parents lol

[Anonymous]

Demographer here. As fertility decline, aging accelerate, college enrollment declines, dependency ratio increase we observe decline in marriage. When marriage is declining, relationships pre marriage decline as well.

We have empirically observed this data.

Your circle/family may be the exception. Just understand that because everything is normal around you doesn't mean that's the general trend

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Gen Z is the first generation in which literally any idiot with too much time on his hands can broadcast nonsense he pulled out of his behind and influence thousands across the globe. It used to be that cult leaders had to work for years to gain followers and weren't heard of by anyone beyond their immediate geographical area. We thought the democratizing influence of the internet would mean smart people could more easily disseminate excellent ideas. We should have considered that a lot of exceptionally stupid and uneducated people are very opinionated and are the most likely to have time to make endless videos because they're not doing anything useful with their time.[/quote

This!!!! This is pretty much the foundation of all our problems today.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the problems that have always existed have increased to an extreme degree. There has always been looks and money obsessed people it’s just more visible and accepted now.

This^. Most people dated and married people they met at school, college, work, through friends etc.

There weren't unlimited options to swipe on apps. There weren't unlimited supply of images of lives of beautiful, handsome, wealthy and famous, unlike today's Instagram, TikTok etc.

People were always shallow, just worse now.

This is exactly it. Pre dating sites the dating pool was much smaller and people were less disposable when dating within your own community. The beauty standards are also reaching new standards of unattainable. For a woman, as long as you weren’t overweight and put some slight effort into your appearance you would be fine, that is no longer the case.

[Anonymous]

Most of the gen Z kids I know are locked down into early monogamy and 100% not engaging in casual flings, in a way that me and my peers were not 20 years ago. It probably matters that I live in a sleepy flyover state now, versus spending my youth in the big coastal city.

The other ones are living monk-like celibate existences. This is probably how the world was before the enlightenment era. Something like 40% of adults never married or had children. Modernity (late 17th century to 20th centuries) had generally increased societal promiscuity but lacked the technology to avoid births and so things were still stymied to a great extent. The freeforall post-sex revolution years of 1960-2010 seem to be the aberration and we’re normalizing to a sustainable state of nature.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Demographer here. As fertility decline, aging accelerate, college enrollment declines, dependency ratio increase we observe decline in marriage. When marriage is declining, relationships pre marriage decline as well.

We have empirically observed this data.

Your circle/family may be the exception. Just understand that because everything is normal around you doesn't mean that's the general trend

This. I read that by 2036 there is going to be 15% less 18 years old and the trend is irreversible..the same article also pointed that women are going to even outnumber men in greater number.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Demographer here. As fertility decline, aging accelerate, college enrollment declines, dependency ratio increase we observe decline in marriage. When marriage is declining, relationships pre marriage decline as well.

We have empirically observed this data.

Your circle/family may be the exception. Just understand that because everything is normal around you doesn't mean that's the general trend

This. I read that by 2036 there is going to be 15% less 18 years old and the trend is irreversible..the same article also pointed that women are going to even outnumber men in greater number.

Who cares. People now have choice.

[Anonymous]

It’s a modern day cult and if you don’t educate your kids they will fall prey,

[Anonymous]

They grew up post 911, saw Iraq, Gaza, COVID, Epstein files, Ukraine, Iran wars, political division among nation, environmental decline and now facing financial crises, 3rd world war and draft so if any generation needed loving, committed and mentally supportive partners, its them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They grew up post 911, saw Iraq, Gaza, COVID, Epstein files, Ukraine, Iran wars, political division among nation, environmental decline and now facing financial crises, 3rd world war and draft so if any generation needed loving, committed and mentally supportive partners, its them.

The scary part is the a large segment of that group simply isn’t going to get a supportive partner.

[Anonymous]

Another point of view is to what extent the troll farms of foreign governments are exacerbating this problem.

When I’m on social media and I go into the comments, invariably the profile that starts some racist, mysoginist, or misandrist sh*t storm is an empty profile.

Since the days of the cold war countries have created and exacerbated civil grassfires to sow division in a country. Making women and men hate each other is just another fault line. I can guarantee there are trolls playing noth sides of every potential rift - gay vs straight, abortion, red vs blue, police brutality, rich vs poor - anything they can use to break down society. What’s worse is that with advent of smartphones is extremely easy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another point of view is to what extent the troll farms of foreign governments are exacerbating this problem.

When I’m on social media and I go into the comments, invariably the profile that starts some racist, mysoginist, or misandrist sh*t storm is an empty profile.

Since the days of the cold war countries have created and exacerbated civil grassfires to sow division in a country. Making women and men hate each other is just another fault line. I can guarantee there are trolls playing noth sides of every potential rift - gay vs straight, abortion, red vs blue, police brutality, rich vs poor - anything they can use to break down society. What’s worse is that with advent of smartphones is extremely easy.

Foreign agitators might be taking advantage of American divisions, the individualistic, money-obsessed, zero-sum American mentality makes division inevitable.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:This NYT "thought piece" I think is giving way too much credence to fringe behavior by positioning it as mainstream. What say you?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/opinion/gen-z-dating-clavicular.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QVA.a3NV.5apj7_Wu0kSD&smid=url-share

My kids are GenZ. They're dating. I don't know any boys doing this looksmaxx BS. Am I wrong or is this article just complete BS and out of step with the zeitgeist?

As a Gen Z male who is around "looksmaxxers" and who is very familiar with it, including following Clavicular from before he was mainstream the truth is that there's a small percentage of men who are sleeping with an absurd amount of women and then a much larger percentage of men and women who are not sleeping around at all.

I am friends with guys who are "looksmaxxers" who've slept with hundreds of women before 25 because they're active on Apps and in person. What used to take years of learning how to get a girl into bed started from we were around 14 and then we were on the apps before we were 18 (kicked off a few times) then redownloaded for good at 18 then it was game over. Reason being is quite simple: in a second or two to look at a profile women who have much greater control of their choice of who they want to sleep with (and believe me they do want to sleep around still) will choose the top 1-3% of guys on the app. Those 1-3% of the guys will earn a disproportionate amount of likes. I say this because I've been on it and slept with multiple women in a day depending on the week from the app.

Then you go out to club and a bar 2-4 times a week and meet girls there and you're talking scheduling issues because you're sleeping around so much. Again, this is much easier if you're in the top 1-3% of guys because women who used to think you were out of their league have a false impression of how attractive they are because they receive an outsourced amount of attention online.

I've since stopped sleeping around and I am not proud of it but I am still in close contact with guys who are active in these circles and the behavior is now repulsive to me (group chats bragging about who's going to sleep with the most girls for the week, sending nudes of girls etc). Horrible horrible stuff that isn't nearly talked about enough is going on in the Gen Z dating world. The worst part is, is that a lot of these women are misled that the sexual revolution and them sleeping around is empowering when I've seen and heard these girls cry first hand about why I and or a friend ghosted them after a one night stand (sorry you were just a number for me to try beat my friends for who got the most girls for the week). Then recorded her crying from another phone and sent into the GC to laugh at.

If I was someone who knew of this happening and wasn't attractive/etc. I would simply stop dating, which is what I suspect is happening to a lot of Gen Z

What makes you think you're in the top 1-3% and by what objective parameters is this measured? It sounds as if you think that a man who can get multiple women to sleep with him in a short period of time is in the top 1-3%. But if a man is pinging hundreds of women to get dozens of dates and have sex 5 times a week, what does that say about him beyond that he has a lot of time on his hands and isn't choosy?

Your generation is very strange. You've layered a veneer of "science" over absolute nonsense.

No defender of the PP, and it sounds like he isn't a defender of himself either. However, what he is saying makes sense with data that is coming in about how fruitless dating is on the apps for most men. The data is consistent with the idea that "matches" are very heavily skewed toward a tiny proportion of men--1-3% being a realistic number based on what I have read for the percentage of men experiencing high yield from dating apps.

'Twas ever thus. Social mores in the past constrained this behavior. For instance, the 90s star quarterback slept around some, but not with hundreds of women. Now he has access to an almost infinite pool.

Again, is there any evidence that these are the most desirable men as opposed to the men who are the most active? Is there any data on how many profiles men in the "top 1-3%" are swiping on versus men in whatever counts as the bottom?

I don't know how old you are, but anyone over 40 should remember that the bar pickup scene used to be dominated by men who weren't the smartest, most handsome, or most fun, but rather made the most time to hit the bars every single day and hit on every woman in sight. For instance, my roommate in my 20s was a 5'8, 150 lb super extravert who would have sex with any woman of any race under a size 16 and younger than age 45. He probably ran through 5 to 10 women a week sometimes. To say he was top 1-3% of men based on this would be stupid.

Sex is a numbers game first and foremost. So, how is this "data" distinguishing between men who live on the app and swipe on every other girl to play the odds versus men who are truly desirable to women?

You are proving PP's point. "super extravert" and physical presence (industriously hitting the bars) does not communicate on the apps, so that guys is never in the running.

I don't know how to help you understand that the analog of the super extrovert bar guy is the guy who sits on the apps swiping on hundreds of profiles in a short period of time. They're both playing a numbers game. Their yield has less to do with their desirability and everything to do with the sheer volume of attempts. I've explained this three times now

You could say it three hundred times but it wouldn't become less stupid. It's like this is your first time learning about any of this. Swiping takes seconds. It is not an analog to being at the bar.

You're completely missing their point.

No. We all understand the point. Regardless of what your therapist told you, not all your thoughts are valid. Some of them are invalid and stupid. This is one of those times.

DP. Can you really not tell that the person you wrote this ugly response to isn't the same person you were just arguing with?

Hi again. I can definitely tell that you are sock puppeting to reinforce your own ignorant comments.

Are you going to accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being one person? OK.

No, I just think it is unlikely that there is more than one actual person on this thread who is so poorly informed and yet so outspoken.

Yet here you are.

😀