'Situationships,' 'the ick' and great expectations: What's driving Gen Z's 'romantic recession'?

Yahoo

02-04-2025

Jacklyn Romano, 27, was pleased that a man her age had chosen a fancy restaurant for their first date. She sat on the booth side of their table, expecting her date, whom she'd just met, to take the chair opposite her. Instead, he slid in next to her. It seemed like a bit much for a first date, and Jacklyn would have preferred to face him, but she rolled with the punches.
Then he proceeded to cut up her steak for her and feed her the first bite. 'I was like, is this weird or is this a flex?' Jacklyn tells Yahoo Life. 'I didn't want to offend this person. In a way, it was kind of sweet, like he's treating me like the queen of England.' He made big promises about trips they'd take together and introduced Jacklyn to his family. But after a couple of more dates, things fizzled out. 'I was definitely interested in going on more dates, but I'm not the type of person to chase someone down and try to make plans,' says Jacklyn. The man's behavior swung wildly from 'love-bombing' to no effort at all, and she wondered, 'OK, how many girls are you taking out and spoon-feeding steak?'
She says she often gets love-bombed by someone who promises the world and then disappears, or a date never materializes, at least not by her definition. 'I expect, at the bare minimum, that a man plans the date, reaches out, opens doors, pays for the date,' she says. 'But nowadays, making a reservation is too much for these men.'
Jaclyn has a college degree and owns two businesses: a fitness studio in New Jersey and an online clothing company. She's an exemplar of an ambitious generation of young women: Overall, Gen Z women seem to be doing pretty well for themselves, and more women than men who are Jacklyn's age now hold bachelor's degrees. That may be why Jacklyn and her friends are 'not in a rush and we're not going to settle,' she says. But she would like to find a partner to settle down with. In the meantime, it would be nice if the dates were better. Since they're not, she only agrees to two or three a year.
Jaclyn's story is emblematic of a larger trend, one highlighted in a recent report, the Survey Center on American Life (SCAL), which has dubbed the lack of dating a "romantic recession." Was it always this bad on the romantic playing field or is the current decline in dating something new?
Admittedly, 'romantic recession' was mostly a pithy title for the report, co-author Kelsey Hammond, a researcher and program coordinator at SCAL, tells Yahoo Life. But the term "recession" is used in the financial world when there is a significant drop-off in economic activity, often coupled with a sense of pessimism about the market. Young Americans' dating activity and sentiments aren't too far off that mark, according to the survey's findings.
The majority of both single men (57%) and single women (54%) say that they feel pessimistic about finding someone they'd be happy to have a committed relationship with, according to the survey. Plus, 62% of U.S. singles believe dating is harder today than it used to be. When it comes to the heterosexual dating landscape, Hammond believes that the problem is in part due to a growing gender divide. 'Men and women are really starting to differ in their opinions about the world and their goals,' as well as their expectations, she says. 'Plenty of young people are having good relationships, but this increasing gender gap is just something to be cognizant of."
Only 58% of Gen Z adults said they'd been on their 'first romantic date' during their teenage years (compared to 81% of baby boomers, 76% of Gen X-ers and 67% of millennials), according to the SCAL data. Gen Z-ers were also more likely to say they'd never been on a date, with 30% saying they've never yet had the experience.
Of course, Gen Z's circumstances are undeniably extraordinary in some respects. The COVID-19 pandemic upended two years of these young adults' lives. Gen Z-ers were between ages 17 and 23 in 2020, meaning that school closures, a global health emergency and social distancing affected their formative late-high school and college years. Hammond interviewed Gen Z-ers as part of the new report. 'They themselves recognize that their social abilities and social development were stunted' by the pandemic, she tells Yahoo Life. 'We need to give Gen Z-ers as much credit as we can,' she adds.
That said, 'it is pretty clear that Gen Z is having a hard time in the dating world,' Jennie Rosier, a professor of communication in interpersonal relationships at James Madison University, and the host of the Love Matters podcast, tells Yahoo Life. In the undergraduate classes she teaches, Rosier says almost all of her 100-or-so students would like to have long-term relationships or get married. But what they're doing now 'is not helping them achieve those goals,' she says. And she says that the Gen Z-ers in her classes simply aren't having much fun trying. 'They're not happy with the way things are going; they're frustrated and annoyed,' she says.
Like Jacklyn, 22-year-old Jaeda Skye is already a thriving entrepreneur. And while she does enjoy dating, she's not very impressed with the men her age, she tells Yahoo Life. She too expects her dates to behave like gentlemen, such as planning and paying for dates and holding the door for her. She'd also like to see that they are hardworking and motivated. 'Someone doesn't have to be super successful right now, but [I'd like them to be] showing potential, that they have a plan for setting up the future.'
Jaeda acknowledges that men her age have just graduated college. But so has she, and she's already running the media agency she founded, creating content and selling curricula on social media (to her alma mater, no less). Many young women seem to feel that their male counterparts are not keeping up. Hammond asked college-age women, ''Do the men in your class or men at this college meet your expectations for what a young man should be like?' and almost every single one said no,' she says. 'It's a bummer that the young men don't have it together.'
Their disappointment in young men likely stems from the huge progress young women have made. 'It would be safe to assume that, considering the economic freedom available to women, women are not economically reliant on men in the same way' they would've been in the past, says Hammond. That may be why 55% of single women said in her survey that they are more concerned about ending up with the wrong partner than with no partner at all (for the record, so did 47% of single men). Rosier suspects that many women worry they'll end up 'man-keeping,' or doing an unfair amount of work to take care of their male partner, their home and shared social lives. That fear may underpin the belief, held by a majority of single women (55%), that unpartnered women are generally happier than married women.
Single men, on the other hand, think that their married counterparts are happier: Only 22% of unmarried men believe single guys are happier. But they're struggling to find partners. Men account for seven in 10 Americans who say they've been rejected often, nearly every time or every time they've tried to court a romantic interest, according to the SCAL report. 'Men are behind and confused, and the women have emotionally evolved past them,' Rosier says. 'Women are getting messages of empowerment, but we're still raising men the same way as we raised the last generation and the generation before.'
But Rosier is among experts who worry that the list of criteria that makes someone a 'wrong' partner has become so long that young people — and especially women — may struggle to find anyone 'right.' Her favorite case study? 'The ick.' If you've ever watched reality dating shows, you've probably heard the phrase (perhaps ad nauseam). Rosier defines it as when 'something doesn't feel right in your gut, so you just drop someone.' Sometimes, someone will get the 'ick' over something important, like misogynistic behavior. Others, though, it's over something 'trivial, like, a guy wore jean shorts to dinner and [the woman] could never look at him the same way again,' says Rosier.
A major source of 'the ick' is politics, the subject of a growing gender divide, according to the SCAL report. Its polling found that 52% of single women would be somewhat or a lot less likely to date someone if they were a Trump supporter. Only 36% of men felt the same way, and 47% said it didn't make any difference. In some ways, this political 'ick' is a new version of an old worry. 'Boomers I think believed that you couldn't have people of two different religions marry each other,' notes Rosier. 'We know now that people can be in a relationship with different religions, but we now believe that politics are so important to our daily lives…that we really cannot be in a relationship with someone of different political views.'
Women who want to be sure the person they're with is worthwhile is a good thing, says Rosier. But, 'in other ways, it's preventing many women from experiencing something that could potentially be a great relationship,' she says. 'Especially the silly 'icks,' like wearing jean shorts — it contributes to the idea that it's OK to throw relationships away.'
More than a third of Gen Z-ers have been in a 'situationship,' or poorly defined romantic relationship. 'I don't necessarily see ["situationships"] as healthy, but they are demographically sensical,' given the ages of Gen Z adults and the economic uncertainty many of them may feel, says Jess Carbino, a sociologist who previously worked with Tinder and Bumble and who is now a relationship dating coach at the company she founded, Relapy.
Some romantic company may be better than none for a while, but "situationships" may also keep young people from learning how to be in a committed relationship, or coax them into accepting less than they really want, says Pepper Schwartz, a sexologist and sociologist who matches couples on the show Married at First Sight. 'When you accept a 'situationship,' you may kid yourself about what it is and what it is not,' she tells Yahoo Life. She compares a 'situationship' to a frog being boiled in water that's heated up slowly, 'it all happens very slowly,' and may drag on longer than is good for either person. Jaeda hasn't been in a 'situationship' herself since high school, but she's seen the slow boil happen to plenty of friends. 'When you're in it, you get a little blind to reality,' she says.
Experts and the young women Yahoo Life spoke to suspect that social media may play a role in Gen Z's commitment-phobia. Rosier says online content promotes a fear of being 'too much': too needy, too affectionate, too uncool. Jacklyn thinks apps like TikTok, Instagram and dating apps (which she doesn't use) make men think, 'There always is something better and an opportunity to meet someone else because it's easy and so in reach to DM another girl.'
Social media also fosters unrealistic comparisons of 'every average person' to 'these beautiful people online,' she says.
Rosier thinks that for Gen Z-ers to reverse their romantic recession, they'll first have to address some insecurities, including those brought out by social media. 'Men and women need to work on developing a clear sense of self that is not reliant on other people's opinions of them or how well they can perform for others,' she says. 'You want to find someone who loves you for the person you are and for the person you might become.'