Heterosexuality has been deemed dangerous for as long as I can remember. In the 1990s, before I was born, an influential faction of feminists had already declared heterosexual sex and especially marriage to be marred by men’s structural advantage over women. By my teenage years, whether according to the revitalized legacies of MacKinnon and Dworkin or the dictates of #MenAreTrash feminism, to love a man was to be subject to his contempt and domination. (Figures like the disreputable Andrew Tate would agree.) By 2025, more than a decade since the term “toxic masculinity” entered cocktail-party conversation, it’s become a baseline assumption that heterosexual women are beleaguered, suffering from a condition not entirely of their own choosing but still incriminating for any right-thinking person: being attracted to ever faultful men.
“Heteropessimism,” coined in 2019 by the critic Asa Seresin, has become a shorthand and sometimes a rallying cry for many who are uneasily straight. Seresin defined it as the trend, particularly popular among women, of “performatively detaching oneself from heterosexuality.” He considered this an understandable response to living in a patriarchal society, but he also predicted that, far from revolutionizing gender relations, these performances were most likely to produce more heterosexual despair. Sure enough, in 2024, before and after the election, a rash of splashy journalistic dispatches proclaimed that now was the time for women to cut ties with men completely: the New York Times and the Guardian profiled young women going “boysober,” while others counseled “evidence-based” lesbianism, or joining the gender-segregationist 4B movement originating in South Korea. The campaign continued in 2025 with viral essays like Jean Garnett’s “The Trouble with Wanting Men,” for the New York Times Magazine, in which the author and her female friends commiserate about the unsuitability of even the “good men” in their social circles, and fantasize that they could renounce dating those who belong—no matter how apologetically—to the “tainted category of ‘men.’”
But heteropessimism has not only become a mainstream channel for women’s romantic discontent; it has broken containment and migrated across the sexes. By the mid-2010s, male-dominated online forums had begun to develop their own heteropessimist manifestos, many of which would later become the intellectual engine for the New Right. And today young men, especially on the right, avail themselves just as much as women of public disavowals of the opposite sex. Last September, while covering the National Conservatism conference, I watched the reliably pro-male ally Helen Andrews deliver, to the great acclaim of a nearly all-male audience, the first iteration of the speech that would become the viral treatise called “The Great Feminization.” Her polemic against the consequences of women’s participation in political and professional life electrified a demographic of young men who are attracted, like many millennial feminists, to grand structural explanations that tell them exactly who to blame for the coupling crisis and other cultural indignities.
In my last article for this magazine, I recounted conversations I’d had in 2024 with several young, right-leaning men in Washington, D.C. My method was unscientific; I spoke at length to people in my extended social world—one that is distinctive, perhaps, only for being so suffused in the political ambitions of the nation’s capital, and relatively heterogeneous ideologically—in hopes of bringing to light a set of opinions and perspectives on the election that seemed to me to be a significant part of the story of the New Right, but which had been overlooked by the professional media.
I noticed then that at the parties, conferences and debates where I encountered these self-described “sensitive young men,” the discussion would often slide from politics to romance, to how to define a good girlfriend or a good marriage. This wasn’t just limited to the young men who form the Trumpian vanguard. In the capital city, the thing on the minds of the politicos and professionals was love and dating, just as in post-2024 news coverage and commentary, analysis of the election has become inseparable from examinations of the vexed gender dynamics of Gen Z. But as with the media coverage of my generation’s support for Trump, the voices we repeatedly hear in this discussion tend to be older intellectuals and influencers, podcasters and political operatives, rather than the young people at the center of the story.
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Last February, a group of young conservatives in Washington hosted an open-invitation Valentine’s Day debate party. There, a month after the inauguration, dozens of young men in or around Trump’s new administration gathered to discuss not the great man in the White House, not political revolution, but love.
This is an era of good feelings for these young men, and the theme would seem to reflect the mood. It is also promisingly uncontroversial, and thus more welcoming: more women have come to this event than most conservative mixers, raising their average attendance from the single digits to tentative double digits. For a generation of young men increasingly politically divorced from women their age, who make up the most anti-GOP and anti-Trump demographic, the idea that love could overcome any obstacle is a hopeful premise.
But in the debate that ensues, nearly every speech is against romance. The arguments detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a “simp” or a “sucker.” Some wonder aloud whether one should ask out women at all, who, in the age of dating apps, receive far too much male attention, and as a result have become too picky, exacting and fickle. Eventually, a quip about women’s suffrage comes from the audience, prompting a jocular back-and-forth. I ask a friend why they are suddenly discussing whether women should vote. He looks at me and sighs. “Women’s suffrage always comes up.” By night’s end, almost nobody has asked out any of the women present in the room; the only man who ventures to do so is summarily rejected.
Afterwards, at a nearby bar, I find again a lot of single young men talking about women, rather than to women. One tells me that his friend, who is not here tonight, recently found a girlfriend: “I’m really happy for him. But now he texts our group chat advice, acting like he’s got the key to life, like he’s got it all figured out. And sometimes I’m not sure what to talk about with him anymore. We used to bond over not having a girl.” I think of my own “girlfriends,” who’ve told me to break up with previous boyfriends over their greater or lesser faults, imploring me to think of “how fun it would be to be single together.”
In another corner of the bar, I encounter a group of three twentysomething young men. The young, right-leaning women who had shown up hopeful have gone home. These men are now here alone on a Saturday night, in hour one of a five-hour debate about the nature of love. They are lonely experts, armed with elaborate theories of the female mind. The discussants go around in circles for hours, discussing what men truly want, what women truly want. Theses abound: “Men want respect; women want to be desired”; “Men are easily satisfied, but women are always afraid of making the wrong choice and not maximizing their options”; “Men are the only true romantics.” And questions remain: How many past sexual partners is too many? How many is too few? Does she need to share your interests, or is femininity more important than intellectual compatibility? Is it a red flag if she’s unmarried after 25? Is it a red flag if she’s single? What if we just assigned girlfriends and boyfriends randomly, wouldn’t they be happier than if we let them choose?
These single men talk amongst themselves about how many kids they want, out of an earnest aspiration but also, at times, as if in competition to prove their traditional virility. It is easier to talk about wanting ten kids while unattached and 24 than to raise ten kids with one’s wife, but tonight the effect is the same: here, you are based. One asks me how many I want. “I don’t know yet; I have to find someone first. Three, four?” He gives me a look. “Those are liberal numbers.”
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A few weeks later I attend another party in similar circles. It is almost midnight, ten minutes until my 27th birthday. I want to go home. As I walk out I encounter two young men, staffers in Trump’s administration, talking on the sidewalk in their suits and loosened ties, smoking cigarettes. Hesitantly, I say hello. I am exhausted by the theories I’ve heard over the last few weeks about women’s virtues and faults and nearly wince, expecting more to come. Behind me, I recognize two college-aged guys from recent media exposés; they work for DOGE and are evaluating some absent girl’s Instagram page.
I exchange a few pleasantries and introductions with the two men in front of me instead. Midway through the conversation, I mention that I ought to go home soon, but a friend walks past and wishes me a happy birthday. One of my new acquaintances walks abruptly toward a flowering dogwood tree, picks a flower from a branch, and comes back to present it to me without a word. I hold it in my hand, shy and elated. The DOGE boys call him a simp.
One thing I and other young women in D.C. have observed since the election is a shift in how young men speak to and appraise us. Passing through conservative mixers, parties and young-professional networks in Trump’s Washington, we’ve increasingly felt like we’re working against an assumption that women are tainted and guilty until proven otherwise. “Among all the young men I’ve met on the right, especially on the far right, I would guess that 10 to 20 percent of them hate all women,” my acquaintance Oliver, someone familiar with these circles, tells me somewhat sarcastically. I share Oliver’s estimate with a twentysomething right-wing influencer. He widens his eyes and laughs, but concedes there’s truth to it. “Look, lots of these guys, they just consider you less reliable if you talk to women. You’re compromised, in a real way.”
I later tell Jake,* the Trump staffer who picked me the flower, about the statistic. He is a former fraternity president and hardly uses X. He looks bewildered. “Where do you find these guys?” He shakes his head. “Whoever they are, they don’t talk to me.” Jake seems to be as-yet uncontaminated by the culture on the right that views women as saboteurs of right-wing ideological purity and hen-pecking nuisances to be avoided. He suggests to me that, as a 27-year-old, he’s already older than the demographic that received their intellectual and social formation online. His romantic imagination was shaped more by fraternity mixers and reading physical books. Jake quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and Goethe’s Faust, revealing a talent I suspect will bode better for his own fertility than that of the young men studying tweets about female fertility.
The three of us meet again for drinks, and the other young staffer I met on my birthday, James,* offers his own explanation for his peers: “My working thesis is that all of these stupid, these ridiculous rules—they come from a sense of anxiety. People feel very anxious that the normal rules have broken down.” He references not just the disappearance of in-person dating scripts, or our confusion about gender roles, but the widespread anxiety around expressing desire toward women, even verbally approaching women without clear permission, in the wake of #MeToo. “They [young men] think, ‘I have to make my own new rules.’ But people’s new rules are worse. Much worse. Real life has been so eroded” by social media, COVID lockdowns and dating apps “that people are forced to retreat into this kind of categorical thinking. Because opportunities to casually meet people as they actually come, as entire people and not checklists, are no longer available to most people. It’s all first principles. Yeah, right. Like, what’s the ‘first principles’ wife? ‘Doesn’t have too many tattoos.’ ‘I just want a woman who dresses modestly.’ Where are we, fucking Qatar?”
“For most young men, their lives are consumed by thinking about these categories,” he continues, “because real life is degraded for most people, and they can’t exit out of these imagined categories and just meet human beings. Real life is not degraded for me, because I’m relatively good-looking and charming and rich.” He pauses and gives me a smile. “But I can understand it. We’ve outsourced opportunities for normal connection. You go to bars today and it’s literally groups of guys in three and groups of women in three, and none of them talk to each other. That was not how it was fifty years ago. If you’re just a well-meaning young person who is not extraordinary in any way, what are you supposed to do?”
I think of his peers, the young right-wing men at parties around the city, surrounded by young women who share their values. Amid a post-election renaissance of right-wing social life in D.C., they’ve had all summer to pursue opportunities in real life, but the forms of gender-specific discourse that had given them consolation were more gratifying, or familiar, than the opportunity to encounter real and receptive women. Instead, they talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.
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Around the same time this past summer, I stepped outside the New Right’s anxious romantic subculture and went to a birthday party for a liberal acquaintance. The invitation contained a self-deprecating joke about turning 29 (“it’s so over!”), which turned out to indicate an ambient anxiety about aging, a sense that we’re getting too old to still not know who we are and what we want.
At the party, I run into an old acquaintance and his girlfriend of four years, who works in Democratic politics. They are a pleasant and up-to-date couple who are appropriately embarrassed by how high-income their D.C. neighborhood is. At some point, as we discuss our late twenties, I mention wanting to have kids one day. His girlfriend’s eyes light up. “You do?!” she asks as she turns to me. “How many? Boys or girls?” Then her boyfriend chimes in. “You want kids?” He’s genuinely surprised; he expected better from me. He reminds me how bad the world, the country, is. I think back to when he and his girlfriend first started dating, in the Biden era, and the year-long situationship that preceded their lukewarm relationship, and wonder what he’s so afraid of.
While nearly all my conservative friends are single, even though they claim to want to get married young, many of my left-leaning or liberal friends are in long-term relationships, but say that they don’t want to get married or have kids any time soon. The young liberal women I know, based on the desires they express and their sometimes-contrary actions, seem to want an open but committed relationship; they want someone enthusiastically sex-positive but not a playboy; a man who reads but only the right things, and who isn’t disagreeable or prone to overexplaining what interests him; they want casual, liberated sex with regulated communication, rules and a sense of mutual obligation. They often prioritize men who have learned the right political and romantic lines and have an emotional register that mirrors their female friendships, but lack the seriousness or sense of purpose they are looking for in their relationships.
I notice another old acquaintance at the party. Years ago he survived a life-threatening accident; his girlfriend stood by him, through the complications and disability. I’d visit him between surgeries, and he told me once, still at that time facing death, that he had decided he was going to marry her. She had taken him to the hospital, been there for the appointments, held his hands and his head, stood by him on death’s doorstep. She had proved she was the one. As he told me this, I thought that I caught a glimpse of something women long to see: real, fixed love in a man’s eyes. It reminded me of the “state of enchantment” W. H. Auden called “certainty.” His near-death encounter had made freedom seem meaningless in the face of one real thing.
I wonder now if I imagined it: if my own romantic indecisiveness made me vicariously relieved by his bravery. Once he recovered, I asked him excitedly when he planned to propose. He became quiet. I felt like I was suddenly talking to a different person. His wounds were still healing; the scars were hard to look at. But more frightening was the look on his face when I asked him about that previous moment of clarity. I hoped he might be the first among my friends, all in their mid-to-late twenties, to make a lasting commitment. It seemed to me that he had made up his mind about her weeks before, somewhere between life and death. But in the light of life, with fifty years still ahead, he faltered.
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As with the right-wing men, online dating discourse bleeds into my single female friends’ accounts of their experiences: they tell me, in insights learned from short-form videos on TikTok, that men are so dangerous that it’s safer to encounter a wild grizzly in the forest rather than a man, but also that it’s both laudable and empowering to have a one-night stand with a near stranger (who is also, of course, a man). Asked once by a friend about the bear-versus-man dilemma, I answered, not knowing the political context of the question, “I think I’d rather encounter a man. You can reason with a human being, right?” My answer was the wrong one.
After the party, I speak to Alexis,* another friend, about a new guy she’s seeing. She’s a leftist and lives in a suburb. She’s in her mid-twenties, and has been dating for a few years since college. After several dead-end romantic experiences, she’s become uneasy with casual sex. On a date recently, she tried to explain to a left-wing young man why she wanted to wait a few weeks before having sex, but struggled for a moral vocabulary that didn’t seem retrograde, prudish or weird. She recounts the end of the date to me: “So I told him, ‘I don’t want to jump right into sex anymore, honestly. It’s so weird. It’s like, Hey, I just met you; now choke me out and fuck me.’”
She pauses as she tells me this, and laughs. “Like, that’s insane if you think about it! So that’s what I told him. And then he said, ‘No, no, I completely understand.’
“But I don’t think he did. I just told him, ‘I’m far beyond this idea of fucking just because you can, just because you’re attracted to this person and they’re alone with you in your house.’” Alexis grows more emphatic, as if proving the point to me as she recounts this conversation. “That doesn’t mean you have to, right?!” She pauses; she seems to be looking for some broader justification that might license, or contextualize, her desire for more emotional intimacy, familiarity and safety before having sex. “I told him, ‘Look, we’re bringing back yearning.’”
Something about the phrase sounds familiar. I look it up later, and it’s popular among young women who watch shows like Bridgerton, plots that have all the courtesy and flattery of traditional courtship with little of the stifling authority or shame. It seems that women who have observed, and accepted, that sex must precede emotional attachment in dating use the concept of “yearning” to barter for any sign of emotional life from their lovers at all.
She goes on. “I later sent him this famous essay I had read, by Silvia Federici, about how sex and sexuality are a form of labor for women. He asked me to explain what it meant to me. I told him, exasperated, ‘Look, it’s structural, not personal!’”
I think of the notion of boysobriety—celibacy, in other words, rebranded with an infantilizing TikTok neologism. The desire to sober up from love and sex is pervasive among the first generation (mine) to fully combine the mores of free love with the more, more, more impulse of dating-app culture. Drowning in opportunities but dying for dignity, people my age and younger don’t want a relationship they can DoorDash. The turn to “trad” dating norms, Marxist-feminist theories and TikTok lifestyle advice reflects the desperation for a social or moral framework that gives them the permission and the confidence to say, without feeling too conspicuous or weird, “I’ve had enough.”
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As the daughter of a mother who immigrated from a theocracy and a grandmother who was married at thirteen, I know too much about the risks of unthinking deference to old mores; but as a member of the dating-app generation who grew up around mostly divorced older people, I also know about the shortcomings of the technologies that are taking their place. I was fourteen when Tinder launched in 2012; at first, it seemed to us like a welcome escape from the terror of determining who did or didn’t like you at school. The first time anyone ever asked me to be his “girlfriend,” in middle school, it was over Facebook Messenger.
The summer before college, I’d match with people I had known in high school who only felt confident expressing mutual interest on a digital interface. I used to participate in the charade of posting Instagram stories I hoped one specific person might see, even when I hardly used social media at all. Meanwhile, I consumed the typical slate of TV shows featuring female antiheroes. Trying to square my dating preferences (liking men) with the received wisdom that men were largely bad (hating men), I believed it was necessary to be derisive to my male peers to win their affection and prove I was no conventional woman desperate for a relationship (it didn’t work). By the time I got to college, having learned that men were “porn-obsessed pigs,” the common wisdom was that hookup culture was a necessary, unavoidable evil out of which, if you were lucky, a hard-won and minimally vulnerable emotional connection might sprout.
When I was 22, I spent my first summer out of college in COVID lockdown and tried Hinge for one month. In the winter of 2020, the most appalling tendencies of the dating environment started to become entrenched; one could look at hundreds of faces every day while hardly meeting anyone in real life. While scanning the thinly presented options on the app, one could swipe over to yet another app (say, Instagram or Twitter) and watch short-form videos or read tweets about “finance guys” and “chads,” “cheaters” and “liars,” “girlbosses” and “gold diggers,” “OnlyFans girls” and “porn addicts.” My entire dating world in 2020, like so many others, became a two-by-four-inch iPhone screen; all my romantic possibilities and fears could be conjured within it.
I have survived the same “nightmare” scenarios young men on Twitter and young women on TikTok bemoan and attribute to their respective political and cultural villains. I met a boyfriend on a dating app and we dated for years without getting married; depending on the eye of the beholder, in our relationship I was a “bad feminist” countless times and he was a “sucker.” If I had told a group chat of friends that this boyfriend told me he loved me after only a few months, they might have warned me that he was a malicious “love bomber,” and to doubt his intentions.
I sympathize with the desire to distance oneself from the romantic and physical humiliations of hookup culture, which are variously—and sloppily—attributed to heterosexuality, to men as a whole, to women as a whole, to patriarchy or to the moral degeneracy of the age. The moment I learned that it wasn’t romantic suicide to reject the sexual bidding war that is the dating market, I opted out. I began to “date to marry,” not because I wanted to be married in my early twenties (I didn’t), but because I felt I had to draw a hard line against the pervasive heterosexual standard of situationships, where no one was at the wheel. Despite being raised an atheist, I, like many in my age group in recent years, took up some hard-line rules from Christian sexual ethics, which, compared to the high-strung dating discourse, seemed to offer a less baroque, if sometimes still too crude, filter for what I really wanted from love.
At 27, I have higher hopes for love than I did at fourteen, or 22. Still, like many my age, I know I have a larger and more specific set of parameters for romance than any of my ancestors. Many of the young people I’ve met and spoken to on right and left, myself included to a great degree, want to find someone who is gorgeous, can hold court on philosophy and history, is financially stable, sensitive and surprising. Then they must have something even greater than the sum of all these parts, that certain je ne sais quoi that accords with our intuition, while possessing the superficial qualities that flatter our rational judgment and make sense to the audiences that govern our social media-addled minds.
Even the young conservative men are more modern than they often acknowledge: notwithstanding their sometimes dramatic rejections of it, they have been shaped by dating-app culture, and they also build their ideal woman from a formidable checklist. They tell me they want a traditional woman who is financially independent, a real intellectual—and certainly not a “normie”—whose independent ideas serendipitously align with the cacophony of anonymous guys they follow on X. While some blame “women with master’s degrees” for the fertility crisis, most of the right-leaning young men I’ve spoken to want a marriage filled with conversation, and a woman broad-minded enough to understand and engage with their countercultural ideas. (That may be why women with master’s degrees are doing quite well, statistically, in coupling off.)
The checklists are the flip side of the online discourse’s emphasis on shame-inducing categories and judgments, from “fuckboy” to “simp,” from “ran-through woman” to “girlboss”—judgments that may surprise those who had accepted our post-normative dating environment at face value. It transcends the political divide; older New Right influencers have told me that they do not understand the fixation of younger men on sexual history or “body count,” while at the same time I hear from teenage family friends who lean left that it’s considered life-ending to date someone for more than three years without getting married, and that one is romantically ruined after sleeping with someone or acquiring, in the dehumanizing digital parlance, their “first body.” The result is that it feels harder than ever not to mess up in a myriad of hyper-specific and unpredictable ways, all of which heighten the risks of vulnerability and make its rewards harder to imagine.
But there is a reason that these seemingly arbitrary standards hold such appeal. The new technologies, we’re told, give us more freedom and choice, and they do. Yet they also undermine the moral and practical heuristics we need to know how to make a good choice. In the absence of norms or models, however imperfect, we turn each relationship into an elaborate contract dispute. Without a clear path or end goal we inspect little red flags along the road as signals for whether to end things, searching for decisive forks in a missing trail. Amid the collapse of authority on sex and gender, and in this radical freedom, we are all forced to become existentialists in dating, in blue-bubbled messages, on our endless social media feeds and in strained conversations: What do you want? Where are we going? What are we?
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Our models of love, and our aspirations for who we will marry or be with forever, will always be related to our ideas of the good life, which is why the “sensitive young men” on the right and the feminist young women on the left aren’t entirely wrong to connect their romantic lives to their political ideals. There is no subject more important to think deeply about, to be honest about. Love matters so much that neither the left-wing women nor the right-wing men who blame each other for their romantic dissatisfaction can stop talking and thinking about each other. No matter how flooded we are with horror stories and recommendations to give up, we still care about finding love. But instead of clarifying standards, raising our aspirations or giving us expectations of dignity in love, the online discourse has built upon decades of gender wars to leave Gen Zers largely alien to each other, afraid and alone.
I am unimpressed with the self-indulgence of the heteropessimists, both male and female. I find first-world heteropessimism to be an insult, if nothing else, to myself and to the women who came before me and who did not have the freedoms that I do. Only a handful of women in the countless generations of my family, originally from Iran, had the opportunity to be with a man they freely, genuinely loved. And yet women a generation or two older, born and raised in the United States, are asking young women like me: “Have you tried being gay?”
But heteropessimism is also, as Seresin noted, an “anesthetic.” Like so much of the gender discourse, it holds out the prospect of protection from uncertainty and risk but results instead in a retreat from our own judgment and agency—as well as, in some cases, from our own desires. These were already temptations for those of us in our twenties, whose pessimism about relationships has been formed less by disappointing romantic experience than by abstract villains. As we scroll through the articles and posts of the misandrists and the misogynists, it is easy to harden our hearts against the possibility of any non-mercenary relation between the sexes at all. Yet I doubt I am speaking only for myself when I say that the stories on my phone have never prevented my disappointments in love, nor predicted my best experiences.
Millennia of verses, songs, sonnets, novels, films and countless more unrecorded bonds have been born out of heterosexual love, as has human life itself. There must be some realistic and attainable way to live with, and love, the people to whom we are actually attracted.
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Late last May, after I had already begun working on this essay, I found myself at a dinner party in midtown Manhattan, hosted by a wealthy bachelor. Entrepreneurs, physicists, venture capitalists, a wealth manager, a tech executive, a life coach and (somehow) I had gathered in the private room of an old-school steakhouse to discuss a topic announced just before: the fertility crisis.
We sat in a burgundy room, surrounded by antique picture frames and curtains; to my right was a bewildered Oxbridge academic, only a day here in our strange country where unmarried Americans convene fertility-crisis backroom dinners, and to my left a young portfolio manager at a prestigious venture-capital firm. All but two guests were in their late thirties and forties, and twelve out of fifteen were men. They represented an impressive and varied range of careers; several of them matched the generic description of what eligible women would hope for in a marriageable partner.
I sat directly across from the host in the middle of a long table. He had gathered us for no small reason, for no small talk: we were told as the wine was poured that this decline in births was threatening Western civilization. We had received four dire charts to review in our emails. The United States’s population lagged behind replacement in each of them; there was a labor-force and pension crisis ahead. Throughout dinner, various causes of the decline all centered on a single culprit: women. “It’s simply that the women don’t want to get married. They don’t want to have kids.”
“All around the world, the statistics show that when women are educated, they have fewer children.” Another chimed in, “And, when they entered the academy, they made it more feminine, they made it woke and intellectually dishonest.” And another general cause: “Women are too left-wing now. The statistics show it. They hate men.”
Finally an unmarried woman in her forties spoke up. I had been glancing at her throughout the conversation, sensing an unspoken recognition that she was the proxy for the overeducated “picky” woman the men at the table were most contemptuous of. She, like her peers, said more or less what I expected her to say: “I couldn’t find an emotionally mature, considerate and thoughtful man until recently. The men aren’t marriageable, and women don’t need to settle anymore.”
I asked her what the faults of the previous candidates were. She said she had wanted someone emotionally available, thoughtful, sensitive and feminist, and had found none. The remark was pointed—the professional men around the table, her similarly aged peers, were clearly not that. They were ambitious and high-earning, they were prestigiously educated, they were intelligent; but none of them, over the course of the evening, came across as particularly sensitive, and certainly not feminist.
I asked her if it seemed likely that the same man who was ambitious enough to break into a high-earning career would also be sensitive and given to long emotional talks. She pleaded with me, like an elder sister, that I didn’t need to settle, that I could find such a man if I waited long enough. Her “partner” was an investment banker who was sensitive, present, thoughtful and doting. He was also in his fifties and previously married. I immediately felt frightened, not reassured. I didn’t want to wait on the off chance that I might encounter some extraordinary hybrid of masculine and feminine qualities in twenty or thirty years. The 2040s are far away; I wanted a husband much sooner than that.
The debate between the sole feminist and the chorus of men’s apologists carried on as I fretted about what an ideal man even might be. I saw my own potential future in each of these anxious talkers, with more accusations than answers about love. At a certain point I interrupted and asked, “General causes aside, what about ourselves? How many people here are married or in a relationship?”
Only four hands raised tentatively, out of fifteen. “Why?” I asked.
The table, particularly the jury of men, was quiet for the first time all evening. There were no ready-made lines from social media to cite, and for the women, no op-ed screeds against male emotional incompetence or cruelty. The most virulent anti-feminist discussant, who firmly believed coeducational institutions were to blame for women’s uppity disinterest in men, averted his gaze.
The host, a successful entrepreneur in his forties, broke the silence with jovial grace: “I’ll speak only for myself: personal deficiencies.”
I’m not surprised that most of my dinner companions had defaulted to systemic, external causes of the birth decline; those phantasms of child-despising girlbosses and insensitive male chauvinists are simpler villains than one’s own complicated mistakes, one’s own cowardice or vanity, one’s own halting uncertainty about when to ask for more or settle for what’s given, when to try once again or give in to despair.
Those who have inadequate and disappointing experience in particulars tend to love general theories. This dinner, convened to save Western civilization, was little more than what civilizations are ever made of—men and women striving to be greater than they are. The more I hear complaints from single men and women, whether adolescents or adults, right or left, I think of St. Augustine: “‘Bad times! Hard times!’: People say this. Let us live good lives, and the times are good. We make our times; such as we are, such are the times.”
Art credit: Claire Partington, Daphne and Apollo, 2024. Glazed earthenware and mixed media. 101 × 30 × 30 cm. © Claire Partington. Courtesy of the artist and Winston Wächter Fine Art.
Heterosexuality has been deemed dangerous for as long as I can remember. In the 1990s, before I was born, an influential faction of feminists had already declared heterosexual sex and especially marriage to be marred by men’s structural advantage over women. By my teenage years, whether according to the revitalized legacies of MacKinnon and Dworkin or the dictates of #MenAreTrash feminism, to love a man was to be subject to his contempt and domination. (Figures like the disreputable Andrew Tate would agree.) By 2025, more than a decade since the term “toxic masculinity” entered cocktail-party conversation, it’s become a baseline assumption that heterosexual women are beleaguered, suffering from a condition not entirely of their own choosing but still incriminating for any right-thinking person: being attracted to ever faultful men.
“Heteropessimism,” coined in 2019 by the critic Asa Seresin, has become a shorthand and sometimes a rallying cry for many who are uneasily straight. Seresin defined it as the trend, particularly popular among women, of “performatively detaching oneself from heterosexuality.” He considered this an understandable response to living in a patriarchal society, but he also predicted that, far from revolutionizing gender relations, these performances were most likely to produce more heterosexual despair. Sure enough, in 2024, before and after the election, a rash of splashy journalistic dispatches proclaimed that now was the time for women to cut ties with men completely: the New York Times and the Guardian profiled young women going “boysober,” while others counseled “evidence-based” lesbianism, or joining the gender-segregationist 4B movement originating in South Korea. The campaign continued in 2025 with viral essays like Jean Garnett’s “The Trouble with Wanting Men,” for the New York Times Magazine, in which the author and her female friends commiserate about the unsuitability of even the “good men” in their social circles, and fantasize that they could renounce dating those who belong—no matter how apologetically—to the “tainted category of ‘men.’”
But heteropessimism has not only become a mainstream channel for women’s romantic discontent; it has broken containment and migrated across the sexes. By the mid-2010s, male-dominated online forums had begun to develop their own heteropessimist manifestos, many of which would later become the intellectual engine for the New Right. And today young men, especially on the right, avail themselves just as much as women of public disavowals of the opposite sex. Last September, while covering the National Conservatism conference, I watched the reliably pro-male ally Helen Andrews deliver, to the great acclaim of a nearly all-male audience, the first iteration of the speech that would become the viral treatise called “The Great Feminization.” Her polemic against the consequences of women’s participation in political and professional life electrified a demographic of young men who are attracted, like many millennial feminists, to grand structural explanations that tell them exactly who to blame for the coupling crisis and other cultural indignities.
In my last article for this magazine, I recounted conversations I’d had in 2024 with several young, right-leaning men in Washington, D.C. My method was unscientific; I spoke at length to people in my extended social world—one that is distinctive, perhaps, only for being so suffused in the political ambitions of the nation’s capital, and relatively heterogeneous ideologically—in hopes of bringing to light a set of opinions and perspectives on the election that seemed to me to be a significant part of the story of the New Right, but which had been overlooked by the professional media.
I noticed then that at the parties, conferences and debates where I encountered these self-described “sensitive young men,” the discussion would often slide from politics to romance, to how to define a good girlfriend or a good marriage. This wasn’t just limited to the young men who form the Trumpian vanguard. In the capital city, the thing on the minds of the politicos and professionals was love and dating, just as in post-2024 news coverage and commentary, analysis of the election has become inseparable from examinations of the vexed gender dynamics of Gen Z. But as with the media coverage of my generation’s support for Trump, the voices we repeatedly hear in this discussion tend to be older intellectuals and influencers, podcasters and political operatives, rather than the young people at the center of the story.
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Last February, a group of young conservatives in Washington hosted an open-invitation Valentine’s Day debate party. There, a month after the inauguration, dozens of young men in or around Trump’s new administration gathered to discuss not the great man in the White House, not political revolution, but love.
This is an era of good feelings for these young men, and the theme would seem to reflect the mood. It is also promisingly uncontroversial, and thus more welcoming: more women have come to this event than most conservative mixers, raising their average attendance from the single digits to tentative double digits. For a generation of young men increasingly politically divorced from women their age, who make up the most anti-GOP and anti-Trump demographic, the idea that love could overcome any obstacle is a hopeful premise.
But in the debate that ensues, nearly every speech is against romance. The arguments detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a “simp” or a “sucker.” Some wonder aloud whether one should ask out women at all, who, in the age of dating apps, receive far too much male attention, and as a result have become too picky, exacting and fickle. Eventually, a quip about women’s suffrage comes from the audience, prompting a jocular back-and-forth. I ask a friend why they are suddenly discussing whether women should vote. He looks at me and sighs. “Women’s suffrage always comes up.” By night’s end, almost nobody has asked out any of the women present in the room; the only man who ventures to do so is summarily rejected.
Afterwards, at a nearby bar, I find again a lot of single young men talking about women, rather than to women. One tells me that his friend, who is not here tonight, recently found a girlfriend: “I’m really happy for him. But now he texts our group chat advice, acting like he’s got the key to life, like he’s got it all figured out. And sometimes I’m not sure what to talk about with him anymore. We used to bond over not having a girl.” I think of my own “girlfriends,” who’ve told me to break up with previous boyfriends over their greater or lesser faults, imploring me to think of “how fun it would be to be single together.”
In another corner of the bar, I encounter a group of three twentysomething young men. The young, right-leaning women who had shown up hopeful have gone home. These men are now here alone on a Saturday night, in hour one of a five-hour debate about the nature of love. They are lonely experts, armed with elaborate theories of the female mind. The discussants go around in circles for hours, discussing what men truly want, what women truly want. Theses abound: “Men want respect; women want to be desired”; “Men are easily satisfied, but women are always afraid of making the wrong choice and not maximizing their options”; “Men are the only true romantics.” And questions remain: How many past sexual partners is too many? How many is too few? Does she need to share your interests, or is femininity more important than intellectual compatibility? Is it a red flag if she’s unmarried after 25? Is it a red flag if she’s single? What if we just assigned girlfriends and boyfriends randomly, wouldn’t they be happier than if we let them choose?
These single men talk amongst themselves about how many kids they want, out of an earnest aspiration but also, at times, as if in competition to prove their traditional virility. It is easier to talk about wanting ten kids while unattached and 24 than to raise ten kids with one’s wife, but tonight the effect is the same: here, you are based. One asks me how many I want. “I don’t know yet; I have to find someone first. Three, four?” He gives me a look. “Those are liberal numbers.”
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A few weeks later I attend another party in similar circles. It is almost midnight, ten minutes until my 27th birthday. I want to go home. As I walk out I encounter two young men, staffers in Trump’s administration, talking on the sidewalk in their suits and loosened ties, smoking cigarettes. Hesitantly, I say hello. I am exhausted by the theories I’ve heard over the last few weeks about women’s virtues and faults and nearly wince, expecting more to come. Behind me, I recognize two college-aged guys from recent media exposés; they work for DOGE and are evaluating some absent girl’s Instagram page.
I exchange a few pleasantries and introductions with the two men in front of me instead. Midway through the conversation, I mention that I ought to go home soon, but a friend walks past and wishes me a happy birthday. One of my new acquaintances walks abruptly toward a flowering dogwood tree, picks a flower from a branch, and comes back to present it to me without a word. I hold it in my hand, shy and elated. The DOGE boys call him a simp.
One thing I and other young women in D.C. have observed since the election is a shift in how young men speak to and appraise us. Passing through conservative mixers, parties and young-professional networks in Trump’s Washington, we’ve increasingly felt like we’re working against an assumption that women are tainted and guilty until proven otherwise. “Among all the young men I’ve met on the right, especially on the far right, I would guess that 10 to 20 percent of them hate all women,” my acquaintance Oliver, someone familiar with these circles, tells me somewhat sarcastically. I share Oliver’s estimate with a twentysomething right-wing influencer. He widens his eyes and laughs, but concedes there’s truth to it. “Look, lots of these guys, they just consider you less reliable if you talk to women. You’re compromised, in a real way.”
I later tell Jake,* the Trump staffer who picked me the flower, about the statistic. He is a former fraternity president and hardly uses X. He looks bewildered. “Where do you find these guys?” He shakes his head. “Whoever they are, they don’t talk to me.” Jake seems to be as-yet uncontaminated by the culture on the right that views women as saboteurs of right-wing ideological purity and hen-pecking nuisances to be avoided. He suggests to me that, as a 27-year-old, he’s already older than the demographic that received their intellectual and social formation online. His romantic imagination was shaped more by fraternity mixers and reading physical books. Jake quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and Goethe’s Faust, revealing a talent I suspect will bode better for his own fertility than that of the young men studying tweets about female fertility.
The three of us meet again for drinks, and the other young staffer I met on my birthday, James,* offers his own explanation for his peers: “My working thesis is that all of these stupid, these ridiculous rules—they come from a sense of anxiety. People feel very anxious that the normal rules have broken down.” He references not just the disappearance of in-person dating scripts, or our confusion about gender roles, but the widespread anxiety around expressing desire toward women, even verbally approaching women without clear permission, in the wake of #MeToo. “They [young men] think, ‘I have to make my own new rules.’ But people’s new rules are worse. Much worse. Real life has been so eroded” by social media, COVID lockdowns and dating apps “that people are forced to retreat into this kind of categorical thinking. Because opportunities to casually meet people as they actually come, as entire people and not checklists, are no longer available to most people. It’s all first principles. Yeah, right. Like, what’s the ‘first principles’ wife? ‘Doesn’t have too many tattoos.’ ‘I just want a woman who dresses modestly.’ Where are we, fucking Qatar?”
“For most young men, their lives are consumed by thinking about these categories,” he continues, “because real life is degraded for most people, and they can’t exit out of these imagined categories and just meet human beings. Real life is not degraded for me, because I’m relatively good-looking and charming and rich.” He pauses and gives me a smile. “But I can understand it. We’ve outsourced opportunities for normal connection. You go to bars today and it’s literally groups of guys in three and groups of women in three, and none of them talk to each other. That was not how it was fifty years ago. If you’re just a well-meaning young person who is not extraordinary in any way, what are you supposed to do?”
I think of his peers, the young right-wing men at parties around the city, surrounded by young women who share their values. Amid a post-election renaissance of right-wing social life in D.C., they’ve had all summer to pursue opportunities in real life, but the forms of gender-specific discourse that had given them consolation were more gratifying, or familiar, than the opportunity to encounter real and receptive women. Instead, they talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.
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Around the same time this past summer, I stepped outside the New Right’s anxious romantic subculture and went to a birthday party for a liberal acquaintance. The invitation contained a self-deprecating joke about turning 29 (“it’s so over!”), which turned out to indicate an ambient anxiety about aging, a sense that we’re getting too old to still not know who we are and what we want.
At the party, I run into an old acquaintance and his girlfriend of four years, who works in Democratic politics. They are a pleasant and up-to-date couple who are appropriately embarrassed by how high-income their D.C. neighborhood is. At some point, as we discuss our late twenties, I mention wanting to have kids one day. His girlfriend’s eyes light up. “You do?!” she asks as she turns to me. “How many? Boys or girls?” Then her boyfriend chimes in. “You want kids?” He’s genuinely surprised; he expected better from me. He reminds me how bad the world, the country, is. I think back to when he and his girlfriend first started dating, in the Biden era, and the year-long situationship that preceded their lukewarm relationship, and wonder what he’s so afraid of.
While nearly all my conservative friends are single, even though they claim to want to get married young, many of my left-leaning or liberal friends are in long-term relationships, but say that they don’t want to get married or have kids any time soon. The young liberal women I know, based on the desires they express and their sometimes-contrary actions, seem to want an open but committed relationship; they want someone enthusiastically sex-positive but not a playboy; a man who reads but only the right things, and who isn’t disagreeable or prone to overexplaining what interests him; they want casual, liberated sex with regulated communication, rules and a sense of mutual obligation. They often prioritize men who have learned the right political and romantic lines and have an emotional register that mirrors their female friendships, but lack the seriousness or sense of purpose they are looking for in their relationships.
I notice another old acquaintance at the party. Years ago he survived a life-threatening accident; his girlfriend stood by him, through the complications and disability. I’d visit him between surgeries, and he told me once, still at that time facing death, that he had decided he was going to marry her. She had taken him to the hospital, been there for the appointments, held his hands and his head, stood by him on death’s doorstep. She had proved she was the one. As he told me this, I thought that I caught a glimpse of something women long to see: real, fixed love in a man’s eyes. It reminded me of the “state of enchantment” W. H. Auden called “certainty.” His near-death encounter had made freedom seem meaningless in the face of one real thing.
I wonder now if I imagined it: if my own romantic indecisiveness made me vicariously relieved by his bravery. Once he recovered, I asked him excitedly when he planned to propose. He became quiet. I felt like I was suddenly talking to a different person. His wounds were still healing; the scars were hard to look at. But more frightening was the look on his face when I asked him about that previous moment of clarity. I hoped he might be the first among my friends, all in their mid-to-late twenties, to make a lasting commitment. It seemed to me that he had made up his mind about her weeks before, somewhere between life and death. But in the light of life, with fifty years still ahead, he faltered.
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As with the right-wing men, online dating discourse bleeds into my single female friends’ accounts of their experiences: they tell me, in insights learned from short-form videos on TikTok, that men are so dangerous that it’s safer to encounter a wild grizzly in the forest rather than a man, but also that it’s both laudable and empowering to have a one-night stand with a near stranger (who is also, of course, a man). Asked once by a friend about the bear-versus-man dilemma, I answered, not knowing the political context of the question, “I think I’d rather encounter a man. You can reason with a human being, right?” My answer was the wrong one.
After the party, I speak to Alexis,* another friend, about a new guy she’s seeing. She’s a leftist and lives in a suburb. She’s in her mid-twenties, and has been dating for a few years since college. After several dead-end romantic experiences, she’s become uneasy with casual sex. On a date recently, she tried to explain to a left-wing young man why she wanted to wait a few weeks before having sex, but struggled for a moral vocabulary that didn’t seem retrograde, prudish or weird. She recounts the end of the date to me: “So I told him, ‘I don’t want to jump right into sex anymore, honestly. It’s so weird. It’s like, Hey, I just met you; now choke me out and fuck me.’”
She pauses as she tells me this, and laughs. “Like, that’s insane if you think about it! So that’s what I told him. And then he said, ‘No, no, I completely understand.’
“But I don’t think he did. I just told him, ‘I’m far beyond this idea of fucking just because you can, just because you’re attracted to this person and they’re alone with you in your house.’” Alexis grows more emphatic, as if proving the point to me as she recounts this conversation. “That doesn’t mean you have to, right?!” She pauses; she seems to be looking for some broader justification that might license, or contextualize, her desire for more emotional intimacy, familiarity and safety before having sex. “I told him, ‘Look, we’re bringing back yearning.’”
Something about the phrase sounds familiar. I look it up later, and it’s popular among young women who watch shows like Bridgerton, plots that have all the courtesy and flattery of traditional courtship with little of the stifling authority or shame. It seems that women who have observed, and accepted, that sex must precede emotional attachment in dating use the concept of “yearning” to barter for any sign of emotional life from their lovers at all.
She goes on. “I later sent him this famous essay I had read, by Silvia Federici, about how sex and sexuality are a form of labor for women. He asked me to explain what it meant to me. I told him, exasperated, ‘Look, it’s structural, not personal!’”
I think of the notion of boysobriety—celibacy, in other words, rebranded with an infantilizing TikTok neologism. The desire to sober up from love and sex is pervasive among the first generation (mine) to fully combine the mores of free love with the more, more, more impulse of dating-app culture. Drowning in opportunities but dying for dignity, people my age and younger don’t want a relationship they can DoorDash. The turn to “trad” dating norms, Marxist-feminist theories and TikTok lifestyle advice reflects the desperation for a social or moral framework that gives them the permission and the confidence to say, without feeling too conspicuous or weird, “I’ve had enough.”
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As the daughter of a mother who immigrated from a theocracy and a grandmother who was married at thirteen, I know too much about the risks of unthinking deference to old mores; but as a member of the dating-app generation who grew up around mostly divorced older people, I also know about the shortcomings of the technologies that are taking their place. I was fourteen when Tinder launched in 2012; at first, it seemed to us like a welcome escape from the terror of determining who did or didn’t like you at school. The first time anyone ever asked me to be his “girlfriend,” in middle school, it was over Facebook Messenger.
The summer before college, I’d match with people I had known in high school who only felt confident expressing mutual interest on a digital interface. I used to participate in the charade of posting Instagram stories I hoped one specific person might see, even when I hardly used social media at all. Meanwhile, I consumed the typical slate of TV shows featuring female antiheroes. Trying to square my dating preferences (liking men) with the received wisdom that men were largely bad (hating men), I believed it was necessary to be derisive to my male peers to win their affection and prove I was no conventional woman desperate for a relationship (it didn’t work). By the time I got to college, having learned that men were “porn-obsessed pigs,” the common wisdom was that hookup culture was a necessary, unavoidable evil out of which, if you were lucky, a hard-won and minimally vulnerable emotional connection might sprout.
When I was 22, I spent my first summer out of college in COVID lockdown and tried Hinge for one month. In the winter of 2020, the most appalling tendencies of the dating environment started to become entrenched; one could look at hundreds of faces every day while hardly meeting anyone in real life. While scanning the thinly presented options on the app, one could swipe over to yet another app (say, Instagram or Twitter) and watch short-form videos or read tweets about “finance guys” and “chads,” “cheaters” and “liars,” “girlbosses” and “gold diggers,” “OnlyFans girls” and “porn addicts.” My entire dating world in 2020, like so many others, became a two-by-four-inch iPhone screen; all my romantic possibilities and fears could be conjured within it.
I have survived the same “nightmare” scenarios young men on Twitter and young women on TikTok bemoan and attribute to their respective political and cultural villains. I met a boyfriend on a dating app and we dated for years without getting married; depending on the eye of the beholder, in our relationship I was a “bad feminist” countless times and he was a “sucker.” If I had told a group chat of friends that this boyfriend told me he loved me after only a few months, they might have warned me that he was a malicious “love bomber,” and to doubt his intentions.
I sympathize with the desire to distance oneself from the romantic and physical humiliations of hookup culture, which are variously—and sloppily—attributed to heterosexuality, to men as a whole, to women as a whole, to patriarchy or to the moral degeneracy of the age. The moment I learned that it wasn’t romantic suicide to reject the sexual bidding war that is the dating market, I opted out. I began to “date to marry,” not because I wanted to be married in my early twenties (I didn’t), but because I felt I had to draw a hard line against the pervasive heterosexual standard of situationships, where no one was at the wheel. Despite being raised an atheist, I, like many in my age group in recent years, took up some hard-line rules from Christian sexual ethics, which, compared to the high-strung dating discourse, seemed to offer a less baroque, if sometimes still too crude, filter for what I really wanted from love.
At 27, I have higher hopes for love than I did at fourteen, or 22. Still, like many my age, I know I have a larger and more specific set of parameters for romance than any of my ancestors. Many of the young people I’ve met and spoken to on right and left, myself included to a great degree, want to find someone who is gorgeous, can hold court on philosophy and history, is financially stable, sensitive and surprising. Then they must have something even greater than the sum of all these parts, that certain je ne sais quoi that accords with our intuition, while possessing the superficial qualities that flatter our rational judgment and make sense to the audiences that govern our social media-addled minds.
Even the young conservative men are more modern than they often acknowledge: notwithstanding their sometimes dramatic rejections of it, they have been shaped by dating-app culture, and they also build their ideal woman from a formidable checklist. They tell me they want a traditional woman who is financially independent, a real intellectual—and certainly not a “normie”—whose independent ideas serendipitously align with the cacophony of anonymous guys they follow on X. While some blame “women with master’s degrees” for the fertility crisis, most of the right-leaning young men I’ve spoken to want a marriage filled with conversation, and a woman broad-minded enough to understand and engage with their countercultural ideas. (That may be why women with master’s degrees are doing quite well, statistically, in coupling off.)
The checklists are the flip side of the online discourse’s emphasis on shame-inducing categories and judgments, from “fuckboy” to “simp,” from “ran-through woman” to “girlboss”—judgments that may surprise those who had accepted our post-normative dating environment at face value. It transcends the political divide; older New Right influencers have told me that they do not understand the fixation of younger men on sexual history or “body count,” while at the same time I hear from teenage family friends who lean left that it’s considered life-ending to date someone for more than three years without getting married, and that one is romantically ruined after sleeping with someone or acquiring, in the dehumanizing digital parlance, their “first body.” The result is that it feels harder than ever not to mess up in a myriad of hyper-specific and unpredictable ways, all of which heighten the risks of vulnerability and make its rewards harder to imagine.
But there is a reason that these seemingly arbitrary standards hold such appeal. The new technologies, we’re told, give us more freedom and choice, and they do. Yet they also undermine the moral and practical heuristics we need to know how to make a good choice. In the absence of norms or models, however imperfect, we turn each relationship into an elaborate contract dispute. Without a clear path or end goal we inspect little red flags along the road as signals for whether to end things, searching for decisive forks in a missing trail. Amid the collapse of authority on sex and gender, and in this radical freedom, we are all forced to become existentialists in dating, in blue-bubbled messages, on our endless social media feeds and in strained conversations: What do you want? Where are we going? What are we?
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Our models of love, and our aspirations for who we will marry or be with forever, will always be related to our ideas of the good life, which is why the “sensitive young men” on the right and the feminist young women on the left aren’t entirely wrong to connect their romantic lives to their political ideals. There is no subject more important to think deeply about, to be honest about. Love matters so much that neither the left-wing women nor the right-wing men who blame each other for their romantic dissatisfaction can stop talking and thinking about each other. No matter how flooded we are with horror stories and recommendations to give up, we still care about finding love. But instead of clarifying standards, raising our aspirations or giving us expectations of dignity in love, the online discourse has built upon decades of gender wars to leave Gen Zers largely alien to each other, afraid and alone.
I am unimpressed with the self-indulgence of the heteropessimists, both male and female. I find first-world heteropessimism to be an insult, if nothing else, to myself and to the women who came before me and who did not have the freedoms that I do. Only a handful of women in the countless generations of my family, originally from Iran, had the opportunity to be with a man they freely, genuinely loved. And yet women a generation or two older, born and raised in the United States, are asking young women like me: “Have you tried being gay?”
But heteropessimism is also, as Seresin noted, an “anesthetic.” Like so much of the gender discourse, it holds out the prospect of protection from uncertainty and risk but results instead in a retreat from our own judgment and agency—as well as, in some cases, from our own desires. These were already temptations for those of us in our twenties, whose pessimism about relationships has been formed less by disappointing romantic experience than by abstract villains. As we scroll through the articles and posts of the misandrists and the misogynists, it is easy to harden our hearts against the possibility of any non-mercenary relation between the sexes at all. Yet I doubt I am speaking only for myself when I say that the stories on my phone have never prevented my disappointments in love, nor predicted my best experiences.
Millennia of verses, songs, sonnets, novels, films and countless more unrecorded bonds have been born out of heterosexual love, as has human life itself. There must be some realistic and attainable way to live with, and love, the people to whom we are actually attracted.
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Late last May, after I had already begun working on this essay, I found myself at a dinner party in midtown Manhattan, hosted by a wealthy bachelor. Entrepreneurs, physicists, venture capitalists, a wealth manager, a tech executive, a life coach and (somehow) I had gathered in the private room of an old-school steakhouse to discuss a topic announced just before: the fertility crisis.
We sat in a burgundy room, surrounded by antique picture frames and curtains; to my right was a bewildered Oxbridge academic, only a day here in our strange country where unmarried Americans convene fertility-crisis backroom dinners, and to my left a young portfolio manager at a prestigious venture-capital firm. All but two guests were in their late thirties and forties, and twelve out of fifteen were men. They represented an impressive and varied range of careers; several of them matched the generic description of what eligible women would hope for in a marriageable partner.
I sat directly across from the host in the middle of a long table. He had gathered us for no small reason, for no small talk: we were told as the wine was poured that this decline in births was threatening Western civilization. We had received four dire charts to review in our emails. The United States’s population lagged behind replacement in each of them; there was a labor-force and pension crisis ahead. Throughout dinner, various causes of the decline all centered on a single culprit: women. “It’s simply that the women don’t want to get married. They don’t want to have kids.”
“All around the world, the statistics show that when women are educated, they have fewer children.” Another chimed in, “And, when they entered the academy, they made it more feminine, they made it woke and intellectually dishonest.” And another general cause: “Women are too left-wing now. The statistics show it. They hate men.”
Finally an unmarried woman in her forties spoke up. I had been glancing at her throughout the conversation, sensing an unspoken recognition that she was the proxy for the overeducated “picky” woman the men at the table were most contemptuous of. She, like her peers, said more or less what I expected her to say: “I couldn’t find an emotionally mature, considerate and thoughtful man until recently. The men aren’t marriageable, and women don’t need to settle anymore.”
I asked her what the faults of the previous candidates were. She said she had wanted someone emotionally available, thoughtful, sensitive and feminist, and had found none. The remark was pointed—the professional men around the table, her similarly aged peers, were clearly not that. They were ambitious and high-earning, they were prestigiously educated, they were intelligent; but none of them, over the course of the evening, came across as particularly sensitive, and certainly not feminist.
I asked her if it seemed likely that the same man who was ambitious enough to break into a high-earning career would also be sensitive and given to long emotional talks. She pleaded with me, like an elder sister, that I didn’t need to settle, that I could find such a man if I waited long enough. Her “partner” was an investment banker who was sensitive, present, thoughtful and doting. He was also in his fifties and previously married. I immediately felt frightened, not reassured. I didn’t want to wait on the off chance that I might encounter some extraordinary hybrid of masculine and feminine qualities in twenty or thirty years. The 2040s are far away; I wanted a husband much sooner than that.
The debate between the sole feminist and the chorus of men’s apologists carried on as I fretted about what an ideal man even might be. I saw my own potential future in each of these anxious talkers, with more accusations than answers about love. At a certain point I interrupted and asked, “General causes aside, what about ourselves? How many people here are married or in a relationship?”
Only four hands raised tentatively, out of fifteen. “Why?” I asked.
The table, particularly the jury of men, was quiet for the first time all evening. There were no ready-made lines from social media to cite, and for the women, no op-ed screeds against male emotional incompetence or cruelty. The most virulent anti-feminist discussant, who firmly believed coeducational institutions were to blame for women’s uppity disinterest in men, averted his gaze.
The host, a successful entrepreneur in his forties, broke the silence with jovial grace: “I’ll speak only for myself: personal deficiencies.”
I’m not surprised that most of my dinner companions had defaulted to systemic, external causes of the birth decline; those phantasms of child-despising girlbosses and insensitive male chauvinists are simpler villains than one’s own complicated mistakes, one’s own cowardice or vanity, one’s own halting uncertainty about when to ask for more or settle for what’s given, when to try once again or give in to despair.
Those who have inadequate and disappointing experience in particulars tend to love general theories. This dinner, convened to save Western civilization, was little more than what civilizations are ever made of—men and women striving to be greater than they are. The more I hear complaints from single men and women, whether adolescents or adults, right or left, I think of St. Augustine: “‘Bad times! Hard times!’: People say this. Let us live good lives, and the times are good. We make our times; such as we are, such are the times.”
Art credit: Claire Partington, Daphne and Apollo, 2024. Glazed earthenware and mixed media. 101 × 30 × 30 cm. © Claire Partington. Courtesy of the artist and Winston Wächter Fine Art.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.