Fathering a son means thinking about the advice you’re going to give him as he gets bigger. If you’re like me, it’s not something you ever really planned for ahead of time. Marriage and family were, for most of my 20s, not something I was seriously considering, and then it happened when I least expected it.
Relationships come to mind as one of the minefields your kid is going to need help navigating. And if you’re like me, you had to figure stuff out on your own. It’s strange to look back on the weird jungle of dating, and writing about it makes you feel like a “boomer” no matter what. So I asked a few friends what it’s like as a male member of Gen Z. In a nutshell, they said that the cost-benefit of approaching women just doesn’t make sense in many cases. There’s a perceived lack of seriousness and sincerity. That is to say, the Zoomer guys I spoke with feel like a lot of females in their generational cohort aren’t really interested in a long-term relationship or have unreasonable standards, such as staunch political preferences. “Don’t swipe if you vote Republican” sort of thing. You’re also liable to be called a weirdo for engaging in behavior that was until recently considered normal or becoming an object of ridicule online, the way one sad soul did after he made a move on the only girl to attend a “hackathon.”
This poor guy thought he was being cute by slipping a handwritten Post-it note to the lone female at a nerdy conference. What he wrote was benign and frankly sweet:
Hey! I think you’re REALLY cute… and I LOVE those 2 braids in the back of your hair. Let me take you out sometime.. I’d love a lesson from you on how to hack. LOL.
Is it kiddish? Yes. It reads like something a middle schooler might tuck under his crush’s desk. That’s precisely why it’s endearing. But for shooting his shot, our anonymous Romeo had his bones reduced to fodder for the content mill. A friend of the girl he made a move on tweeted a picture of his little love letter just to humiliate him.
It’s probably still counterintuitive to think about our society as sexless, given what looks to be the hypersexualization of, well, everything. But this has been the case for a while now, paradoxically. As I wrote in 2021: “The march of sexual liberation that railed against patriarchy . . . produced a generation of anti-male sexual puritans and the most sexless society ever.”
There are several different factors at play here. In the era of OnlyFans, when everything becomes sexualized, sex—and intimacy—is pretty meaningless. Then there are shrinking social circles, the isolation brought on by the pandemic, changes in social interactions (mostly virtual rather than face to face), and differences in developmental milestones between generations.
Think of coming-of-age movies like American Pie. Most people remember it for the infamous pastry scene. But it’s actually a very wholesome film in the end about guys growing up and the milestones involved with that, like the terrifying ordeal of love falling in love for the first time and allowing yourself to be vulnerable with someone else as a boy becoming a man and, yes, sex (For social conservatives who might object, I guess it comes down to asking yourself whether you want to live in a world where men and women enjoy each other’s company or don’t).
Could American Pie be made today? Would it resonate with as many young people now as it did in 1999? As
noted, Millennials are “a bridge generation between the old ways and the new, between pay phones and smartphones, between phonebooks and Facebook.”“Perhaps it’s my Millennial chauvinism,” he added, “but I think we’re the only generation who can understand the scale of the loss.”
He’s right, and it’s especially true for dating.
Millennial men got to grow up doing things the “old-fashioned way” and were also thrust headfirst into apps like Tinder, which was released in 2012. Tinder wasn’t the first service of its kind, but I think the “swipe” aspect of it was unique in that it introduced frivolity and velocity to the process of meeting someone in a way that only social media and smartphones could. At least people actually used it to connect with others at first. Only about half of those on the app today say they’re interested in meeting offline at all. Tinder eventually became another instrument for doomscrolling—a mere means of distraction. It turned into another social media app that enables anti-social behavior as a coping mechanism, ironically, for feeling lonely and dissatisfied.
There are obvious downsides to the kind of culture that developed around apps such as Tinder, one that promoted, let’s say, loosened mores, but, again, at least people were going on dates, and at least, in the case of Millennial men, we got to do it all before every move you made had a good chance of becoming someone’s content. In contrast, Zoomers are having less sex, with fewer partners, than previous generations—and it’s not because they’ve discovered chastity. You can see this reflected in other kinds of survey data.
Today, 53 percent of single men say that they’re afraid of being called “creepy” while interacting with women, so they’re less likely to try at all, according to one study. That tracks with a Pew Research Center Valentine’s Day survey from 2023 that found 63 percent of men under 30 describing themselves as single. In the former study, 82 percent of women also said they experience creepy behavior “sometimes,” “often,” or “constantly.”
Creepy behavior, like getting a note from a guy at a hackathon?
It is important to be able to make mistakes, say dumb things, use bad pickup lines, and shoot your shot because, for men, it is a way of building confidence and learning how to deal with rejection healthily. Yes, she could let you down brutally, and maybe the people around would see that. Oh well, have another drink. Or maybe she’ll let you down softly, even pay you a compliment for the gallant effort, and with that, you would feel encouraged to try again until you get lucky.
These things still happen—it’s not “gone,” obviously. But Millennials were, it seems, the last generation to be able to do all this without having to worry about the humiliation force multiplier that viral public shame on social media is now or without having to fear being portrayed as a creep in the same way. That also contributes to the anti-social resentment toward women that has become a defining characteristic of some parts of the right and the popularity of people who capitalize on that resentment, like Andrew Tate.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. I think some of these dynamics are changing. The woman who shamed the guy at the hacker event received a tremendous amount of backlash, and rightly so. What she did was meanspirited and cruel. An older Zoomer also told me that once he hit a certain age, he stopped caring about—and actively avoiding—the kind of girl who would behave this way. It might even be a problem that solves itself. “Dating Darwinism,” a friend called it.
has been writing about how, after COVID, after the internet, the desire for real-life interactions has been making a comeback. People want real connections again. I wouldn’t be surprised if that also applies to dating and romance. Maybe we’ll even get another American Pie.
I'm grateful for your singular voice, Pedro. I for one welcome more fathering wisdom like this in the future.
Caught a bunch of little typos after hitting publish because I was trying to get this one out ASAP. I need an intern to proof me!