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Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage | Fewer young people are getting into relationships.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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I wonder how much of it is silent undiagnosed depression. Lack of desire for dating from such depression?
Life sucks, the future looks really bleak for the young, billionaire exploiters are taking over, etc, etc. What are their prospects, if they can't become wealthy being their own boss as a social media influencer? Work a 9-5 till death to make a billionaire rich?
I dont know at all, just speculating if this could be part of it.
I think there's a few factors at play here
Yes, depression is a big one
There's also a lack of places to go and things to do for young people. Some parents are weird about their kids going anywhere these days, and no one really wants to bring their boyfriend/girlfriend over to hang out with their parents.
And even if you don't have obnoxious helicopter parents, where do you go? Malls are dying, restaurants and movies are expensive, and if you go hang out in a park some Karen will call the police on you.
Neighborhoods aren't walkable, public transit is broken, and cars are unaffordable so even if you find somewhere to go on a date, how do you get there?
And at least in heterosexual dating, we've also had a bit of a cultural shift that might throw things off. A lot of things that used to be accepted we now rightly understand are problematic, I think a lot of men and boys are hesitant to make the first move now because we don't want to be seen as creeps, but at the same time I think most girls still kind of expect the guys to make the first move, and while a lot of us are a bit more enlightened and could be cool with that (my wife of 5 years made the first move, she'd probably still be waiting if she left it to me) there's still plenty of guys with toxic fragile masculinity out there who could react poorly to a girl making the first move and I don't blame girls for not wanting to take on that risk (for the record, I also choose the bear)
So the dynamics have shifted a bit, and I don't think we've really figured out how things are supposed to work yet, and honestly things probably need to shift a whole hell of a lot more before things can normalize there and people can just feel comfortable asking other people out on dates without worrying about it being weird.
And in a similar vein, it's also I think become a lot more normal to just have platonic friends of the opposite gender. Personally some of my best friends are women who have no desire to date or fuck.
And people are also a lot more willing to have some sort of casual sex, friends with benefits, hookup culture, etc.
So there's probably a lot of physical and emotional needs that are now being met outside of the context of a romantic relationship when in the past that was pretty much the only way to meet them.
I also feel like a lot of parenting strategies stemmed from preventing teenagers from making mistakes as they tried to assert independence, which is throwing a lot of parents for a loop when kids choose to stay at home and not engage with their peers.
The teenage years are supposed to be the years where people learn how to be an independent adult and society has robbed them from the ability to learn.
gen alpha, having not really pushed any boundaries while living with their parents, are gonna get fuckin wild in college
In my time we would be hetero or gay, and you'd better not be gay! So choice was easy, even if wrong. Now you have to choose/understand what you are and what you want. Isn't it possible that they just become blocked in their decision making process?
What? Either, you are attracted to men, women, both, no one, or any gender presentation, more or less. It's not a choice at all unless you are bi/pan. Pretty easy to make a choice since there isn't much of one to make.
I will grant that I did choose hetero, well what I perceived as hetero at the time relationships due to stigma. Being pan I had that choice. But I also grew out of giving a damn what anyone thought and just dated whomever I felt like in my early twenties.
It's not a choice of who to like, you like who you like for various reasons and just go for it, or limit your choices to be seen as normal and still pretty much just go for it minus the other parties you are interested in.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. Anyone over the age of 25 or so didn't have everything so blatantly out in the open with the internet as much as they do. When I was a kid we'd look up to adults as people that actually knew what the fuck was going on. Of course, later on in life you realize that nobody knows what the fuck is going on. But people that are growing up now see it for what it is when they're still in middle-school and highschool. They're seeing how fucked everything is before they even have a chance to be optimistic. The illusion of stability isn't just broken, it's missing entirely.
Almost 30 here I realized life the universe and everything was a chaotic mess held together by tacit agreement with the social contract in highschool. I expect most high schoolers who pay attention realize this. Middle school is where I'd say there might still be reverence for adults.