A Look Inside Gen Z’s Dating Dumpster Fire
Why modern dating has become defined by casual sex, ambiguity, and the “situationship”
My parents met in college when my dad, then president of the flying club, asked my mom if she wanted to go for a flight. That was the whole move. No mutual friend was deployed to test the waters, nobody reviewed her recent social-media activity, and no one asked a roommate whether she had perhaps mentioned him favorably three weeks earlier. He liked her, so he asked. And in doing so he accepted the catastrophic possibility that she might say no. I owe my existence to what looks, from today’s vantage point, like astonishing risk tolerance.
Cornell has taught me many things, and given its price tag, that is reassuring. One unexpected lesson, however, has been in vocabulary. My parents used words like “date,” “ask out,” and “relationship.” Generation Z has “getting with,” “having a thing,” “talking,” and, most vitally, “situationship”: a term for those who behave like a couple while maintaining that no such couple exists. They may have sex regularly, share a bed multiple nights per week, text constantly, and become visibly upset when somebody else enters the picture, yet asking the question “are you two dating?” feels quite rude. Dinner is serious; sex, apparently, is not.
When I describe this world to adults of my parents’ generation, they are often amused, appalled, or some combination of both. And I understand why. Tell somebody who attended college in the eighties that two people who have had sex a dozen times will not go out to dinner because it might feel “too date-y,” and it sounds like a joke. The vocabulary is ludicrous and the rituals even more so. Spend enough time inside this world, however, and you are slowly crushed by the devastating sadness you observe.
You watch someone stare at their phone for an hour because the person they have slept beside for three months has become distant without explanation. Your friend claims he does not care about the girl he has been “talking to” because admitting otherwise would surrender too much leverage. A girl explains that asking the guy she sleeps with whether he actually wants to date her might scare him off. They accumulate memories, resentment, and heartbreak while resisting the one thing that might make any of it mean something: a label.
The question required is quite simple: what are we doing here? It has become dangerous, though, because asking requires vulnerability. A man who asks a woman on a date tips his hand. He risks rejection and embarrassment. He risks discovering that his affection was never reciprocated. These are non-zero costs, but they are exactly what make love so special. A relationship means something because it survives uncertainty. A marriage means something because two people bind their futures together with no guarantee that life will be easy, healthy, or prosperous. The hardships of love are inseparable from its beauty.
There is another fact modern dating discourse seems afraid to address. I recently discovered, at great social cost, that suggesting men and women are different is highly controversial. Yet internalizing that difference is vital to understanding why these perverse circumstances have emerged. Men and women evolved under different reproductive pressures and thus tend not to approach sex the same way. Men faced stronger incentives to pursue additional reproductive opportunities; women faced stronger incentives to be selective about the men with whom they reproduced. Contraception gave us extraordinary control over that reproduction without erasing the psychology shaped long before such control existed. The sexual revolution nevertheless proceeded as though women could adopt the sexual habits historically associated with promiscuous men and experience the same consequences, or lack thereof. Enter the situationship.
At its core, a situationship is an untenable bargain. He wants the privileges of commitment without its duties. She accepts less than she wants out of fear that demanding more will leave her with nothing. He receives sex, affection, and companionship while remaining free of responsibility. When she offers this arrangement without demanding commitment, he has little incentive to volunteer for the obligations that traditionally accompanied such access. So he doesn’t. She accepts ambiguity, waits for signs, analyzes small changes in his behavior, and tells herself that her patience will eventually become a relationship. He calls it casual because commitment would require something of him. She calls it casual because admitting that she wants more would force her to confront how little she is now receiving.
This arrangement did not emerge without cause. For decades, women were encouraged to throw sexual selectivity to the wind. Then they watched men press for sex, evade commitment, and become mysteriously busy after receiving what they wanted. Men have watched women maintain options, use them when convenient, and demonstrate little interest in building something real. Both have had enough bad experiences to make distrust reasonable. The tragedy is that this distrust yields the very behavior it seeks to prevent. A woman expects a man to disappear, so she performs indifference. A man expects a woman to have alternatives, so he keeps alternatives of his own. Each then views the other’s evasiveness as proof that their original suspicion was correct.
Promiscuity pours fuel on that fire. It teaches men to pursue sexual access without responsibility, women to offer intimacy without standards, and both sexes to treat one another as discardable. Men are told that sexual conquest proves virility, status, confidence, and charm. It proves none of those things. A man who cannot govern his sexual appetite has demonstrated that he is easy to manipulate. And after years of treating women as interchangeable, he meets one worthy of marriage and asks her to believe fidelity has suddenly become his governing principle. He may mean every word, but she has good reason not to take them at face value.
Women are taught a similar lesson. They are told that selectivity is prudish and casual sex liberating. For many young women, promiscuity has become a bandage for a sense of self-worth damaged by the modern world. A woman who does not believe she deserves love will settle for being desired, because desire arrives quickly and asks nothing of the man offering it. For a few hours, she feels chosen. Then he leaves and makes clear that, in fact, she was never special at all. The wound nevertheless remains, so she seeks the same medicine over and over again. A woman who repeatedly gave intimacy to men who offered little in return should expect a serious man to wonder why he is now being asked for exclusivity, provision, and a home when others received access for far less.
The modern response is to suggest that questioning promiscuity is judgmental, as though judgment were some strange defect to eliminate. Judgment is how sane people distinguish husband from fling and wife from passing pleasure, and it requires us to reckon with the choices a future spouse made before we arrive. The research confirms what common sense has always understood. A2024 study found that those with no sexual partners other than their spouse had the lowest divorce risk. That risk climbs steadily with the number of partners, even after adjustment for a broad range of family, religious, personality, and mental-health factors. A2025 cross-national study likewise found that prospective long-term partners were deemed less desirable as their number of sexual partners increased. To no one’s surprise, the habits we practice in our youth do not evaporate the moment we meet somebody worth keeping.
Parents must stop turning a blind eye to this culture, as their children are suffering deeply within it. They must take a more active role in setting the expectations our society has failed to implement.
Teach your sons that collecting women proves nothing about manhood. Teach them to control themselves, to ask a woman out plainly, and to accept rejection without resentment. A son who learns to pursue women without courage or responsibility will become incapable of meaningful relationships.
Teach your daughters that selectivity is vital, promiscuity is damaging, and they are too valuable to give themselves to men who have earned nothing from them. A man who wants access while resenting responsibility has already answered the question of whether he is worth their time. Teach them the unmatched importance of finding a husband who will honor them, while demonstrating how to be the kind of woman worthy of that honor.
My father approached my mother with no assurance that she would say yes and no intermediary to absorb the embarrassment if she did not. He did so anyway, and that small act of courage became my family. Parents should make sure their children understand why.
Photo by Caleb Ekeroth on Unsplash