The fundamental reality is young people do not have places to hang out anymore.
Bars? Old people.
State/County fair? Old people and tots.
Restaurant? Old people and too expensive.
School? Options are limited and once you graduate it's over.
On the street? Most people don't want to be bothered, if you don't live in a city there usually isn't anyone in sight anyway.
Church? Mostly old people, on the off chance you find someone it's often seen as inappropriate.
Coffee shop? People don't want to be bothered or are just there to pick up and leave.
Dance? Literally where.
If you're retired the dating pool is bottomless. If you're middle aged it's still quite deep. If you're young, it's a series of very thin puddles dispersed in hidden places.
Relationships can't form without places for both sexes to mingle. Even when I was in college the parties that older folks speak about did not exist. It was always low key and usually the women were few in number and absolutely never talked to the men, even at frat parties. This is the result of crazy old bitches with oddly shaped glasses and liberal-puritan beliefs expelling teenagers for drinking at college. Even frat hazing which often isn't violent or dangerous has been made into a boogeyman.
It is not a result of online dating either. Most of Gen Z wants to date in person, but does not know where to do it. Usually people meet the opposite sex through mutual friends, but since COVID and even the largely separate movement to solitary work-focused individualist lifestyles the average person does not have many friends.
I myself know many Gen Z men who have maybe 10 friends at most, none of whom are particularly close and all of whom are guys.
You can kick and scream and cry incel but the fact of the matter is statistically you're probably in a weird unfulfilling relationship if you're in one at all, and will die childless and alone unless the wind changes direction.
Even Gen X has this problem. Many of my coworkers are only acquaintances to me and each other. They have no fraternal affection and if they lose their jobs they will never talk again except to solicit career advancement. They barely tolerate each other, and only go out for drinks because they often have nothing to go home to.
This is not an individual failure. We're at the point where being in a relationship is a result of the circumstances of your birth and very rarely how good you are at socializing. If you were born in a white neighborhood in the last 30 years chances are you had limited social interaction in your late teens, right when your sexuality was peaking.
If you're employed and middle class and single after college, you're basically fucked because there's nowhere to talk to people anymore. That fucking died and anyone who doesn't know this is showing their age.
I am noticing that for the first time in modern history we have actively normalized and encouraged being childless and single in your 40s.
would. Drizzle Drizzle.
