The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance

After Donald Trump’s reelection, a lot of women were angry: at the result, at what Trump’s return to office could mean for their lives, and at the many people who voted for him—especially the men. In the ensuing days, some of these women began suggesting, half-jokingly or in total earnest, a radical kind of recourse: a sex strike.

Many of them cited South Korea’s 4B movement, in which women responding to what they describe as a damaging patriarchal culture have renounced not only sex with men but also dating, marriage, and childbirth. The idea of an American version drew a good deal of media attention—though not positive attention, for the most part. (“4B Is Not the Winning Strategy to Resist the Patriarchy People Think It Is,” a Time headline read.) It’s true that a 4B-style movement might never take off in the United States. For starters, it’s unclear what such a movement’s aim would be, or how it would effect political change here. (South Korea’s movement hasn’t exactly taken off either.) But a big shift is happening among straight American men and women—a parting of ways that began long before the election. Many people, perhaps women most of all, have been quietly turning away from heterosexual partnership.

As a reporter covering modern dating, I’ve spoken with a lot of men and women who have reluctantly given up the search for love. I believe that people can have rich, fulfilling lives with or without partners; I also know that courtship has never been easy. But research supports the idea that, in recent years, the United States has seen a particularly pronounced crisis of faith in romance. The Pew Research Center, in an analysis of census data, found that as of 2019, 38 percent of adults were unpartnered—that is, not married or living with a partner—compared with 29 percent in 1990. In a survey Pew conducted that same year, half of single adults said they were not seeking dates. When Pew divided that result by gender, it found that 61 percent of single men said they were looking to date or find a relationship while only 38 percent of single women said the same.

In other words, straight partnerships seem to be going out not with a 4B-style bang but with a whimper. And however subtle the shift might seem, it has huge implications for men and women: how they treat each other, whether they’re willing to trust each other, and how they’ll build their futures—together or apart.

Years ago, the business journalist Jon Birger was working at Fortune when he noticed a trend. The men he knew seemed to have no trouble dating; they were all either coupled up or content being bachelors. His female friends and colleagues, meanwhile, “seemed to have everything going for them” but couldn’t find partners, he told me. They shared horror stories about their dates that he could hardly believe. He wanted to know what was going on—so he went looking for answers.

That search resulted in his 2015 book, Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. His main takeaway was that college-educated women were competing for a shrinking number of similarly educated men, and that given this “man deficit,” they were facing a demoralizing dating scene. Starting in the 1970s, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded to men began to drop; more recently, the number of women enrolling in and completing college has surpassed the number of men to a significant extent. Many college-educated women look for partners who feel equal to them in terms of education or career ambitions—and simply can’t find them.

[Read: Why does romance now feel like work?]

But even if these women don’t prioritize dating a man with a degree or a prestigious job, many of the men without those credentials don’t want to date them. In the U.S. and elsewhere, Marcia C. Inhorn, a Yale anthropologist, told me, mainstream cultural tradition has encouraged women to engage in hypergamy: “marrying up to a slightly older man, somebody who’s more career advanced, makes more money.” Men, meanwhile, have tended toward hypogamy, marrying someone younger, less well off, and less academically accomplished. Those norms are still so ingrained that as more women have made advances at school and work, many men have held it against them. That women’s hard-earned achievements disadvantage them romantically is a dark irony.

Men are feeling penalized too. Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life, talked with young men while reporting his forthcoming book, Uncoupled, on the U.S. gender divide. Many discussed watching the women around them flourish, while the men themselves floundered. “If you look around the classroom,” Cox said, describing these men’s perspectives, “it’s their female peers who are killing it … They’re the leaders of all these clubs. They’re going to college at much higher rates. And then when they get to college, they’re doing much better.” Disparity in educational attainment is not men’s only point of grievance. They experience, for instance, higher rates of addiction and suicide, and report having fewer friends. Many men Cox has spoken with are aware of the ways some of their peers are faltering. At the same time, they’re hearing cultural conversations about “patriarchy and male advantage,” Cox told me, and they feel that those critiques are unfair coming from women they see as succeeding spectacularly.

[Read: Misogyny comes roaring back]

But those formidable young women aren’t having a good time either. Cox has heard from girls in high school whose boyfriends pressured them into sending nude photographs, which he said then got “passed around like trading cards.” He has heard from women who are constantly afraid of being sexually assaulted, or who find that the men they date always seem to expect sex but don’t seem interested in having a conversation. Inhorn similarly noted that in her discussions with women, “there was a lot of grimness, just about the way men treated women … a sort of gender despair.” Cox has found that both women and men believe that their gender disadvantages them. When so many men feel underappreciated and so many women feel mistreated, it creates a vicious cycle of resentment.

Dating complete strangers probably doesn’t help—yet that’s how most people do courtship these days. The anonymity provided by apps precludes accountability: No mutual friends will find out if you acted like a jerk on a date. Birger told me that this can result in even worse behavior from some college-educated men, who might feel emboldened by having numbers on their side. (“Lopsided gender ratios turn some nice guys into monsters,” he wrote in Date-onomics, describing men who promised to text back and never did, who insulted women’s bodies, who cavalierly dumped people they were fond of because they were confident they could find other great options.) And without input from shared acquaintances—useful context for personality quirks, or reasons to empathize with someone else’s views—both men and women might be more likely to make snap judgments after only a date or two, and walk away.

[Read: The people who quit dating]

They might be quicker to judge based on political differences, for example—to see the other person as a proxy for a party or a principle, rather than as a complicated human being worth engaging in debate. A political gap between American women and men already existed before the election: Men have aligned more with the right and women with the left. In November, young voters seemed to diverge even more starkly based on gender. Cox told me he doesn’t believe that this will split a huge number of long-term couples. But he does think it will prevent a lot of new prospects from giving each other a chance.

For those seeking romance, political differences might only worsen what was already a dispiriting state of affairs: In Pew’s 2019 survey, 75 percent of respondents said that finding a date in the past year had been difficult, and 67 percent said that their dating life wasn’t going well. Among the people who said dating had gotten harder in the past 10 years, women were twice as likely as men to say that it now involved more risk—both physical and emotional. In 2022, Pew found that women were 9 percent less likely than men to report positive experiences with online dating.

As American women and men grow more discouraged, it’s not hard to imagine more straight people giving up on sex and dating—motivated not by allegiance to a cause or a group but by exhaustion and self-protection. If that happens, relationships, families, and communities will transform. In some ways, they’ve already started to.

Women, for instance, are freezing their eggs at growing rates. Many commentators have assumed that the trend is the result of women prioritizing their careers, but Inhorn has found that the large majority would have children sooner rather than later if they could; they’re simply struggling to find a co-parent. For her book Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, she spent a decade interviewing more than 150 women undergoing the egg-freezing process, 82 percent of whom were single; of the 18 percent who were partnered, half felt that their relationship wasn’t stable enough for parenthood, and others did not believe that their partner was ready. Almost everyone’s reason for egg freezing, she told me, was “incredible frustration, sadness, anxiety surrounding partnership.” In fact, most women who freeze their eggs never use them, often because they don’t find a partner, Inhorn told me. Not everyone has the resources, the support, or, frankly, the desire for single parenthood.

[Read: Why are women freezing their eggs? Look to the men.]

Even if a withdrawal from relationships isn’t initially meant to be political, it can still become so, Rosanna Hertz, a Wellesley College sociologist and the author of Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice, told me. She refers to many “single by chance” mothers as “reluctant revolutionaries.” They end up on an unconventional life path only because the standard route—finding a heterosexual relationship and starting a family—didn’t work out, despite years of trying. (“They don’t get up one morning,” she told me, “and say, Gee, I’m sitting around in my pajamas. I think I’ll order sperm on the internet.”) But some connect with other women who have run up against similar challenges; then they begin to talk about their experiences publicly. And in this national moment, when pundits are panicking about low fertility and marriage rates, people who quit dating, opt out of parenthood, or have children on their own are making a political choice, whether they intend to or not.

Women should have every right to build a meaningful future that doesn’t require men, and if society is slowly moving to acknowledge that idea, you might call that a silver lining to the gender divide. But however well those alternative paths might work for some individuals, they’re unlikely to heal the societal gender rift. And they won’t change the fact that many straight men and women still want to find love. Cox, the author of Uncoupled, told me that when you survey people, the majority say they would like a long-term, stable relationship. “The sad part for me,” he said, “is that I don’t think there’s a fundamental shift in desire”—only in outcome. The sentiment he hears is “Ideally, this would not be my life,” but finding a partner is “too difficult. It’s too hard. And I’m having a lot of negative experiences that I just don’t want to have.”

When I mentioned that I’d been picturing straight American romance as disappearing with a quiet little whimper, he thought that sounded right. He also offered his own metaphor: a slow, almost-imperceptible shrug.

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