Looking at a generation that got handed screens instead of porches.
I am seeing the headlines about young people not dating and I keep noticing that most of the people writing them sound surprised. As if this came out of nowhere. As if a generation raised entirely inside a screen somehow failed to develop the instincts that only come from being outside one.
I am not surprised. And I do not blame them.
The numbers are real. A survey from the Survey Center on American Life found that only about half of Gen Z entered adulthood having had any romantic relationship at all. Compare that to three quarters of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers who had a boyfriend or girlfriend as teenagers. Nearly half of young men today have no relationship experience from their teen years — double the rate of older generations. And it is not just dating. They are socializing less. Attending fewer things. Spending less time in unstructured spaces with other people. A generation retreating from the friction of real human contact at exactly the age when that friction does its most important work.
Here is what I know about friction. It is not comfortable. It was not comfortable when I was young either. Asking someone out when you did not know what the answer would be. Sitting across from another person and not knowing what to say next. Getting your feelings hurt and having to get up the next day and try again. Nobody enjoyed that part. But we did it because it was simply what you did. It was the texture of being alive among other people.
That texture is what builds you. The awkward conversation teaches you how to have the next one. The rejection teaches you that you survive it. The relationship that doesn’t work out teaches you something about yourself that no amount of scrolling ever will. You come out the other side with calluses in the right places. Tougher in a way that makes you more capable, not less feeling.
What did we hand this generation instead. A phone at twelve. A feed curated to show them the polished surface of everyone else’s life. An algorithm that learned what kept them looking and optimized relentlessly for it. Social media that made them perform their identity for an audience before they had any idea who they actually were. Dating apps that turned other human beings into a stack of cards to swipe through — all the appearance of options, none of the practice of showing up.
We did not give them less. We gave them more — more stimulation, more connection on paper, more access to more people than any generation in history. And somehow they ended up with less. Less practice at being present. Less tolerance for the discomfort that intimacy requires. Less confidence that they have anything worth offering to another person face to face.
The researchers at NYU put it plainly. Without the tough conversations and negotiations that early relationships require, young people are showing up to adult life without the ground rules for human interaction. Not just romantic interaction. All of it. How to navigate disagreement. How to read a room. How to want something from another person and ask for it honestly.
One in three adults in their twenties today may never marry. That is not a dating statistic. That is a loneliness forecast. And loneliness at that scale does not stay private. It shows up in workplaces, in communities, in the way a society holds together or quietly comes apart.
I am not writing this to judge them. I have sat with young people and seen what they are carrying and it is not nothing. They inherited a world mid-collapse on several fronts at once and were handed a device to look at it through instead of tools to navigate it with. That is not a character failure. That is a design failure. Ours, not theirs.
What I want to say to them — and to anyone who loves one of them — is that the thing they are missing is not complicated to name even if it is hard to find. It is practice. Plain unpolished practice at being in the room with another person without a screen between you. At saying the awkward thing. At staying when it gets uncomfortable instead of swiping to the next option. At being known by someone who has seen the unpolished version and stayed anyway.
That is what a relationship teaches you. That is what we used to get for free just by growing up in neighborhoods where kids ran loose until the streetlights came on.
We took the porches away. We took the unstructured afternoons. We took the boredom that forced people to turn to each other. And then we handed them a phone and wondered why they forgot how to reach out.
They did not forget. They never got the chance to learn.
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“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
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