Gen Z's Dating Retreat Is Also an Economy Story

The survey landed with the kind of deadpan that only researchers can manage. The Institute for Family Studies and BYU's Wheatley Institute polled a nationally representative sample of unmarried Americans between 22 and 35 who said they wanted to be in relationships — and led their findings with this: we are in a "depressed dating economy." Not a slump. Not a rough patch. An economy. Depressed.

I want to sit with that phrase for a second, because it's doing more work than it looks like. The same cohort living inside that depressed dating economy is also the one that graduated into the worst job market since the Great Recession, entered a housing market where the median home price now requires an income that most of them will never see, and watched the gig economy reclassify the floor out from under entry-level stability. The 22-to-35-year-olds in that survey aren't just anxious about dates. They're anxious about rent. They are, by any structural measure, the generation that got the bill for forty years of decisions they had no part in making.

That context is not a detour from the dating story. It is the dating story.

Christine Emba — a Washington Post opinion columnist who also writes for the New York Times opinion section and is identified in the Vox conversation as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute — joined Sean Illing on The Gray Area this week to talk through what she's been reporting on Gen Z's retreat from dating and relationships. The conversation is worth your time, but I want to add the layer it doesn't quite reach.

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The body as a balance sheet

Emba opens with looksmaxxing, a subculture that grew out of incel forums and has since developed its own elaborate internal logic. The premise: your physical appearance is the primary variable you can optimize in order to succeed romantically, and possibly in life generally. Practitioners range from "soft maxers" — gym, skincare, normal stuff — to what the community calls "hard maxers," who pursue plastic surgery, deliberate facial bone fracturing (the practice is called "bone smashing" — exactly what it sounds like), pharmaceutical stacks, and in documented cases, serious drug use.

[Editor's note: A prominent looksmaxxing streamer is discussed in the transcript whose name is rendered unclearly in the source material. Pending name verification and confirmation of the specific New York Times profile attribution before publication, we are not naming the individual. The claim that this person reported beginning testosterone supplementation at age 14 comes from Emba's characterization of his livestreams; we are treating this as her reported characterization, not independently verified fact.]

Here's what strikes me about this, coming from the beat I cover: looksmaxxing is what happens when workers fully internalize the logic of the market — and then apply it to their own faces.

I spend a lot of time writing about how capital extracts value from workers, how management consultants teach executives to treat labor as a cost to be minimized rather than people to be sustained. And then I read about young men hitting themselves in the jaw with the goal of inducing micro-fractures that will grow back stronger, because a stronger jaw increases their "value" in the dating market — and the vocabulary is indistinguishable. They talk about "ascending." About "value." About "status markers." About the return on investment of a given physical modification. The language of the shop floor, applied to the body. The body as the only capital you own, and you'd better optimize it or fall behind.

Emba frames this as a symptom of American self-improvement culture on steroids — which it is. But it's also something more specific: it's what self-optimization looks like when you've concluded, correctly or not, that the conventional routes to security are closed. If you can't own property, if the career ladder has been pulled up, if partnership feels economically out of reach — well, you can still work on your jawline. The control is illusory, but the appeal of some control is not.

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Shadow boxing at scale

The gendered divergence Emba describes is, by now, well-documented. Young men moved toward the political center or right in 2024; young women moved sharply left. Online, they're living in separate algorithmic realities that the platforms constructed and profit from.

Her framing of what's happening is precise: "Men are arguing with other men about women who they are not in contact with. Women are talking about men who they're not in contact with." Shadow boxing. Each side grappling with a caricature, because actual contact has gotten scarce. And the platforms are very good at keeping it that way.

This is worth being specific about, because Illing and Emba identify the mechanism — platforms "monetize insecurity" — but leave the business model unnamed. So let me name it.

Tinder's parent company Match Group reported $3.4 billion in revenue in 2023. Bumble, another $900 million. The product these companies sell is not matches. Matches are the feature that keeps you subscribed just long enough to hope. The actual product is the experience of not-quite-matching: the swipe, the near-miss, the "boost" you can purchase to surface your profile, the premium tier that lets you see who already liked you. Dating apps are architecturally designed to make connection feel perpetually one subscription upgrade away. The survey finding that roughly half of unmarried respondents reported "dating efficacy" problems — meaning they didn't feel confident enough to approach someone, read social cues, or recover from rejection — describes people who have been practicing rejection tolerance with a machine specifically built to reject them at scale, and then concluding the problem is themselves.

Meta's advertising model runs on the same logic: your emotional state is the inventory. Fear, envy, and inadequacy generate engagement. Engagement generates ad impressions. The "6-6-6" standard Emba describes — the manosphere shorthand for the supposed baseline of male acceptability (six feet, six figures, six-pack) — circulates on platforms that profit from the insecurity it produces. The content doesn't need to originate with any particular figure to do damage; the algorithm finds what makes you feel worst about yourself and serves you more of it. The origin of that specific formulation is debated in incel and manosphere communities and predates any single commentator, though figures like Andrew Tate have amplified its variants.

No one is regulating this. There is no OSHA for the emotional workplace these platforms create.

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What the substitutions tell us

One of the most useful concepts Emba introduces is what she calls "substitution effects." When actual intimacy gets too hard — and for a generation that lost two to four years of social skill development to pandemic lockdowns, then emerged into an economy where forming a household requires a salary that two people together often can't produce — people find proxies. For men: online communities that provide the sensation of brotherhood without requiring vulnerability. Pornography. AI companion apps that will never tell you you're wrong, and therefore never teach you how to be in relationship with someone who might. For women: parasocial intimacy through fiction, or the aesthetic of self-optimization and "soft living" that puts a wellness gloss on withdrawal.

Emba is careful and sympathetic here, and rightly so. These are people who wanted connection and found that the path to it was either blocked or had been made to feel unbearable. But the substitutions worry her, and they worry me too, for a structural reason: every effective substitute reduces the pressure to fix the underlying problem. If the misery is manageable, the misery persists.

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Emba closes on something I find myself returning to: "It's not their fault. This culture is bad. And has become bad for human connection in ways that we didn't choose."

That's true, and it's important to say, and it's also where I'd push a little harder. Cultures don't become bad for human connection on their own. Specific business models, specific regulatory decisions, specific choices about what to optimize for — those are the mechanisms. The young men and women in that dating survey didn't design the app that trained them to experience rejection as a volume sport. They just downloaded it because everyone told them that's where dating happens now.

The question worth sitting with — and it's genuinely open — is who gets asked to fix it. So far, the answer has been: the people most harmed by it.

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Carmen Rodriguez covers labor, workplace organizing, and worker rights for Buzzrag. She is the author of ongoing investigations into private equity and worker power.