Hi Abigail. I read your last post and have a few things to suggest. I'm not sure that gen-z needs more rom-coms as much as it needs some willingness to accept women and men are made different, or for lack of a better term: gender roles. Your comment about your husband and how he treated you points this out. He didn't marry you for your driving skills, I suspect he was more focused on other things and you probably (in part) married him because he is capable and you trust him.
I don't think gen-z has this. Whatever feminism killed, social media buried.
I'll give an example from my own life. I was married for 14 years to a woman I loved, but she ran into an old boyfriend on social media and was frustrated that I wasn't who she wanted me to be. After the inevitable fling, our family was destroyed and she went back to school, and started getting educated... next thing you know she is fallen for the cult of leftism and now lives alone with our 23 year old son who never finished high school. She will probably be alone the rest of her days, playing girl boss battle with everyone she meets, blaming me, and coddling our son.
I'm remarried to a beautiful woman that I enjoy and we are happy, but (keeping the post on track) we both experienced the dating world of today, and whoa, feminism and social media has changed everything. People don't connect in the real world anymore, it's all text and the women live in some other reality. Point: gen-z and even the progressive gen-x have fallen into a world where they don't know how to interact with the opposite sex. Hell, they don't know how to interact with anyone, they probably aren't even sure who they are. In other words, rom-coms are downstream of culture and the culture is the problem.
Thank you for your very thoughtful comment and for sharing your beautiful story. For what it's worth, I didn't mean to propose Rom Coms as a literal solution to Gen Z's dating woes. I only meant to highlight that previous generations got all sorts of cultural support and guidance for how to flirt and date and that that support and direction is now absent. Thank you so much for this note.
Appreciated.....And agreed... as an interesting side note which kind of makes my point, I've started getting "likes" in my email box for this post, which I suppose is some incentive to get me to interact in this way more. Feels dystopian.
Interesting just a day ago, prior to reading your articles, I was listening to songs from the late 60’s and early 70’s (I think it was Spotify B.J Thomas playlist), I use music to help take naps (getting old but never will be old). It struck me that these songs were about love, about needing someone, caring for someone, etc. I then thought about much of today’s music (Don’t ask the genre…Hip Hop?) and how crass and debasing they are to women and people in general. How indignant the songs are of our culture. No, I do not listen to much of it and do not want to. Back to the point, our, my, college dating and early 20’s had music that was so much different, even the hard rockers came out with live ballads. I do not know how we get back to a kinder, gentler America. Music influences culture and vice-versa, chicken and egg.
I can understand why people want to do at least part of their interaction at a distance. I used to tremble like a racehorse in the starting gate when the adrenaline hit.
I’m not a social worker, counselor, therapist or teacher, but over which as a board certified MD psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and theoretician in the area of human courtship for 30 years we could talk about your questions.
I’m on substack at drpauldobransky.substack.com and Romantipedia.substack.com and as a dating coach in Chicago, Los Angeles, NYC, London, Paris, and Stockholm for 15 of those years, I could bring light to any such questions you could have if we did a livestream.
You underrate today's music. A few current pop love songs: Die with a Smile by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, Beautiful Things by Benson Boone, Birds of a Feather by Billie Eilish, Close to You by Gracie Abrams and Stargazing by Myles Smith. Yes, there are a lot of uninspiring songs, but weren't there aways?
Did I say there were no good songs? I said “much of today’s music”. I agree with you on some great songs and my Spotify playlist has many. Mine was a general observation.
I am eagerly awaiting your book. This hits me on a personal level. My lovely, bright, interesting daughter, born in 2005, has never had any kind of relationship except with her phone. She’s constantly online. She has few friends and only one she makes plans with. She claims she’s attracted to women and I would be happy for her to date a nice person whether they are female or male, but she says she has no interest. When she was in middle school she had crushes but in high school it was like she transferred that energy to her various fandoms. She is wrapped up in these para social relationships with her favorite bands online and seems disconnected from reality. Yet, she’s doing well in college but lives at home and doesn’t want to leave. She’s 20 but seems 14. I don’t know where I went wrong—I have always encouraged her independence and put off getting her a phone until high school. Her one friend is just like her. Something’s not right with so many of these kids. I need to know what to do differently with my younger kids so they don’t get sucked into fantasy land which is where my older daughter lives.
A subject near and dear to my heart as I watch my "Zillenial" (1996) 28 yr old and his friends, none of whom are married (although my son is the first of his crowd - has a GF of 7 yrs, they just bought a condo and are planning on getting married within the year) in stark contrast to my Gen Z kids. My daughter and her hubby just got married at 22, right after college, and all of their friends are very conservative and they're allllll getting married and having babies. That's their goal , to be more traditional. My 18 yr old and his friends are on the same page with them but possibly even more conservative. They're like mini-generations. The difference is crazy.
Are you familiar with Leon and Amy Kass's book: *Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying*? Leon Kass is more famous for his work in bioethics, but when he and his wife were university professors they became concerned about the breakdown in healthy relationships among their students -- it seemed that the young people did not find it easy to fall in love, and the Kasses believed this situation to be at least partially the result of their students being starved for cultural models, for the stories that might have inculcated a richer understanding of their humanity.
So they put together this anthology of literature, as a caring gift. I always wondered if their project bore fruit. I couldn't imagine the people who needed it having any desire to read it, as it seems the current victims of this cultural moment are not typically readers. I definitely get your point about the right kind of movies, in which people fall in love in the old-fashioned way, being a good thing.
My nephew is in his 40's and has been single for several years after a long term relationship. He says women are hard to approach because they travel "in packs." When he wants to talk to one of them, he feels like he has to impress all three or four of them.
You’ve probably already heard of The Dating Project (2011, I believe) https://www.thedatingprojectmovie.com/ but in my experience some of the same problems seem to continue on or just worsen as social media increases. Culturally, we’ve “lost the script”.
Why do these adulting benchmarks exist? Western cultures are supposedly hyperindividualistic but life stages must be completed at certain ages and in certain ways. How absurd! As a young child, my mom told me stories of adults who never learned to drive as if she were reading a grocery list, it just didn't matter. There are people, such as yours truly, who never leave the parental home, drive, have boy- or girlfriends, marry or have children and what of it? By the way, I do not believe that many people are really concerned about the environment; if they were, we would have local and national carpool programs and vehicular emissions would be substantially cut.
Just adding that I don't think it is just Gen-Z. I'm a single female Xennial, and I know quite a few like me. We grew up in mainline churches. We didn't have purity culture pushed on us like some, however books like "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" were everywhere. If we said that we wanted a husband or date, then someone reminded us that we weren't being faithful. We just needed to follow God and when we were ready, He would bring someone into our lives. While the aformentioned author has apologized for his book, the idea seems to have caught on. Are we waiting for the one and only? As a woman, I'd like the man to take the lead, but all the single men seemed to disappear into a basement when we graduated college to never be seen again.
My 20 year old son goes on and on about how we don't understand his generation. I'll send this to him and maybe he can go on and on to you about it. He's certainly got some good points about the collapse of dating, a main one being that there is a political gulf between young men and young women. And then there's the online dating market, which optimizes for one small group of very fit young men to play the field, and for nobody else. He's recently stumbled upon an age-old method that is way better: do good things, meet good people.
H-wood may have given up on Rom-coms; but K-drama's are overflowing with love and romance and relationship serendipity. The kind American movies used to be famous for.
The writing, acting and production values are better than anything Hollywood produces these day. A few are dubed; but most have subtitles. You can watch them on Amz, Netflix, Viki and other streaming services.
My wife and I have been watching them for years now and they just get better and better.
Email sent. Lots of experience with this population. There is a “new idea” coming to youth. “How about we doing something crazy and radical, let’s go outside, don’t bring our phones, and just hang out, talk, and laugh!” What we were forced to do prior to our dopamine machines, they will find necessary to not be robots destined for constant misery.
Hi Abigail. I read your last post and have a few things to suggest. I'm not sure that gen-z needs more rom-coms as much as it needs some willingness to accept women and men are made different, or for lack of a better term: gender roles. Your comment about your husband and how he treated you points this out. He didn't marry you for your driving skills, I suspect he was more focused on other things and you probably (in part) married him because he is capable and you trust him.
I don't think gen-z has this. Whatever feminism killed, social media buried.
I'll give an example from my own life. I was married for 14 years to a woman I loved, but she ran into an old boyfriend on social media and was frustrated that I wasn't who she wanted me to be. After the inevitable fling, our family was destroyed and she went back to school, and started getting educated... next thing you know she is fallen for the cult of leftism and now lives alone with our 23 year old son who never finished high school. She will probably be alone the rest of her days, playing girl boss battle with everyone she meets, blaming me, and coddling our son.
I'm remarried to a beautiful woman that I enjoy and we are happy, but (keeping the post on track) we both experienced the dating world of today, and whoa, feminism and social media has changed everything. People don't connect in the real world anymore, it's all text and the women live in some other reality. Point: gen-z and even the progressive gen-x have fallen into a world where they don't know how to interact with the opposite sex. Hell, they don't know how to interact with anyone, they probably aren't even sure who they are. In other words, rom-coms are downstream of culture and the culture is the problem.
Thank you for your very thoughtful comment and for sharing your beautiful story. For what it's worth, I didn't mean to propose Rom Coms as a literal solution to Gen Z's dating woes. I only meant to highlight that previous generations got all sorts of cultural support and guidance for how to flirt and date and that that support and direction is now absent. Thank you so much for this note.
Appreciated.....And agreed... as an interesting side note which kind of makes my point, I've started getting "likes" in my email box for this post, which I suppose is some incentive to get me to interact in this way more. Feels dystopian.
Sounds like someone, not me; I predate both of you, should write a script.
Interesting just a day ago, prior to reading your articles, I was listening to songs from the late 60’s and early 70’s (I think it was Spotify B.J Thomas playlist), I use music to help take naps (getting old but never will be old). It struck me that these songs were about love, about needing someone, caring for someone, etc. I then thought about much of today’s music (Don’t ask the genre…Hip Hop?) and how crass and debasing they are to women and people in general. How indignant the songs are of our culture. No, I do not listen to much of it and do not want to. Back to the point, our, my, college dating and early 20’s had music that was so much different, even the hard rockers came out with live ballads. I do not know how we get back to a kinder, gentler America. Music influences culture and vice-versa, chicken and egg.
Effect of porn?
I don’t think so.
I can understand why people want to do at least part of their interaction at a distance. I used to tremble like a racehorse in the starting gate when the adrenaline hit.
I’m not a social worker, counselor, therapist or teacher, but over which as a board certified MD psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and theoretician in the area of human courtship for 30 years we could talk about your questions.
I’m on substack at drpauldobransky.substack.com and Romantipedia.substack.com and as a dating coach in Chicago, Los Angeles, NYC, London, Paris, and Stockholm for 15 of those years, I could bring light to any such questions you could have if we did a livestream.
You underrate today's music. A few current pop love songs: Die with a Smile by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, Beautiful Things by Benson Boone, Birds of a Feather by Billie Eilish, Close to You by Gracie Abrams and Stargazing by Myles Smith. Yes, there are a lot of uninspiring songs, but weren't there aways?
Did I say there were no good songs? I said “much of today’s music”. I agree with you on some great songs and my Spotify playlist has many. Mine was a general observation.
I am eagerly awaiting your book. This hits me on a personal level. My lovely, bright, interesting daughter, born in 2005, has never had any kind of relationship except with her phone. She’s constantly online. She has few friends and only one she makes plans with. She claims she’s attracted to women and I would be happy for her to date a nice person whether they are female or male, but she says she has no interest. When she was in middle school she had crushes but in high school it was like she transferred that energy to her various fandoms. She is wrapped up in these para social relationships with her favorite bands online and seems disconnected from reality. Yet, she’s doing well in college but lives at home and doesn’t want to leave. She’s 20 but seems 14. I don’t know where I went wrong—I have always encouraged her independence and put off getting her a phone until high school. Her one friend is just like her. Something’s not right with so many of these kids. I need to know what to do differently with my younger kids so they don’t get sucked into fantasy land which is where my older daughter lives.
A subject near and dear to my heart as I watch my "Zillenial" (1996) 28 yr old and his friends, none of whom are married (although my son is the first of his crowd - has a GF of 7 yrs, they just bought a condo and are planning on getting married within the year) in stark contrast to my Gen Z kids. My daughter and her hubby just got married at 22, right after college, and all of their friends are very conservative and they're allllll getting married and having babies. That's their goal , to be more traditional. My 18 yr old and his friends are on the same page with them but possibly even more conservative. They're like mini-generations. The difference is crazy.
Girlfriend of seven years…enough said!
Glad to hear the younger kids are getting married and not “dating” for years on end.
I think you put your finger on it: "conservative." The kids on the right side of the aisle are doing much better.
Dear Abigail,
Are you familiar with Leon and Amy Kass's book: *Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying*? Leon Kass is more famous for his work in bioethics, but when he and his wife were university professors they became concerned about the breakdown in healthy relationships among their students -- it seemed that the young people did not find it easy to fall in love, and the Kasses believed this situation to be at least partially the result of their students being starved for cultural models, for the stories that might have inculcated a richer understanding of their humanity.
So they put together this anthology of literature, as a caring gift. I always wondered if their project bore fruit. I couldn't imagine the people who needed it having any desire to read it, as it seems the current victims of this cultural moment are not typically readers. I definitely get your point about the right kind of movies, in which people fall in love in the old-fashioned way, being a good thing.
My nephew is in his 40's and has been single for several years after a long term relationship. He says women are hard to approach because they travel "in packs." When he wants to talk to one of them, he feels like he has to impress all three or four of them.
You’ve probably already heard of The Dating Project (2011, I believe) https://www.thedatingprojectmovie.com/ but in my experience some of the same problems seem to continue on or just worsen as social media increases. Culturally, we’ve “lost the script”.
Why do these adulting benchmarks exist? Western cultures are supposedly hyperindividualistic but life stages must be completed at certain ages and in certain ways. How absurd! As a young child, my mom told me stories of adults who never learned to drive as if she were reading a grocery list, it just didn't matter. There are people, such as yours truly, who never leave the parental home, drive, have boy- or girlfriends, marry or have children and what of it? By the way, I do not believe that many people are really concerned about the environment; if they were, we would have local and national carpool programs and vehicular emissions would be substantially cut.
Just adding that I don't think it is just Gen-Z. I'm a single female Xennial, and I know quite a few like me. We grew up in mainline churches. We didn't have purity culture pushed on us like some, however books like "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" were everywhere. If we said that we wanted a husband or date, then someone reminded us that we weren't being faithful. We just needed to follow God and when we were ready, He would bring someone into our lives. While the aformentioned author has apologized for his book, the idea seems to have caught on. Are we waiting for the one and only? As a woman, I'd like the man to take the lead, but all the single men seemed to disappear into a basement when we graduated college to never be seen again.
My 20 year old son goes on and on about how we don't understand his generation. I'll send this to him and maybe he can go on and on to you about it. He's certainly got some good points about the collapse of dating, a main one being that there is a political gulf between young men and young women. And then there's the online dating market, which optimizes for one small group of very fit young men to play the field, and for nobody else. He's recently stumbled upon an age-old method that is way better: do good things, meet good people.
H-wood may have given up on Rom-coms; but K-drama's are overflowing with love and romance and relationship serendipity. The kind American movies used to be famous for.
The writing, acting and production values are better than anything Hollywood produces these day. A few are dubed; but most have subtitles. You can watch them on Amz, Netflix, Viki and other streaming services.
My wife and I have been watching them for years now and they just get better and better.
Glad to hear that Abigail Shrier is working on a new book about Gen-Z's dating and mating struggles! Timely and interesting.
Email sent. Lots of experience with this population. There is a “new idea” coming to youth. “How about we doing something crazy and radical, let’s go outside, don’t bring our phones, and just hang out, talk, and laugh!” What we were forced to do prior to our dopamine machines, they will find necessary to not be robots destined for constant misery.
Abigail, I really encourage you to look into the effects of early puberty for this book.
Walt Bismarck wrote a great piece on this --
https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/girls-are-going-through-puberty-too
I expanded on it --
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-lost-girls-and-boys
I believe Walt is Gen Z (I'm a Millennial) and he might make a good interviewee for the book.