In our new winter issue, we published Mana Afsari’s “Doomers in Love: On dating and dignity”—an in-depth exploration of Gen Z romantic norms and how they have been shaped by heteropessimism and online discourse. We’re publishing an extended excerpt here on Substack. Click here check out the rest of the new issue.
Last February, a group of young conservatives in Washington hosted an open-invitation Valentine’s Day debate party. There, a month after the inauguration, dozens of young men in or around Trump’s new administration gathered to discuss not the great man in the White House, not political revolution, but love.
This is an era of good feelings for these young men, and the theme would seem to reflect the mood. It is also promisingly uncontroversial, and thus more welcoming: more women have come to this event than most conservative mixers, raising their average attendance from the single digits to tentative double digits. For a generation of young men increasingly politically divorced from women their age, who make up the most anti-GOP and anti-Trump demographic, the idea that love could overcome any obstacle is a hopeful premise.
But in the debate that ensues, nearly every speech is against romance. The arguments detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a “simp” or a “sucker.” Some wonder aloud whether one should ask out women at all, who, in the age of dating apps, receive far too much male attention, and as a result have become too picky, exacting and fickle. Eventually, a quip about women’s suffrage comes from the audience, prompting a jocular back-and-forth. I ask a friend why they are suddenly discussing whether women should vote. He looks at me and sighs. “Women’s suffrage always comes up.” By night’s end, almost nobody has asked out any of the women present in the room; the only man who ventures to do so is summarily rejected.
Afterwards, at a nearby bar, I find again a lot of single young men talking about women, rather than to women. One tells me that his friend, who is not here tonight, recently found a girlfriend: “I’m really happy for him. But now he texts our group chat advice, acting like he’s got the key to life, like he’s got it all figured out. And sometimes I’m not sure what to talk about with him anymore. We used to bond over not having a girl.” I think of my own “girlfriends,” who’ve told me to break up with previous boyfriends over their greater or lesser faults, imploring me to think of “how fun it would be to be single together.”
In another corner of the bar, I encounter a group of three twentysomething young men. The young, right-leaning women who had shown up hopeful have gone home. These men are now here alone on a Saturday night, in hour one of a five-hour debate about the nature of love. They are lonely experts, armed with elaborate theories of the female mind. The discussants go around in circles for hours, discussing what men truly want, what women truly want. Theses abound: “Men want respect; women want to be desired”; “Men are easily satisfied, but women are always afraid of making the wrong choice and not maximizing their options”; “Men are the only true romantics.” And questions remain: How many past sexual partners is too many? How many is too few? Does she need to share your interests, or is femininity more important than intellectual compatibility? Is it a red flag if she’s unmarried after 25? Is it a red flag if she’s single? What if we just assigned girlfriends and boyfriends randomly, wouldn’t they be happier than if we let them choose?
These single men talk amongst themselves about how many kids they want, out of an earnest aspiration but also, at times, as if in competition to prove their traditional virility. It is easier to talk about wanting ten kids while unattached and 24 than to raise ten kids with one’s wife, but tonight the effect is the same: here, you are based. One asks me how many I want. “I don’t know yet; I have to find someone first. Three, four?” He gives me a look. “Those are liberal numbers.”
A few weeks later I attend another party in similar circles. It is almost midnight, ten minutes until my 27th birthday. I want to go home. As I walk out I encounter two young men, staffers in Trump’s administration, talking on the sidewalk in their suits and loosened ties, smoking cigarettes. Hesitantly, I say hello. I am exhausted by the theories I’ve heard over the last few weeks about women’s virtues and faults and nearly wince, expecting more to come. Behind me, I recognize two college-aged guys from recent media exposés; they work for DOGE and are evaluating some absent girl’s Instagram page.
I exchange a few pleasantries and introductions with the two men in front of me instead. Midway through the conversation, I mention that I ought to go home soon, but a friend walks past and wishes me a happy birthday. One of my new acquaintances walks abruptly toward a flowering dogwood tree, picks a flower from a branch, and comes back to present it to me without a word. I hold it in my hand, shy and elated. The DOGE boys call him a simp.
One thing I and other young women in D.C. have observed since the election is a shift in how young men speak to and appraise us. Passing through conservative mixers, parties and young-professional networks in Trump’s Washington, we’ve increasingly felt like we’re working against an assumption that women are tainted and guilty until proven otherwise. “Among all the young men I’ve met on the right, especially on the far right, I would guess that 10 to 20 percent of them hate all women,” my acquaintance Oliver, someone familiar with these circles, tells me somewhat sarcastically. I share Oliver’s estimate with a twentysomething right-wing influencer. He widens his eyes and laughs, but concedes there’s truth to it. “Look, lots of these guys, they just consider you less reliable if you talk to women. You’re compromised, in a real way.”
I later tell Jake,* the Trump staffer who picked me the flower, about the statistic. He is a former fraternity president and hardly uses X. He looks bewildered. “Where do you find these guys?” He shakes his head. “Whoever they are, they don’t talk to me.” Jake seems to be as-yet uncontaminated by the culture on the right that views women as saboteurs of right-wing ideological purity and hen-pecking nuisances to be avoided. He suggests to me that, as a 27-year-old, he’s already older than the demographic that received their intellectual and social formation online. His romantic imagination was shaped more by fraternity mixers and reading physical books. Jake quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and Goethe’s Faust, revealing a talent I suspect will bode better for his own fertility than that of the young men studying tweets about female fertility.
The three of us meet again for drinks, and the other young staffer I met on my birthday, James,* offers his own explanation for his peers: “My working thesis is that all of these stupid, these ridiculous rules—they come from a sense of anxiety. People feel very anxious that the normal rules have broken down.” He references not just the disappearance of in-person dating scripts, or our confusion about gender roles, but the widespread anxiety around expressing desire toward women, even verbally approaching women without clear permission, in the wake of #MeToo. “They [young men] think, ‘I have to make my own new rules.’ But people’s new rules are worse. Much worse. Real life has been so eroded” by social media, COVID lockdowns and dating apps “that people are forced to retreat into this kind of categorical thinking. Because opportunities to casually meet people as they actually come, as entire people and not checklists, are no longer available to most people. It’s all first principles. Yeah, right. Like, what’s the ‘first principles’ wife? ‘Doesn’t have too many tattoos.’ ‘I just want a woman who dresses modestly.’ Where are we, fucking Qatar?”
“For most young men, their lives are consumed by thinking about these categories,” he continues, “because real life is degraded for most people, and they can’t exit out of these imagined categories and just meet human beings. Real life is not degraded for me, because I’m relatively good-looking and charming and rich.” He pauses and gives me a smile. “But I can understand it. We’ve outsourced opportunities for normal connection. You go to bars today and it’s literally groups of guys in three and groups of women in three, and none of them talk to each other. That was not how it was fifty years ago. If you’re just a well-meaning young person who is not extraordinary in any way, what are you supposed to do?”
I think of his peers, the young right-wing men at parties around the city, surrounded by young women who share their values. Amid a post-election renaissance of right-wing social life in D.C., they’ve had all summer to pursue opportunities in real life, but the forms of gender-specific discourse that had given them consolation were more gratifying, or familiar, than the opportunity to encounter real and receptive women. Instead, they talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.
Around the same time this past summer, I stepped outside the New Right’s anxious romantic subculture and went to a birthday party for a liberal acquaintance. The invitation contained a self-deprecating joke about turning 29 (“it’s so over!”), which turned out to indicate an ambient anxiety about aging, a sense that we’re getting too old to still not know who we are and what we want.
At the party, I run into an old acquaintance and his girlfriend of four years, who works in Democratic politics. They are a pleasant and up-to-date couple who are appropriately embarrassed by how high-income their D.C. neighborhood is. At some point, as we discuss our late twenties, I mention wanting to have kids one day. His girlfriend’s eyes light up. “You do?!” she asks as she turns to me. “How many? Boys or girls?” Then her boyfriend chimes in. “You want kids?” He’s genuinely surprised; he expected better from me. He reminds me how bad the world, the country, is. I think back to when he and his girlfriend first started dating, in the Biden era, and the year-long situationship that preceded their lukewarm relationship, and wonder what he’s so afraid of.
While nearly all my conservative friends are single, even though they claim to want to get married young, many of my left-leaning or liberal friends are in long-term relationships, but say that they don’t want to get married or have kids any time soon. The young liberal women I know, based on the desires they express and their sometimes-contrary actions, seem to want an open but committed relationship; they want someone enthusiastically sex-positive but not a playboy; a man who reads but only the right things, and who isn’t disagreeable or prone to overexplaining what interests him; they want casual, liberated sex with regulated communication, rules and a sense of mutual obligation. They often prioritize men who have learned the right political and romantic lines and have an emotional register that mirrors their female friendships, but lack the seriousness or sense of purpose they are looking for in their relationships.
I notice another old acquaintance at the party. Years ago he survived a life-threatening accident; his girlfriend stood by him, through the complications and disability. I’d visit him between surgeries, and he told me once, still at that time facing death, that he had decided he was going to marry her. She had taken him to the hospital, been there for the appointments, held his hands and his head, stood by him on death’s doorstep. She had proved she was the one. As he told me this, I thought that I caught a glimpse of something women long to see: real, fixed love in a man’s eyes. It reminded me of the “state of enchantment” W. H. Auden called “certainty.” His near-death encounter had made freedom seem meaningless in the face of one real thing.
I wonder now if I imagined it: if my own romantic indecisiveness made me vicariously relieved by his bravery. Once he recovered, I asked him excitedly when he planned to propose. He became quiet. I felt like I was suddenly talking to a different person. His wounds were still healing; the scars were hard to look at. But more frightening was the look on his face when I asked him about that previous moment of clarity. I hoped he might be the first among my friends, all in their mid-to-late twenties, to make a lasting commitment. It seemed to me that he had made up his mind about her weeks before, somewhere between life and death. But in the light of life, with fifty years still ahead, he faltered.
As with the right-wing men, online dating discourse bleeds into my single female friends’ accounts of their experiences: they tell me, in insights learned from short-form videos on TikTok, that men are so dangerous that it’s safer to encounter a wild grizzly in the forest rather than a man, but also that it’s both laudable and empowering to have a one-night stand with a near stranger (who is also, of course, a man). Asked once by a friend about the bear-versus-man dilemma, I answered, not knowing the political context of the question, “I think I’d rather encounter a man. You can reason with a human being, right?” My answer was the wrong one.
After the party, I speak to Alexis,* another friend, about a new guy she’s seeing. She’s a leftist and lives in a suburb. She’s in her mid-twenties, and has been dating for a few years since college. After several dead-end romantic experiences, she’s become uneasy with casual sex. On a date recently, she tried to explain to a left-wing young man why she wanted to wait a few weeks before having sex, but struggled for a moral vocabulary that didn’t seem retrograde, prudish or weird. She recounts the end of the date to me: “So I told him, ‘I don’t want to jump right into sex anymore, honestly. It’s so weird. It’s like, Hey, I just met you; now choke me out and fuck me.’”
She pauses as she tells me this, and laughs. “Like, that’s insane if you think about it! So that’s what I told him. And then he said, ‘No, no, I completely understand.’
“But I don’t think he did. I just told him, ‘I’m far beyond this idea of fucking just because you can, just because you’re attracted to this person and they’re alone with you in your house.’” Alexis grows more emphatic, as if proving the point to me as she recounts this conversation. “That doesn’t mean you have to, right?!” She pauses; she seems to be looking for some broader justification that might license, or contextualize, her desire for more emotional intimacy, familiarity and safety before having sex. “I told him, ‘Look, we’re bringing back yearning.’”
Something about the phrase sounds familiar. I look it up later, and it’s popular among young women who watch shows like Bridgerton, plots that have all the courtesy and flattery of traditional courtship with little of the stifling authority or shame. It seems that women who have observed, and accepted, that sex must precede emotional attachment in dating use the concept of “yearning” to barter for any sign of emotional life from their lovers at all.
She goes on. “I later sent him this famous essay I had read, by Silvia Federici, about how sex and sexuality are a form of labor for women. He asked me to explain what it meant to me. I told him, exasperated, ‘Look, it’s structural, not personal!’”
I think of the notion of boysobriety—celibacy, in other words, rebranded with an infantilizing TikTok neologism. The desire to sober up from love and sex is pervasive among the first generation (mine) to fully combine the mores of free love with the more, more, more impulse of dating-app culture. Drowning in opportunities but dying for dignity, people my age and younger don’t want a relationship they can DoorDash. The turn to “trad” dating norms, Marxist-feminist theories and TikTok lifestyle advice reflects the desperation for a social or moral framework that gives them the permission and the confidence to say, without feeling too conspicuous or weird, “I’ve had enough.”
Read the rest of “Doomers in Love,” and subscribe to read issue 36 in full.
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This feels to me like the right time to be alive, as far as dating is concerned. We (i'm from the US) have so much free will, in regards to who we form relationships with, lasting or otherwise. However, a big obstacle in our way is our lack of self respect and values. We have the right to set our own standards, yet somehow we are too afraid to find the words, to insist upon them, to hold and love our newfound individuality and freedom. We should go back to the slow style of finding a partner, but it should be under our terms, not anyone else's.