IS IT ANY WONDER MY GENERATION IS HAVING NO SEX
With half of Gen-Z still living at home, scrolling on social media, over-therapised and underpaid – a despairing OLIVIA DEAN asks…
IT ALL seemed so perfect at the start. He was tall and charming — an Irish student abroad. I was 20, and he ‘liked’ me on a dating app, and sent me a couple of flirty messages. A date was arranged. But then he arrived, straggly-haired in a moth-eaten fleece. Drinks — which he refused to pay for — proved an insufficient social lubricant as he offered monosyllabic answers to my increasingly desperate questioning.
‘My mother is Irish,’ I ventured, in an attempt to find common ground.
‘No, she isn’t,’ he inexplicably responded.
In baffling contrast to our easy rapport online, he quickly shut down any attempt at conversation.
During one painful silence, he pulled a dusty chunk of unwrapped Turkish Delight from his coat pocket and chewed on it noisily.
Minutes later, a Capri-Sun orange juice pouch was pulled from the same pocket and slurped vigorously.
Forty-three minutes into the date from hell, I texted my friend under the table. ‘Terrible date. Call me NOW,’ I wrote. He phoned me with a fake ‘emergency’ — and I escaped.
Thankfully, the young Irishman did not message me again. But it was a long time before I dared to venture on another date.
Welcome to the world of youthful romance in the 21st century, where charm is no longer a currency and boozy nights out end not with phone numbers scrawled on receipts, but with a lonely kebab in bed and a scroll through Instagram.
Gen Z, born at the turn of the Millennium, should be in its dating prime, yet research shows that we are having fewer romantic trysts than ever.
A recent study revealed that the proportion of people aged 18 to 24 having no sex at all increased from 29 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women in 2009 to 43 per cent of men and a huge 74 per cent of women in 2018. And things only seem to be getting worse.
What happened to the bed-hopping hedonism of past generations? Our parents — even our oldest siblings — fell in and out of love with ease, yet we twentysomethings seem incapable of having any sort of normal relationship.
But why? Is it dating apps, social media, Covid, mental health, the economy — or a miserable mix of them all?
As my own sixtysomething mother commented in despair: ‘It was so much easier in my day. You saw someone you fancied in the pub, you got their number, you went out, he was your boyfriend.’
BUT Covid decimated the nightlife industry that allowed these encounters to happen. From 2021 to 2022, the cost of running businesses like pubs, bars and clubs rose dramatically, with those costs passed on to revellers via inflated entry costs and higher drinks prices. Recent female graduates (on salaries that haven’t risen to match inflation) are reluctant to spend €40 or €50 on an evening out.
As Rachel, 23, a teacher, told me: ‘I can’t justify the price of a night out when I’ve got no guarantee that it’ll be good.’
Now, where friends would once have met for a casual pint after work — and made eyes at handsome strangers across the bar — it’s easier to save a few quid and have dinner with friends at home.
Not that many of us have places of our own to call home. We may love to moan, but as rent costs spiral and the prospect of owning our own home becomes increasingly remote, the number of 20 to 24-year-olds still living in the family home is frightening.
Even if we did meet someone who took our fancy, chatting awkwardly about the football to a potential paramour’s dad over a slice of his mum’s shepherd’s pie is hardly an aphrodisiac.
And, of course, staying in doesn’t feel so isolated when you’ve got an online world at your fingertips.
My generation was the first to grow up as ‘digital natives’: Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook have been around since I was about 12. We’ve grown up with distance plumbed into our social interactions, able to curate an ideal version of ourselves with the time to consider every message or picture.
‘I work all the time. If I’m texting people rather than calling or meeting up, I can reply whenever I feel like it. It doesn’t all have to be immediate,’ says Josie, 24, a civil servant.
Put bluntly, online interactions have become a sorry replacement for reality. And even if we do find someone that takes our fancy, we spend so long talking to them online rather than connecting in person that the natural flame of chemistry is usually extinguished.
The advent of dating apps in the early 2010s should have made matters easier. But the pool of potential matches quickly became oversaturated.
Some felt unable to commit to anyone given the infinity of other candidates waiting on your phone, while others became overwhelmed by the sheer number of people and shied away completely. ‘It’s total overstimulation,’ says Alex, 25. ‘In a way, just knowing that I could easily get a date by swiping is enough for me. I never actually engage with the dating apps — let alone go on dates.’
And anyway, dating apps are full of pitfalls for the uninitiated. Ella, 23, has a litany of rules. ‘You can’t have selfies on your profile. You can’t have serious answers to any of the prompts, and they can’t be too long. It’s weird if there’s no pictures of you with friends, but if there’s only pictures of you with friends, it makes you seem like you’re hiding how ugly you are. And emojis give me the ick straight away.’
No wonder none of us are getting dates.
Others I spoke to had even more chilling reasons for being cautious. ‘Cases like Grace Millane [murdered in 2018 by a man she met on Tinder] terrify me,’ says Lily, 24.
‘There have always been bad people around but they didn’t have social media and 24-hour news constantly reminding them of what men can do to vulnerable girls.’
WE CAN hardly be blamed for shying away from dating completely. But it’s important to stress that it’s not necessarily a bad thing that we’re being more cautious about our romantic entanglements than previous generations.
The number of teenage pregnancies is way down hopefully spelling better opportunities and education for young girls.
And we’re the children of divorce, after all — ‘baby boomers’ and Gen X’ers (born between the 1960s and 1980s) have the highest divorce rates of any generation. That’s hardly a good example.
‘I watched my parents scream at each other for years and eventually split up,’ says Josie. ‘It doesn’t stop me wanting to date, but it makes me more conscious of my own behaviour in relationships.’
And if our parents were Generation Divorce, we’re Generation Therapy. Almost all my peers — no matter how pampered and happy their childhoods — have spent hours parked on a counsellor’s sofa.
‘You’ve got to work on yourself before you can be with anyone else,’ says Kate, 23, authoritatively. ‘And sex can so often be a self-destructive reflex. There are better places to find validation than in someone else’s desire.’
Once upon a time, such levels of self-reflection would have been labelled narcissistic navel-gazing. A break-up would be swiftly addressed — with six margaritas, a short skirt and a drunken snog with a stranger.
But a recent poll showed than Gen Z are the most sober of them all, with 39 per cent totally eschewing alcohol. In the online age, it’s understandable: why would you get drunk and dance on a table when it could be plastered on Snapchat the next morning?
But in the horror, there is always a silver lining. Among my friends, those that are in relationships are happy, fulfilled and committed.
Those that are single are happy alone (so they say). The days of twentysomethings swapping beds and phone numbers with gay abandon may be over, but the planet’s overpopulated, anyway.