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From when I was a little girl, to the hazy days of teenagehood, I’ve always daydreamed about my future love life. The fictional adventures of Victoria Justice and Zoey Brooks convinced me that waiting on the other side of braces, and breakouts was my induction into adulthood.
As I close the chapter of undergrad, I’ve reflected on expectations and reality. Namely, my biggest disappointment upon my reflection has been the realities of dating. Nearly everyone close to me is going steady, and steadily I’ve remained single. But at only 22, am I really so jaded, or are today's dating inconveniences deeper than that?
In 2025, 37% of Gen-Z survey participants say they have given up on dating and other reports show that 56% of Gen Z are single. And dating woes are not the only problem for Gen Zers right now. Over 50% of recent college graduates are struggling to find relevant work, which is coupled with the national unemployment average steadily spiking since the pandemic. With the job market going limp on us, is the dating scene just following suit?
Dating verbatim in 2026
Though we live in uncertain times, one can always rely on summer. Social media has seen an uptick in declaring intentions to embrace the messiness of youth since Charli XCX’s Brat in 2024. This year, the sentiment remains the same, with the Latina community specifically embracing the upcoming summer. Still, with all the excitement, I find myself staying longer than I’d hoped in hibernation, hoping to avoid femmes and mascs, avoidant or anxious.
In the left corner, coming in at 400,000-some posts, the self-proclaimed avoidant attachments scream space under the guise of inconsistency. In the right corner, at a little over half of that, equally self proclaimed, the anxiously attached hold power in proximity and weakness in distance. These are one of the many universal experiences society has learned to verbalize. Yet, in the height of our digital age, hardly anyone knows how to constructively apply it to their lives.
This era of complete visibility has instead blurred our perception and weakened our understanding of reality, both exterior and interior. While corporations put artificial intelligence to work, subsequently cutting human jobs, we seem to be getting comfortable with only working with half of the toolbox. However, if you simply memorize the sum of an equation, does that mean you can solve it?
As frivolous as it sounds, texting is actually a very delicately formed art. There are rules to be revered, so much so that an astute knowledge of grammar isn’t necessarily helpful. There’s all sorts of unspoken, uniquely understood rules. If you text too much, you run the risk of being “clingy.” On the other hand, text too infrequently, and the person on the other line may read that as disinterest. In my experience though, the act itself is not the issue here. The problem is the occasions we’ve deemed appropriate for a text.
Where I’d place the grander issue in texting etiquette specifically, though, is the cancellation occasion. I won’t wag my finger and pretend I don’t get excited when the text starts with, “Sorry to have to do this, but…” However, it was a moment to treasure because of its rarity. Now, are we collectively just not excited enough? Could the thought of paying twice over for an $18 movie ticket be turning us all off?
On the algorithm
At one point, introducing the internet to dating seemed like a good idea. Holding the catalog of attractive singles near you right in your back pocket sounds like an enchanting invention. Or could it be a cautionary tale?
Algorithms are conditioned to predict in order to persuade. In 2021, two university researchers in Spain concluded that, “...it is important to educate people against trusting and following the advice of algorithms blindly.” Like Icarus, we’ve been blinded by the sun, and we keep flying closer to it as our feathers melt below us and we fall into the sea.
With love,
With Gen Z alcohol consumption dipping to significantly lower rates than previous generations, I often wonder if our generation’s virtue to mental health has cost us too much. However, perhaps therein lies the issue: cost. Price inflation has severely outpaced wages, and society has now been shaken into the neurological survival asset known as flight or fight.
I don’t think young people dating today face any particularly exceptional hurdles in dating. Casual dating has always been akin to going to the gym. It’s a lot of work, you don’t always want to do it, and the good machines are always taken. Before there was a word for it, ghosting was just when a date never called you. What was once just a blip in one’s week has been exacerbated by the ever-growing presence of technology in our daily lives. So, while inflated gas prices continue to tailgate us, is that all we can really see through the rearview mirror?
Perhaps today’s dating struggles are simply bloated from the sharp conservative turn in politics and culture and the economic downturn of the 2020s. Nonetheless, I hope the too-frequent label of exceptionality placed on younger people, pseudo-validated by mysterious polls, won’t continue to deter me or the rest of my generation from embracing dating in the rest of 2026.
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