Young People Have a Weird New Approach to Relationships and Sex. No One—Not Even Them—Likes What’s Happening.

Over the past several months, I haven’t been able to escape Chappell Roan. The 26-year-old singer shot to fame this spring after finding viral success with infectious synth-pop songs celebrating unbridled sexual freedom. The most popular tracks of her recent album, with titles like “HOT TO GO!” and “Red Wine Supernova,” are repeat plays at seemingly every house party and dive bar I’ve been to this year.

Roan has become the latest balladeer of idealized, unburdened young adulthood, forming the soundtrack to countless twentysomething nights punctuated by sticky floors, fake eyelashes, and the anonymous intimacy of dancing with strangers. At a friend’s recent karaoke birthday party—one of those nights where I found myself in a dark, palpitating, multi-screened room—guests sang no fewer than three different songs from her album.

One of those songs—“Casual”—is set apart from the rest of Roan’s hits. Despite going viral for joyful, raunchy anthems hailing the pleasures of casual sex, Roan has released a near-perfect musical distillation of the heartbreak that often follows so-called “casual” relationships. The song’s resonance with so many young people, I think, is particularly telling.

“It’s hard being casual/ When my favorite bra lives in your dresser/ It’s hard being casual/ When I’m on the phone talking down your sister,” Roan sings during the song’s haunting bridge. “And I try to be the chill girl that/ Holds her tongue and gives you space/ I try to be the chill girl but/ Honestly, I’m not.”

Roan is describing a textbook “situationship,” an increasingly popular term used to describe any unlabeled, undefined romantic relationship. While some use the term neutrally, I most often hear it used to describe something much more inherently negative—a distinct mismatch in which one member of a casual entanglement is content with the arrangement while the other quietly yearns for a committed, labeled relationship. One salient definition offered by an Urban Dictionary user describes situationships as “emotional trauma in a gift box.”

Romantic dissatisfaction and ambivalence are all over the most popular music of the past year. “We had sex, I met your best friends/ Then a bird flies by and you forget,” Sabrina Carpenter sings in “The Sharpest Tool,” adding, “If that was casual, then I’m an idiot.” Brat, Charli XCX’s wildly successful album, is largely devoted to romanticizing the emotionally unavailable, hyperattractive, unanchored young woman. However, things take a turn in the album’s penultimate track, “I Think About It All the Time,” in which the narrator reveals her yearning for romantic stability and motherhood––as well as her conflict over whether to make choices that could bring her incredible joy, but also restrict her freedom. “And they’re exactly the same, but they’re different now,” she sings about two friends who recently became parents. “And I’m so scared I’m missin’ out on something/ So, we had a conversation on the way home/ Should I stop my birth control?”

In a situationship, there’s frequently not just the imbalance of one partner who cares more than the other, but also an inner turmoil in each person—the dueling desires to embrace domestic security and the urge to be unburdened and unrestrained by romantic commitments. While it’s easy to dismiss situationships’ rising popularity as just another permutation of age-old dating woes, there’s an important hitch. Unlike previous cohorts of young people, Generation Z is afflicted with endemic risk aversion—a personality feature that makes many current twentysomethings uniquely commitment-phobic.

In fact, Gen Z might just be the most risk-averse generation on record. Fewer Gen Zers got a driver’s license, drank alcohol, or had sex as teenagers than their parents did. The same young adults now report skyrocketing rates of anxiety and other mental illnesses, with some estimates finding that as many as 1 in 5 18-to-24-year-olds have been diagnosed with depression. Timidity—not to mention self-conscious neuroticism—is increasingly the norm.

But how did Gen Z become so risk-averse? The most popular answers are a combination of too much time on social media exacerbated by pandemic isolation and a lack of childhood independence. While earlier cohorts spent their adolescence hanging out with friends away from adult supervision, Gen Z childhoods were defined by increasing isolation, screentime, and parental hovering.

An ongoing study from Montclair State University argues that some of this risk aversion is due to the current political climate—or perhaps young people’s perception of it. “Gen Z’s mental health has deteriorated due to a worldview that the society and environment around them are crumbling,” writes justice studies professor Gabriel Rubin. “Rights are being taken away, the Earth is burning, maniacs could kill you with a gun, and viruses could shut down society again.”

This generational cautiousness has unsurprisingly affected how young people approach sex and dating. If you never learned how to take social risks as a teenager, starting in adulthood will be that much harder. If the world seems like it’s teetering on the edge of disaster, it’s hard to focus on anything else. It’s also hard to place much confidence in official relationships. If everything else is “deteriorating,” why commit if it could all be taken away?

According to market researcher YouGov, 50 percent of Americans aged 18–34 say they’ve been in a situationship. Over the same period of time, a report from the dating app Hinge found that 56 percent of Gen Z Hinge users said that fear of rejection caused them to stop pursuing a relationship, and 57 percent admitted that they’d held back on confessing their feelings for fear it would be a “turn-off.” This anxiety extends off-app, too. A recent survey found that almost half of young men have never approached a woman in public before, with most reporting “fear of rejection” as their reason for holding back. These trends foster a pervasive culture of romantic risk aversion—one that encourages young people to put on a self-protective facade of detachment and apathy, of which situationships are a key part.

However, the situationship is not resulting in the outcomes young people say they want. Gen Zers, like other adults, are generally looking for committed partnerships, and most hope to get married someday. According to one Pew survey, only 15 percent of single daters under 40 were looking just for casual dates, and nearly 7 in 10 unmarried young adults say they want to get married someday. Another 2023 survey from wedding website the Knot found that only 8 percent of Gen Z respondents agreed that marriage was “outdated.”

However, despite these wishes, few are actively pursuing them—at least not at the same rates as their parents and grandparents. Researcher Lyman Stone estimates that among current 23-year-olds, only around 60 percent of women and 50 percent of men will have married by 35, down from around 80 percent in 1994.

At first glance, it seems strange that situationships would be treated as the less risky alternative to traditional dating. While traditional relationships come with a ready-made set of expectations and boundaries, a hallmark feature of a situationship is the sense of being unmoored. Drifting into a quasi-relationship doesn’t just mean straddling the line between a committed partnership and a fully transactional friend-with-benefits arrangement—it also means leaving behind the typical, somewhat reliable guidelines of traditional dating.

It’s a harder, murkier path, but for some Gen Zers, it feels like the safer one. Telling someone how you really feel about them carries the risk of intense discomfort, and many of us would rather avoid the potential conflict altogether. Maybe we’ll be greeted with an enthusiastic acceptance of our affections, but it’s just as likely that these “define-the-relationship” moments will end in tears and hurt feelings.

These moments are hard, and the blurred boundaries of a situationship make it easier to avoid—or at least delay—them, no matter what side of the arrangement you find yourself on.
For the partner on the losing side of a situationship, the arrangement works to delay inevitable rejection. Unrequited love hurts, and persisting in a situationship satisfies an immediate desire to stay with your partner, even if one can sense that, deep down, they’ll never get the commitment they actually want.

Of course, these conversations are difficult for everybody, not just Gen Z. No one likes to be rejected, and loving someone is vulnerable at any age. But Gen Z’s particularly high levels of risk aversion makes “What are we?” discussions harder than they have to be, and the normalization of situationships provides a tempting way to opt out of discomfort.

A situationship also makes it easier to break up with someone without, well, actually breaking up with them. “Ghosting”—ending a relationship by suddenly cutting off communication—has long haunted the cultural lexicon. In a 2023 survey, 77 percent of Gen Zers said they’ve ghosted someone before, and 84 percent of Gen Z and millennial respondents said they had been ghosted, 10 percent of them after several months of dating.

The rise of situationships “represents the continuing expression of the ambiguity that our contemporary culture offers,” says Brad Wilcox, who is a sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia as well as the author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Mediating our relationships online, Wilcox argues, has “further degraded young adults’ capacity … to have those challenging and difficult conversations both at the start of a relationship, but also in the midst of a relationship.”

Situationships enable all manner of antisocial behavior. If someone was never really your girlfriend or boyfriend, many young people believe you don’t owe them the satisfaction of a face-to-face conversation explaining why you don’t want to see them anymore. Breaking up with a girlfriend of several months over text or ghosting is cruel. But in a situationship, the etiquette is much less defined.

In the early days of the pandemic, I struck up a virtual flirtation with another student at my university. I was clawingly lonely—a one-two punch of lockdown and a dizzying breakup. A few Zoom dates became hourslong nightly video calls. When I went back to our college town to move my remaining possessions out of my apartment, we spent 36 straight hours together.

The problem was, I knew almost immediately that I didn’t like him. There wasn’t anything wrong with him, really. I just had the nearly immediate, gut-level feeling that he wasn’t for me. But he was someone to talk to, and more importantly for my bruised ego, he was someone who wanted to talk to me.

In the end, I used a petty political disagreement to end our quasi-relationship. The new school year was beginning, and even with stringent COVID restrictions, I couldn’t plausibly reject his offers to meet in person again. It was the coward’s way out, but I had let the emotional entanglement go on for far too long to be honest without seeming unforgivably cruel.

When I feel self-serving, I chalk up my behavior to a form of COVID-era psychosis. It was an embarrassing and unkind lapse in judgment. But whose judgment wouldn’t be impaired by months spent practically alone?

Too many young people haven’t emotionally progressed from the pandemic. In December 2020, 38 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds agreed that they experienced “feeling loneliness a lot of the day yesterday.” While that percentage had declined to 24 percent by February 2023, young adults still soared above the adult average of 13 percent. In all, twentysomethings in early 2023 were just as lonely as the adult average during the thick of lockdowns.

Situationships seem almost inevitable when more young people are lonely—those on both ends of the arrangement are more likely to stick with a situationship if it feels like it’s their only source of companionship. In turn, that loneliness feeds into another preexisting risk aversion: Being alone is scarier than ending an unsatisfying half-relationship.

Further, it’s easier to slide into something murky and undefined when you don’t have concrete expectations of what romantic relationships are even supposed to be like. Fewer young people have even had a traditional dating experience. In 2023, 76 percent of Gen Xers reported having a boyfriend or girlfriend during their teen years. For Gen Z’s young adults, it was just 56 percent.

Finding romantic stability shouldn’t be reserved for only the most gregarious—or obnoxiously persistent, depending on whom you ask—among us. But when risk aversion is the norm, anything other than passivity starts to seem terribly embarrassing: too eager, too excitable, and painfully needy.

“People definitely now have this horrible habit of ironic distance, and not wanting to be the person to ‘catch feelings’ first, because that implies a level of vulnerability,” Maria Pattison, a 23-year-old recent college graduate, told me. “If you just say, ‘Oh, well, we’re in a situationship,’ the responsibility of having to sort through your feelings … is completely waved away by this highly casual term.”

Maintaining that sense of “ironic distance” is a social imperative in many Gen Z circles. One of the worst social sins is being “cringe”—basically, overly earnest, cloying, and completely unaware of just how stupid you look. Enthusiasm, much less genuine emotion, can even be perceived as a kind of horrible oversharing.

“Ya’ll ever notice how stupid and embarrassing and ugly and cringe you get when you like someone?” said one young woman in a TikTok video with 1.5 million views. “When you like them, you care so much what they think about you and it fucks you up.”

Many of us now fear getting caught experiencing desire itself. It’s fine to want sex, but to want something deeper—an intimate, unguarded emotional connection—betrays a terribly uncool weakness. A renewed obsession with attachment theory has produced a glut of social media influencers who argue that a desire for frequent communication or affection from one’s partner is a sign of deep psychological damage. Caring at all—wanting to be loved—is all too easily pathologized.

This pressure inevitably has a gendered impact. A cool person—a cool girl in particular—has plenty of sex, but also experiences an almost inhuman lack of real desire. This figure is aspirational precisely because her lack of wanting means she can never really be rejected—her partners always like her more than she likes them. Lux Lisbon from The Virgin Suicides and Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World are just a couple of the examples that come to mind. Films like Lady Bird and Shiva Baby both focus on young women who try desperately but ultimately fail to be sexually adventurous but emotionally disinterested cool girls.

Dolly Alderton’s 2023 novel Good Material vividly captures why so many people fear allowing themselves to care deeply about a relationship. In the book, Andy, a 35-year-old stand-up comedian, is abruptly left by Jen, his girlfriend of almost four years. He muddles through the devastating breakup, eventually striking up a situationship with a 23-year-old woman named Sophie. Andy realizes he wants to end their relationship once he notices that Sophie, who had been affecting disinterest in formally dating him, is more interested than she had been letting on.

“A change in power has occurred and neither of us realized what was happening until it was done. In my experience, it happens in every single relationship that fails,” Andy says to himself. “It happened the other way around with me and Jen, which now feels almost unimaginable. Jen was the one who wouldn’t leave me alone in the very beginning. Then about three and a half months in, something shifted. I became the person who was more interested, who was pushing for more time together. She became the manager of Us—I would ask for things and she would grant them to me.”

“She was the one with all the power,” he concludes. “Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.”

Maintaining this sense of power has its downsides. Forcing yourself to appear disinterested ultimately makes your own feelings a source of secret shame—they become negative, inspiring guilt rather than excitement. As a result, we’ve embarked on a cohort-wide game of hard-to-get—preserving our dignity but compromising our chance to experience the companionship of another person who sees and loves you as you are.

But why do so many young people fear earnestness so much? What’s so uniquely terrible about neediness? Or even just having needs at all? For many Gen Zers, an online adolescence—spent at once on full public display, yet isolated from the close personal relationships that matter most—has made us pathologically defensive.

Ironically, as Gen Zers arrived in adolescence already performing themselves online, we’ve reached a strange impasse. So used to having cameras trained on our every move, presenting the best, most flattering version of ourselves at all times, many young people now act as if everyone is always watching. The fear of being uncool, of letting our true thoughts bubble too close to the surface, pervades our thoughts, even when alone.

Growing up under this self-imposed spotlight—constantly performing, always one misstep away from online shame—does to romance what having constant access to hundreds of images of yourself inevitably does to body image. Just as those pesky candid photos can make you painfully aware of physical flaws you would have never noticed in a less digital age, living online exposes you to all the cringe-inducing ways social interaction can go wrong. Avoiding hundreds of possible blunders renders it nearly impossible to loosen up and be yourself around someone else, something that’s essentially required if you want to find a fulfilling relationship.

A 2023 Gallup poll found that the average teenager spent 4.8 hours a day on social media, raising the question of how many adolescents ever disengage from this kind of public performance.

As a result, we’ve become stage actors in our own lives, eagerly performing for an online audience, but so afraid of social error, afraid of causing offense, afraid of having our desires perceived, that intense self-protection seems not just safe, but morally correct. There is a prevailing sense that a good person relies on others as little as possible—no one wants to ask their friends to perform “emotional labor,” or be guilty of “trauma dumping.” Getting close to someone and seeking their emotional intimacy is frequently cast as burdensome.

You can find this shift in something as seemingly innocuous as increasing rates of phone call anxiety among youth. For many young people, any form of communication that requires someone’s immediate attention has become generally stigmatized. Texts are fine, but don’t expect prompt responses. Out-of-the-blue phone calls are for emergencies and are frequently answered with a mix of confusion and concern. Meanwhile, browsing the feeds of popular relationship influencers targeting young people gives the impression that we should aim to be atomized hyperindividuals who rely on others as little as possible. Asking your partner for attention, comfort, or even fidelity (the rise in polyamory seems driven in part by the idea that it’s unfairly stifling to not want your partner to sleep with other people) is asking undue labor of them. Maybe they should draw better boundaries, maybe you’re toxic, maybe you have an anxious attachment style.

“Now I understand why people be single for so long,” reads the text of one viral TikTok video.
“It’s like, once you become single and understand how worthy your peace is you just don’t wanna give that up for just anybody.”

Too many young people seem to believe that romantic relationships primarily exist as an add-on to an already fully realized life, rather than a union with a flawed person with whom you’re building something greater than the sum of your parts. When mutual acceptance is tossed aside in favor of a single-minded drive to “protect our peace,” our relationships become brittle and transactional.

Unhappy situationships, like all other doomed romances, end eventually. You can’t escape the risk of a devastating breakup by feigning disinterest. But unlike in a formal relationship, you end up with a lot less to hold on to when all is said and done. I asked Maria, my friend who dated someone without really dating him at all, if sliding into a situationship ever saved her any heartbreak. “No,” she told me. “It did not save me any hurt whatsoever.”

“By not calling someone, say, ‘my boyfriend,’ he actually becomes something else, something indefinable,” college sophomore Jordana Narin wrote in a 2015 Modern Love essay. While the phenomenon Narin describes wasn’t yet called a “situationship,” she vividly describes the muddled heartbreak at the end of one. “What we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity to move on.”

The problem, though, is that a life spent avoiding pain at all costs is inevitably a small and lonely one. You can’t find love without the risk of loss. It speaks to a deficiency of meaning in our culture that so many young people are looking at this tradeoff and deciding that avoiding heartbreak and rejection is more important than finding lasting partnership. Other people, it seems, just aren’t worth the unpredictability they invariably bring into our lives.

Gen Zers are setting themselves up to be one of the loneliest generations in recent memory. Too many of us will spend our adulthood without emotional intimacy and without the relationships that marked our parents’ and grandparents’ lives. It’s not too late to change course, but cultural trends as pervasive as this are hard to dislodge.

Young people desperately want to be happy. But too many of us don’t know how or can’t access the bravery to open our lives to it. What allows us to save face in the short term is precisely what’s leading to long-term dissatisfaction. We know, deep down, where to find the way out. The question is whether we can summon the courage to begin.