Do you remember that scene in Terminator 2 when the Connors are hiding in Mexico, and John Connor, after seeing two boys fighting, asks the Terminator, “We’re not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.”
That is how I felt reading the new book Generation Uncoupled by Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life.
This isn’t meant as a criticism. Cox tells us the opening chapters of his book are “meant to instill a sense of urgency about the fraying of our relational lives.” And in those chapters, he thoroughly establishes how our “most critical relational experiences are disappearing” and that “without a course correction, we face social starvation at a societal level.”
The stats Cox cites are striking. Only 56% of Gen Z had a boyfriend or girlfriend during their teenage years, compared to 69% of millennials, 76% of Generation X, and 78% of baby boomers. Fewer than half of teenagers now think they are very likely to have children, compared with nearly two-thirds in the early 1990s. And the share of teenage girls interested in marriage fell from 83% in 1993 to 61% in 2023.
Generation Uncoupled: America’s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection; By Daniel Cox; Harmony; 368 pp.; $30.00
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Generation Uncoupled: America’s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection; By Daniel Cox; Harmony; 368 pp.; $30.00
And as Cox shows, this retreat from romance is part of a broader collapse in social connection. Only 40% of Gen Z regularly socialized with friends during their teenage years, compared with 54% of millennials and 60% of Generation X. And teens now spend just 57 minutes a day with friends outside of school, down from 197 minutes two decades ago. That is a 71% decline.
Cox identifies many culprits pushing us apart, none bigger than the social media we consume on our cellphones. As recently as 2005, just 7% of Americans had at least one social media account. Today 80% do, including 95% of teenagers who spend five hours a day on their social media platforms.
Whatever promise social media may have had to better connect us to our friends and family, it isn’t being realized. Cox’s Survey Center on American Life found that while just 28% of social media users regularly interact with friends or family online, almost 40% say they rarely or never do. Instead of sharing and commenting on our loved ones’ content, most people are just doomscrolling through professionally curated content.
And that content is warping our reality.
A generation ago, Harvard professor Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, blamed television for undermining civil society by encouraging Americans to stay home and watch TV instead of venturing out to Rotary Clubs, Moose lodges, and bowling leagues. But at least with television we had a common culture. There were four, maybe five channels, and we all watched the same shows and shared the same viewing experiences.
Social media is the exact opposite. Algorithms feed us content specially tailored to our tastes. Two people sitting next to each other can spend hours scrolling without seeing a single story, joke, or video in common. One gets parenting advice and home renovations — another gets sports highlights and political outrage. Every pause, click, and share helps the platform refine its predictions about what will keep each person watching. Instead of giving us shared experiences to discuss, our screens draw us deeper into separate worlds. We lose both the time we might have spent together and the common ground that makes conversation easier.
Worse, one of the biggest factors determining which online world we inhabit is gender. Cox cites an analysis of nearly 15 million TikTok videos that found men and women are being sorted into separate content silos with little overlap. And those feeds too often encourage mutual contempt. Young men encounter videos portraying women as shallow opportunists interested only in tall, wealthy men. Young women see men belittling women over their sexual histories, while videos mocking shorter men attract approving female audiences. Each feed supplies fresh reasons to distrust the opposite sex, turning the most callous behavior into an apparent statement about what men or women are really like. Before young people have much romantic experience of their own, their phones are teaching them to expect the worst.
Cox doesn’t quite come out and say it, but this negative gender messaging has had a bigger effect on women than it has on men. One consequence is a growing sense of fear. The share of women younger than 50 who at least occasionally worry about sexual assault rose from fewer than 40% before 2015 to 57% in 2023, despite no corresponding documented increase in physical danger. Cox acknowledges the real harms of online harassment and cyberstalking. But an endless stream of assault stories, warnings about predatory men, and instructions for protecting oneself also reinforces the belief that ordinary encounters with men require constant vigilance.
That fear becomes collective through what researchers call “linked fate.” Two-thirds of women younger than 30 believe what happens to other women directly affects their own lives, a sentiment especially strong among young single women. Another woman’s mistreatment becomes a warning about their own futures. Sharing these experiences can provide support and solidarity, but it can also amplify anxiety and helplessness, extending the emotional impact of an assault far beyond the person who experienced it. There is no corresponding sense of solidarity among men.
These increasingly different experiences also accompany a widening political divide. Cox finds that the ideological gap initially grew because young women moved left while young men’s political views remained largely unchanged. Those differences increasingly determine whom women will consider dating. Half of single women, including nearly three-quarters of college-educated single women, say they would not date a Trump supporter. The distrust cultivated in separate online worlds thus becomes another obstacle to forming relationships in the world they share.
Where social media pushes women left and makes them afraid, cellphones have made men less desirable partners and less motivated to find love. Gambling apps turn sports into a constant opportunity to wager money, pornography offers sexual gratification without intimacy, and online gaming communities provide companionship without ever leaving the bedroom. Each supplies an immediate reward that can make the uncertain work of dating seem less appealing. Hours that might have been spent meeting people, building confidence, or nurturing a relationship disappear into activities that demand little of the patience, compromise, and responsibility that sharing a life with someone requires.
The third part of Cox’s book promises “A Path to Reconciliation,” but what little hope that is offered up is thin gruel. He praises schools for beginning to ban cellphones during the school day, but that isn’t going to help get teens to hang out in person after school. He calls for health classes that teach boys and girls how to communicate with one another, but social skills aren’t learned through lectures — they require experience. Cox also calls for co-ed intramural sports after school, but if anything, too many of our real-world spaces are co-ed these days. Women have plenty of spaces to be with other women, but boys have been systematically denied their own gendered safe spaces (see the recent death of the Boy Scouts).
Cox does acknowledge that men without college degrees have been hardest hit by the growing gender divide. Among men aged 24 to 35, 50% without a four-year degree are single, compared with just 31% of college graduates. Men with college degrees are simply more likely to have a job, and having a job is the prerequisite for entering the dating world. Cox cites one study he conducted in which he asked men and women which of 20 attributes was important in a romantic partner. For women, but not men, one stood out: employment status. Having a job was more important to women than height, politics, religion, or education.
The simple reality is that despite all that has changed between men and women over the last 50 years, women still expect their romantic partners to be providers. More than 70% of Americans say a man’s ability to support a family helps make him a good partner, compared with 32% who say the same about women.
HOCUS POCUS MAKES ROMANCE GO POOF
It would seem one obvious solution to our uncoupled generation would be to help men without college degrees get the jobs they need to become possible romantic options for women. But Cox, for some reason, does not go down this path.
Helping men find work and love seems worth a try before surrendering humanity’s future to our phones. Skynet wasted a fortune on killer robots. Turns out it could have just kept us scrolling until we died out.
Conn Carroll is the commentary editor for the Washington Examiner.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
