2023 was the year of the victim. 2024 was the year of the loser. 2025 was the year everything started to break. Not literally, of course. Things have felt off for a few years now, but this was the year things started to feel worse. I’m normally an optimist, but 2025 tested my faith in new and surprising ways.

The Year Dating Broke

Last year, I wrote about the rise of polyamory as a sign of a wider system shutdown: monogamy, which promised safety, security, and stability for decades, was no longer delivering the returns it had in the past. Simply stated, it made sense to me that people were seeking new relationship patterns when the world had shifted so dramatically.

In one generation, young people mostly lost the ability to own their own homes, saw college prices double (more on this below), saw the collapse of dozens of industries (more on this below), saw the prices of childcare skyrocket, etc. Under basically every metric, things went from decent to bad to horrific, and on top of everything else, dating and intimacy became the final battlegrounds for people to enact a series of ideological battles. 2025 was the year the Intimacy Crisis was made manifest. Welcome to the age of sangfroid.

In March, The Wall Street Journal published the provocatively named “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage”, a piece that compiled statistics and interviews into a cogent portrait of the crisis facing American women dating today. A woman named Katie Kirsch stated “dating is ‘the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started”, and immediately went viral on X. The general populace was confused: by all standards of American logic, Kirsch was a catch. As a thin, conventionally attractive, successful (Stanford and HBS graduate), white woman, the screeching masses were confused why she, of all people, was unmarried.

I’ve posted at length about incel logic and the way incels have won the internet, with new slogans and terminology trickling out of 4chan daily: 2025 brought us “foid”, “mid tier Becky”, and positively horrifying ways to measure your skull to determine how attractive you are in “the marketplace”. Looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular went viral this year for admitting to injecting m*th daily for hollow cheeks, and declared Sydney Sweeney was average due to “poor infraorbital support” and a “recessed upper maxilla”. Like I said, horrifying. Reducing Kirsch’s situational singleness to one of demographics, people simply couldn’t believe she was single out of an overreliance on incel logic.

Kirsch’s situation is one borne out by the data: most people in her social class marry other people in that social class in a process called assortative matching, this TikTok driven Pretty Woman ideal of a very very beautiful woman being saved from the middle class by a rich man is not really seen in the data). Additionally, with divides in educational attainment widening, women who have bachelor’s degrees or higher are simply not able to find an equal number of men with similar educations. From the WSJ:

The challenges of finding a romantic partner have been made more complicated by a growing divide in education and career prospects between men and women. In 2024 47% of American women ages 25-34 had a bachelor’s degree, according to Pew, compared with 37% of men.

On TikTok, there’s currently a conversation in the Black community around these same educational attainment gaps. Due to an intergroup marriage preference, Black women are far less likely to marry someone who isn’t Black, with only 7% marrying someone who doesn’t identify as Black. Educational attainment plays out as follows:

The increasing gender gap between bachelor’s degree-holders in America was found across every major racial group, with the largest race-gender gap found among Black Americans. Today, roughly 38 percent of young Black women have earned a college degree, compared to just 26 percent of Black men. (JBHE/Pew Data)

If Black women mostly want to marry someone Black, and most Americans want to marry someone in their same educational attainment bracket, you immediately see how the numbers simply don’t shake out. A few years ago, Real Housewife of New York Eboni K. Williams was attacked online for stating she would never marry a bus driver (Williams is a lawyer and pundit, appearing regularly as a talking head on political opinion shows). Conversations around classism and elitism spring up when people have a stated preference, but the conversations become infinitely more complicated when thinking about the very real (and data proven) roadblocks towards higher education across class lines, and especially racial lines.

Similarly, the 2024 election brought the widening political gaps into stark relief:

Around 39% of women ages 18 to 29 identified as liberal in 2024, according to Gallup, compared with 25% of their male peers. This gap has more than tripled in a decade: 32% of women and 28% of men called themselves liberal in 2014. (WSJ/Gallup)

We understand that politics aren’t only about how people vote, but about the values they champion. It’s hard to imagine partnership with someone who disagrees with you about gender roles, expectations of labor divisions, childcare, and even whether you should work or not after having children.

Circling back to rising conservatism being connected to the idea of a rich person swooping down to save people from themselves, it makes a sick sort of sense. In The Sociology of Begging Someone to Marry You, I wrote about the horror of modern divisions of labor, with women shouldering the vast majority of domestic duties after marriage, even if they work full-time. This fantasy of marrying someone rich enough to inoculate you from both working full-time and from cooking/cleaning/caring for children makes sense when presented starkly: the fantasy isn’t specifically about being chosen by a millionaire, the fantasy is of a life free from the pressures of modern heterosexual partnership. The horror lurks inside the home.

On top of this, we’re in a cultural moment of women stepping forward to admit how difficult mothering is, with numerous books and three movies specifically about how difficult it is to be the primary caregiver hitting theaters in 2025 alone (One Battle After Another, Die, My Love, and If I had Legs I’d Kick You). All Her Fault on Peacock also examined the horror of modern partnership, with women being blamed for accidents and failings both quotidian and catastrophic: forgetting to pack a lunch, forgetting to call a nanny’s references, having a child kidnapped.

Zooming out a little, the Intimacy Crisis isn’t only affecting young people: In June, Men, Where Have You Gone? went viral, detailing a Gen Xers (the author was 54) struggles with dating men who were accustomed to hiding behind a virtual wall when communicating with others. Candace Bushnell, the iconic author of Sex and the City, detailed her struggles with dating Boomers (men in their sixties) in the Hamptons this summer, with men having too many options and wanting sex without intimacy. In January, The Atlantic published The Agony of Texting with Men, a piece connecting some men’s inability to answer texts with the Loneliness Crisis.

It’s clear something is happening. If people in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties are having issues dating and communicating, clearly something is the matter. In The Slow Demise of American Romance, author Faith Hill quotes a study that highlights a growing cycle of resentment between straight men and women due to men’s feelings about women’s educational and professional success and women hating a culture that pushes them to hook up:

…both women and men believe that their gender disadvantages them. When so many men feel underappreciated and so many women feel mistreated, it creates a vicious cycle of resentment.

On top of this, there are also people who have functionally quit dating altogether. In The People Who Quit Dating, The Atlantic spoke to six people who completely stopped trying to find a partner across various age brackets. There have also been a number of articles about Gen Z leaving the dating apps because they feel “transactional, laborious and scripted”. Others concur.

I made a video last year about Hinge and the comments were absolutely flooded with people who concurred the app was hiding likes based on user engagement, and while they’ve held the company line that the app doesn’t assign people ratings based on an algorithm for attractiveness, I simply don’t believe them. On top of that, prices have skyrocketed and it’s become clearer than ever that people on dating apps exist in a state of financial and emotional blackmail, being fleeced by the tantalizing possibility of meeting a partner on an app (Zohran did it!). In September, I saw the CEO of Match Group speak about how AI will revolutionize dating and how the plan is to bring in-person events to the apps in order to spark joy among the disillusioned swipers. For some reason, I don’t believe AI is the answer.

Deus Ex Machina

Tell the Bees

·

May 2, 2025

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This season of Love Island brought all of this to the forefront. Viewers were stumped by the emotional manipulation, gameplaying, and coldness by which the contestants approached their connections, but I wasn’t. This is just how people date now. Everyone on Substack is a yearner or a lover girl or in a situationship, apparently, but most people out there are playing a game of frigid emotional chess, refusing to share too much lest they be deemed cringe, extra, or off putting. Hell, even the act of posting a partner online once you attain them has been deemed embarrassing (I talked about this at length on ICYMI!).

For these reasons, I think Materialists is actually the movie that speaks the most to how we date in 2025. Materialists stars Dakota Johnson as a chilly matchmaker to the uber-wealthy torn between working class actor Chris Evans and millionaire Pedro Pascal. While conversations around this film centered around “broke boy propaganda”, the discourse itself revealed more about where we are as a society than anything else: director Celine Song waxed poetic about how important love is, and the idiocy of trying to manifest a perfect partner using math, facts, and figures.

Viewers, on the other hand, could only focus on the marketplace of it all (and here we loop back to the incel logic): a partner who is wealthy is more important than a partner who is kind, or gentle, or caring. While Chris Evans is kind of a loser in the film (sorry, blame the writing!) the frank discussions of weight, height, race, and class broke my sociological brain a bit. Obviously class and education matters— I famously hated the “invisible string theory” TikTok trend because nine times out of ten, middle class white people will marry other middle class white people (we had beach houses next to one another and didn’t start dating until we were in our twenties isn’t a love story, it’s geography and propinquity)— but seeing human beings break down other human beings into bits and bobs in order to calculate their worth was horrifying. When did everyone become a butcher, weighing other people’s potential like slabs of meat? When did everyone become a stockbroker, gambling on possibilities based on demographics?

When I see discussions of the chopped man epidemic or looksmaxxing or any of the thousand other trends that attempt to reify physical attractiveness into actual worth, I shudder. A movie attempting to sell us on the power of love trumping money becoming lost in the mire of dating discourse further entrenches the mentality of dating as mental and emotional warfare. Two generations (Tinder was invented in 2012) of emotionally stunted people further damaged by poisonous social media discourse about who gets to fall in love stumbling blindly into the future: what could go wrong?

Further Observations:

The Year the Economy Broke

In September 2024, I wrote about the economy. While I am (famously) not an economist, I noticed that post 2020, the vibe online had shifted tremendously, and people were complaining about rising inflation, rising costs of consumer goods, higher bills, and layoffs more than ever.

This year, things got worse. Childcare costs continue to outpace inflation around the country (updated 2025 data), home prices continue to rise, wedding prices continue to rise, average tuition for both public and private four year colleges has essentially doubled in the last 30 years (after adjusting for inflation). On top of this, Americans don’t believe four-year college degrees are worth what they cost due to the state of the economy and the massive amounts of student loan debt people are burdened with, leading to extreme levels of malaise. The New York Times interviewed a number of Millennials who, on paper, are doing better than their parents ever did, but seem to be constricted in every other way: after paying rent, student loans, bills, and for childcare, they’re broke. One said:

Now an analyst for a chemical company with a household income of about $150,000, he likes his lifestyle in Hamburg, Pa., and wants to keep it.

“We live in the richest country in the history of human civilization, so why can’t I eat out twice a week and have kids?” he said.

Speaking of inflation, per the WSJ, The Middle Class Is Buckling Under Almost Five Years of Persistent Inflation, and “people are growing tired of an economy in which everything seems to get more expensive”. Electricity is up 13% nationally, car insurance is up, prices of beef and coffee and cereal and milk and bread are all up.

Unemployment is also up, by the way. Economists will say we’re not in a recession and it’s DoorDash and Uber’s fault, but I genuinely don’t know. What markers are we meant to use to quantify misery? If the job market is worse than ever, and everything is more expensive, and everyone is unhappy, what exactly are we meant to take away from the charts and figures economists trot out to placate the population? I write about trends and I write about what I see, and what I see is that people are unhappier than they’ve ever been.

The Year Industry Broke

In early December, advertising giant Omnicom “merged” with advertising giant IPG, cutting 4,000 jobs in the process. WBD, fresh off a merger that obliterated a number of divisions (26% of the overall workforce in 2022, 10% of the film group in 2025) is deciding whether it will merge with Netflix or Paramount, either of which will lead to between 5,000-10,000 jobs lost in an already gutted Hollywood. Paramount merged with Skydance and laid off 2,000 people in October.

Journalism has been gutted by layoffs for a decade now, but the rapid advancement of AI has led to a veritable slaughter. TheWrap details 2025 layoffs at Dotdash Meredith, WaPo, Forbes, CNN, PBS, CBS News, and Business Insider.

Obviously, these are specific jobs in specific sectors, but overall, a grim portrait is being painted. PE is gutting retail (Newsweek details the closures of Joann’s Fabrics, Red Lobster, Party City, and Big Lots, victims of PE gobbling up stores, stripping them for parts, and shutting them down, leaving thousands unemployed).

Tech, whose workers smugly spent a decade telling everyone to learn to code, has been roiled by layoffs for the last two years, with Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta laying off hundreds this year as they restructure, optimize, and downsize. Target, UPS, and Verizon also enacted layoffs this year. And that’s on top of the 9% of the federal workforce that was slashed by DOGE.

That makes tech, media, journalism, retail, CPG, federal jobs… I once applied for a job at the mayor’s office, believing that a government job would be safe from the constant turmoil and economic downturns experienced by basically every industry in New York outside of finance or medicine (healthcare is also looking at massive layoffs in q4 and going into q1 2026). I’m not sure what the answer is, but combined with the economic data above, the portrait is decidedly terrifying.

The Year Reality TV Broke

Not really ending on a high note, but I briefly discussed how Selling Sunset absolutely crashed and burned by trying to avoid politics this year. Chrishell Stause, the sole queer cast member on the cast and the undisputed star of the show, was alienated by the rest of the cast and subjected to thousands of hate comments from MAGA due to her pointing out Emma Hernan’s boyfriend used the n-word and aggressively reposted hateful MAGA TikToks on his account. The cast decided this was beyond the pale (with the sin of her pointing it out being treated more gravely than the actual sin of his hatefulness) and bullied her, isolated her, and forced her to leave the show.

Selling the OC delivered its worst season ever by focusing on the feud between Alex Hall (truly one of the most unpleasant people ever put on television) and a pregnant 24-year-old. RHONY crashed and burned after one of the cast members decided to weaponize her experience with SA against another (I wrote about this at length). New shows about age gap dating, virgins, and the Mar-a-Lago set have made little to no noise.

Love Island USA delivered a horrific season based on emotional gameplaying, frigidity, and calculating losers circling around one another, determining who could get them the farthest on the show rather than pairing with those they actually liked. Roiled by two separate racist scandals, the machinations of the contestants were further amplified by the absolutely toxic social media discourse. On TikTok, viewers called each other antiblack and Islamophobic depending on who they supported, and post show, discourse got worse when two TikTokers doxxed and threatened one another with cease and desists. I spoke to Vulture about the parasocial crisis, and I genuinely think people were projecting onto reality star contestants, making them avatars for morality plays. Something is rotten in the state of reality TV, and I think 2026 will mark a true shift in seeing actual, interesting stories about humanity on television vs. influencers seeking followers and fame (and almost guaranteed horror post-show). Viewers are hip to the game now, and the sheer amount of televised slop will mean programmers will need to be more discerning about what makes it onto our screens.

That’s a wrap! See you in the new year— thank you, as always, for following, engaging, watching, commenting, emailing— I see it, I honor it, and it truly means the world to me. Thank you all!