Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsReports confirming the death of young love are pouring in: Post-COVID declines in dating aren’t rebounding. Way fewer teens and young adults are having sex. In 2019, 42 percent of single adults younger than 40 told Pew Research Center that they’d never been in a committed relationship.Thirty years ago, my friends and I thought of romance and marriage much the same way screenwriters did: They were just the expected ending. Now this attitude seems to be less and less the norm. It’s not that people don’t want romantic relationships. But chasing them feels to people like it exacts too much of a toll. So over time, they’ve become less of a priority. As a result, we have entered what The Atlantic’s staff writer Faith Hill calls the “great romance slump,” in which romance is no longer the center of people’s lives.Hill created a survey and sent it to people all over the country. She heard from men, women, nonbinary people, queer people, and straight people. From their answers and insights from research, Hill came up with solid theories about why more people are giving up on love.On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Hill explains what’s driving the romance slump, and what its long-term implications are for families, the economy, and politics. And we hear from two people Hill interviewed who have given up, at least for now.The following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: It didn’t happen all at once. Instead, the modern disenchantment with romance unfolded slowly, subtly, but still unmistakably. Post COVID, young people stopped dating as much. If you talk to them about why, what you hear is exhaustion with the apps—the whole hassle of combing through matches, chatting, finding a mutually convenient time, and then dragging yourself out of the house to meet a total stranger.All of that started to seem less important than seeing friends, caring for family, getting some work done, watching the series that everyone else was talking about. These shifts were made one by one, inside people’s heads. And then all of these individual decisions accumulated over time and turned into something new, something which staff writer Faith Hill calls the romance slump.Rosin: I have a question for you, as my colleague. Are you the romance reporter? Is that your actual job?Faith Hill: (Laughs.) You know, I’m proud to hold that mantle. I report on some other things, too, but romance and dating and singlehood specifically has kind of become a big thing for me.Rosin: That’s amazing. So The Atlantic has a romance-and-relationship reporter, and that is you.Hill: I guess so.[Music]Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Faith spent the last several months reporting on what she called the great romance slump. In the last 40 or so years, we’ve seen huge drops in both marriage and cohabitation rates, especially among 25-to-34-year-olds.Hill: But there’s also just a shrinking share of young adults who have a steady partner. And, you know, in 2019, 42 percent of single adults younger than 40 told Pew Research Center that they’d never been in a committed relationship.Rosin: That is the statistic that really surprised me.Hill: I felt the same when I saw that, and I think it’s important to talk about because it’s pretty easy to shrug off the declining marriage rates as kind of: The institution of marriage is not as important to people. You can easily have romance without marriage.Rosin: Or intimacy without marriage, or children without marriage.Hill: Right. Exactly. But that’s not the only thing going on. You know, it’s not just about sort of views towards marriage, and I think this is really quite a profound change.Rosin: Listening to you, I see why you called your story “The Great Romance Slump,” because it is something of a resignation. It’s kind of like a shrug.Faith: Yes. That’s exactly it. I liked the term for that reason. It, you know, has this kind of subtle, almost passive feel to it. You know, it’s not a sudden and dramatic plummet. It’s not that active. Like, it’s not people all swearing off romance, but rather sort of a lot of people kind of slowly giving up on it kind of captures this pessimism and fatigue.Rosin: Yeah. It’s like a slight bad smell in the air.Faith: Yeah, exactly. But it also implies that it’s not necessarily permanent. You know, you can come back from a slump, so there’s that too.Rosin: Okay, let’s get into some of the reasons this is happening. Some I can just guess right off the bat. I did write a book called The End of Men about a decade ago, so I did a lot of study into how men’s and women’s relationships were changing, and just the basic fact of women being more financially independent, women being able to buy houses. We can have credit cards now—amazing—have any career you want.So the basic idea that you need a man in order to survive is just not true anymore. What are some of the other reasons that you came across? Or at least, what’s your take on the cause?Hill: I think that there’s kind of a combination of people needing romance less than they used to, which is great, and also dating being hard in these, you know, very specific frustrating ways. You hear so much about the dating apps, of when people talk about singlehood and romance, and a lot of times, I think people are talking about the sort of distance of the technology making it easier to ghost and people being on bad behavior because of that, kind of a lack of accountability.[Music]Hill: And also, you hear a lot about the kind of paradox of choice—like, people are just swimming in options. And I think there’s truth there. But I do kind of think, you know, the big thing that comes to mind for me when I consider online dating is just the toll that it takes on people. You know, when you’re having to set aside time and energy and money to meet strangers, to suss them out on the app, and then meet up with them, and then, you know, try to keep the momentum up, it just is a huge toll.And, you know, I think that toll means that a lot of people, like, want a relationship but aren’t going to prioritize it. But I think the combination of dating being kind of exhausting and time-consuming and requiring sacrifice from other areas of life, and singlehood being so normal and doable, it starts to make it very easy for romance to just, like, not be the top thing that you wanna pursue.And, you know, when you want romance but don’t need it, and you don’t feel like it’s gonna be easy to get, and you don’t feel optimistic about those chances or about the people you would be dating, a lot of people are just gonna give it up.Rosin: And so if you were a sociologist, what would be the sentence? Like, what is the headline in the world of romance that merits bigger attention?Hill: Well, I would say, you know, romance is obviously a very broad term. Under that umbrella, you know, you might fit sex, dating, partnership, marriage. But all of these forms, particularly among young people, seem to be on the decline.And I think that shift has a lot of downstream implications. You know, it’s changing how and whether people have families, how people spend their time, how they spend their money, potentially who they vote for. And, you know, if romance is no longer the center of nearly everyone’s life, something else is.[Music]Rosin: How fed up with romance do people have to be before they give up? The line is different for everyone, but there are some patterns in people’s breaking points. Faith created a survey and sent it far and wide—she heard back from men, women, nonbinary people, queer, straight, and living in all different parts of the country.One loud theme that emerges, from the respondents but also from the research, is a gender gap—more women giving up on men, not trusting them to be supportive in the right ways, not getting what they need from them, and not willing to give so much when they’re not getting back.One of the people that Faith talked to was a woman named Treasure, who drifted away from romance and then did find new things to put at the center of her life.Hill: Treasure is a 39-year-old woman in Chicago who has been single for a long time, and she’s loving it.Treasure: I have been single now for 10 years.Hill: She, for many years, was trying to date seriously, trying to find someone to marry. She was, you know, really a romantic and had high hopes about it.Treasure: From 18 to about 27, I took dating very seriously.Hill: She was engaged four different times. In each one, she felt like she was contributing half financially, and yet she was also doing all of the child care. She has three children.Treasure: I already had two children before I turned 18. I started off as a teen mother. All four relationships failed because it’s like raising another child.Hill: After that fourth relationship ended, the fourth engagement, that was really the last straw for her.Treasure: I’m going to get extremely personal here, but I had a miscarriage, and my significant other at the time noticed that I was depressed and noticed that I was upset, and I kept trying to explain to him, “Well, you know, my hormones are changing right now.” I was already four months along. I was like, “I’m really sad right now. I know you feel like you need attention, but right now I can’t do this. This isn’t about you.”Hill: She said, “You know, the one time that I need something from him, his support, he couldn’t be there.”Treasure: In my mind, it was like I overperform in these relationships, and when it comes down to the wire and something is needed for me from them, I was not receiving it. And if that’s the case, then what is the purpose?Hill: I think she just felt really exhausted by holding everyone else up and feeling like the mother to the partners she had.Treasure: That was the last time for me. I was like, “This isn’t for me.”[Music]Hill: She likes to say, you know, she realized if she wasn’t gonna find a husband, she had to make “husband money.” So she did a bunch of training and an apprenticeship, and she ended up becoming a technical engineer in a union job, and that totally changed the financial picture for her, where she felt like, you know, she could be single and take care of her kids herself.Treasure: I've been in the trades now for nine years, and I choose not to date anymore.Hill: When she first gave up on dating and romance, she felt really lonely. I think it was a big change. But she realized she just had to start replacing what she had gotten from those partnerships with other things.Treasure: I adjusted, and I made more friends, and I found myself again. I have new hobbies and go places alone. I travel alone. I go to the movies alone. I go out to dinner alone. I’m literally dating myself, and I’m so much happier. I am the one for me.Hill: She wishes that she could have found the relationship that she once dreamed about, but she said, “I think at this point, it’s a fantasy.”Treasure: It’s kinda like, How do you get it all? Is there a way? I haven’t found it. I had to give up romantic love with a spouse in order to achieve everything else that I wanted.Rosin: That’s so interesting. It’s like when Esther Perel says we look to our partners and we expect everything from them, and that’s not realistic. It sounds like she just took the everything and divided it among people—like, I’m gonna have best friends here. I’m gonna have a community there. I’m gonna make money here, and maybe she just has sex somewhere else. You know?Hill: Right. Exactly.Rosin: I bet that there are women who can definitely relate to that. Does she seem happy to you now?Hill: She really does seem happy. Yeah. She was, I think, one of the happiest people I talked to for this story.I found that really beautiful to kind of realize that if you can sort of round that bend psychologically, sometimes you just can grow to love your life in the way it is if you sort of lean into it. I don’t think it would necessarily be the same for everyone, but Treasure is really independent, and she has great friendships and meaningful work. I think she just had such a hard time trying to find love that, in comparison, she feels so free.Rosin: It’s important, because I guess she counts as a post-romance model. Like, it’s not for everyone, but that is a template that might work for some people. Because she did wanna have a romantic relationship at some point. She sought it. She tried many times. And so for anyone in that situation, this is an alternate model that’s maybe hopeful at the other side.Did you have a sense of how typical she was?Hill: Yeah, I’ve talked to a lot of people who have sort of stopped searching for romance. I think she might be a little atypical in just how much she’s loving it and thriving.But I’ve talked to a lot of people who say that they would welcome a relationship if it fell in their lap, but they’re not gonna search for it. They just can’t do that anymore. They’re too exhausted. They spent too much time on it. They wanna focus on other things.And I actually talked to one researcher who said, you know, she had to stop asking in studies whether people were “actively” looking for a relationship, because what resonated more with people was whether they were “open” to a relationship.[Music]Rosin: It’s also interesting because the word slump is sort of a negative word, but Treasure’s case implies that the romance slump is not necessarily a negative thing, because it does open up alternate possibilities, particularly for women.Hill: I think that’s definitely the hope. And, you know, I think for some people like Treasure, who can kind of pull this off and find meaning and community in all these other ways, it could be really beautiful.And of course, it is a great thing that this change is happening, partly because women are able to live independently and focus on other things. So I definitely don’t think the shift is all negative. At the same time, you know, the majority of single people do still say that they want a long-term partnership.And so for me, that’s kind of at the heart of this story. You know, what happens to the people who want love and are struggling to find it or give up on it altogether? I do think that there’s real loss there that we can take seriously, even if, you know, it does open up sort of new ways to think about purpose and community and meaning.Rosin: Next up: the men. What’s their experience of the romance slump? That’s after the break.[Break] Rosin: Okay. We’ve talked about the women’s point of view. What about the men? I wanna talk about one of the guys you interviewed, Arthur. Can you tell me about him?Hill: Arthur is a guy in his 40s who has spent many years dating. He’s had one-off dates here and there. He’s dated some people for a month or so. He’s had some one-to-two-year relationships. But he’s always felt like it just kind of hasn’t totally worked out.Arthur: It was always kinda like hedged by them saying stuff like, “Oh, you’re nice and everything. We’ve had some good times, but honestly, you’re not really right for me.”Hill: Some exes have kind of told him that they feel like he’s almost too nice.Arthur: I’m not sure how to square that. Like, I mean, I will be, you know, the man and, you know, make all the plans and execute and everything if you want.Hill: You know, they want him to kind of be more decisive or be the man in the relationship.Arthur: But I mean, that does kinda come at the cost of me being somewhat less, you know, supportive and more demanding, because it kinda has to be that way.Hill: One person said that he has “dad” energy.Arthur: I’m not 100 percent sure what that means, but I’m guessing it’s not very sexy.Rosin: Ugh.Hill: Right?Rosin: That’s trauma. I mean, that could be great, I guess, but it sounds like he did not take it as a good thing.Hill: Right, and I think this person didn’t take it as a good thing in the romantic context. She wasn’t looking for “dad” energy.Rosin: Yeah. That gets into something very important, which is the impossible dilemma that men seem to be in.It’s very hard to know how to be, because you mentioned earlier that part of the problem between Treasure, who we talked about, and lots of women, was that men could not see their needs or weren’t open or communicative enough. And yet, here is poor Arthur maybe trying to be that way and getting dinged for it.Did you hear men talk about their confusion over roles?Hill: Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re in a kind of confusing in-between time, where there are sort of these new standards for men that they’re trying to reach, like this—you know, being kind and communicative and emotionally open—but at the same time, the old standards haven’t really gone away fully.So a lot of men did still feel like they were expected to pay for everything on the dates and, kind of, take the lead on everything, initiate flirting, kissing. And they felt sort of torn between those two and confused. Like, they were trying to kind of exemplify all of these traits at once—like, be sort of masculine and sturdy, but also gentle and empathetic—and feeling like they were sort of always falling down on the job on one of those sides.Rosin: And did Arthur have any positive experiences? Like, did he have any success or things that worked for him?Hill: He definitely had some, you know, relationships that ended in friendships. And so it hasn’t been all, you know, a bad time. And yet, I think he felt like he was just putting so much into it. You know, he still very deeply wants to find love.Arthur: I’m human, right? Like, I want to go out and, like, meet people and, you know, kiss the pretty ladies and all that.Hill: But he just feels like he can’t be prioritizing it anymore.Arthur: There’s so much going on. I’ve got all this stuff that I need to learn. I wanna go play with my niece and my nephew. You know what I mean? So something had to give, and I decided it was kinda like, You know what? This romantic stuff is not going my way anyway. Instead of being, like, top three things in my life, let’s bring it down to, like, maybe the bottom of the top 10.Hill: He’s kind of pulled back from it. He’s focusing on being a good uncle, a good person, a good employee. So he’s like, “Let me just focus on myself and being the best person I can be,” and that has been a real sort of grief that he’s carrying.Arthur: It really broke my heart to feel like I wouldn’t find my person. Like, it really did. I carried that. It was like I lost a parent. Like, it really felt that hard.Hill: He feels like he kind of had to at least temporarily say goodbye to this partner he kept expecting to show up.Rosin: Did Arthur have a moment in the same way that Treasure did? Like, a moment where he thought—you know, like Treasure’s miscarriage moment—where he thought, I gotta stop?Hill: I think for him, it was a little bit more gradual over time, like, just realizing sort of how draining this was. He also talked about COVID. There was a huge pandemic dating recession, and a big part of that was just young people not meeting as much. You know, the singlehood rates rose a lot after COVID.But there’s also another element, which is something that Arthur talked about, which is, you know, feeling like he actually lost some social skills when he was isolating in COVID. You know, he just was, obviously, not seeing people as much for a long time, and then when the world kind of opened up there, you know, it takes a while to sort of get back into the social life you used to have.Arthur: The world fully started opening up again, and I found myself feeling awkward. You know, it’s like being 17 again and, like, afraid to talk to the pretty girl you see.Hill: I think a lot of people can relate to that, right? Like, in the dating context or otherwise, just, like, feeling weirdly socially rusty. And that does not make making good chat and being charming with a stranger easy. Like, dating is already pretty hard socially.Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. You said that Arthur was focusing on other things. How do you hear something like that? Like, do you hear that to mean he’s given up on romance? He’s not actively dating?Hill: I think that’s kind of one of the big questions of this piece, you know: How much is this a sad thing for people, or how much is it kind of a triumph that people can have other priorities? And I think it’s a big mix. You know, I do think he has a meaningful and full life, and he’s getting a lot of purpose and enrichment from the relationships and the hobbies he does have.But at the same time, you know, he says himself that he is yearning for a partner. You know, he wants to do all of this with someone.Arthur: I do wanna find somebody that I can wake up in the morning and snuggle with, you know, for the next 20 or 30 years.Hill: And so I think it’s kind of both at once. You know, I’m very happy for him that he is able to find meaning in these other ways and that he has taken kind of, you know, a break from dating when it was not feeling good. But at the same time, he’s not getting something that he wants. And I want that for him.Rosin: So you’re a romance reporter. You’re also an adult woman looking for a long-term partnership. So I’m curious what this reporting experience has done to your outlook. Did you talk to all these people and feel comforted and more hopeful? Or did you talk to all these people and think, Oh, we just have to really accept a new reality? Like, We are entering a kind of post-romance, post-marriage age, and we have to be creative about how we adapt to it?Hill: Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. I definitely feel comfort in the sense that there are so many great people who just have been struggling with this for a really long time, and it does make one feel less alone in it.So there’s something really important about knowing there are, like, structural forces at work and a lot of luck too.Rosin: Like, It’s not just me. Like, The world is conspiring against me in some way.Hill: Right. Exactly. But at the same time, of course, that makes you feel, like, a little more pessimistic, right?Because it’s not like I can just change something about myself. It’s like, yeah, you know, dating is really hard right now, and a lot of people are in this situation. And we can’t just sort of fix all of the things that are making it hard.Rosin: Yeah. You’ve mentioned the yearning a couple of times. I wonder if that made you pessimistic or hopeful. Like, when I think of tens of thousands of young people yearning for a partner, it makes me sad, but maybe also makes me happy. Like, it’s a motivating factor. How did you receive that?Hill: Yeah, I think the yearning is kind of a beautiful thing. I mean, it’s a human emotion, you know? It can be positive in that it drives people forward to look for something that they really want.And I love to hear when people can sort of find peace with singlehood and close that door if that makes their life better. And yet, at the same time, I think that’s the thing with the slump, right? Like, a lot of people who do want partnership are just kind of giving up. And I think the yearning is one thing that is gonna kind of keep people having hope and still trying. You know, I wouldn’t want all of that to go away. And I also hope that, you know, people can maybe channel the yearning into other parts of life.Like, I do think there’s not such a clear objective divide between the romantic and other forms of love and passion. And, you know, I think maybe these single people who are turning their attention elsewhere are really bringing a lot of their heart and soul because they’re looking for other ways to kind of fill the center of their life and, like, give love. And I think that makes them—it gives them sort of a powerful energy.Rosin: Yeah. Can I ask: Did you shift in any way? Like, after doing all of this reporting and talking to all of these people and finding all of this company in the looking for romance in an ambivalent way, did you make any decisions about your own life?Hill: I didn’t make any clear ones, but I will say, you know, when I talk to people who have stopped dating—and, you know, a lot of those people are enjoying their life more now than when they were dating, ’cause they weren’t having a good time; that’s why they stopped. So it does, it feels pretty tempting, and I do start to think, you know, of all the different things I could be doing with my time.Like, I feel like I might be a better daughter and a better friend, and maybe I could, like, start writing fiction or—you know, my mind starts racing, and I think those are good things to be thinking about. We all do have limited time on this Earth, and we have to make choices about how to use it. So that’s something I’m considering, but I also know that some people I talk to, you know, when I checked in after we had an interview, they had had, you know, some dates with someone they were really excited about. I talked to at least one person who was like, “Oh, I found someone. Like, he’s the one. I am not right for your story anymore.” So that also was a reminder that, you know, if you do keep trying, for a lot of people, eventually, like, there is, you know, someone who makes the rest of it all feel like it was worth it to lead to that. So I’m split.[Music]Rosin: Ugh. We can never give up on the rom-com ending.Hill: Yeah.Rosin: It’s just how we are. We’re just built that way. Well, Faith, thank you so much for joining me today.Hill: Thank you so much.Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes with help from Jacob Smollen and Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Fact-checking by Genevieve Finn and Álex Maroño Porto. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.