Right now there is a loneliness epidemic throughout the world. More and more people aren’t entering relationships. Gen Z men are having significant trouble dating while there are some economic factors in the mix. From my own view and experiences combined with what I’ve read most Gen Z men are lack the social and communication skills to even enter a relationship. This has and in the future will lead to extreme issues. There’s already been a marked rise in hostility towards women by young men (think Andrew Tate and his ilk) that’s likely born out of this frustration. I would definitely say there’s been a rise in gender hostility ever since the pandemic.
Back in the 50s there was arranged marriages. All a person had to do was just show but now that’s gone because it was an unequal system and I think society missed its chance to establish something much healthier and better in its wake. Now we have people that are unable to connect with each other. We just toss people blindly into the mess that is human interaction and relationships and no one knows what to do anymore. We could be have the most fulfilling relationships humans have ever had. Think of the amount of people who would of never have entered abusive relationships had there been someone around them that showed them what love exactly is.
The way we teach is so heavily focused on teaching people how to be worker drones that we forget the human part of the person. This is why a lot of people who do extreme well in school and college fare so poorly in relationships and have higher rates of depression. We are the most educated and advanced in human history, we know psychology, we can teach this shit rather than tossing people blindly into the meat grinder.
Read generously, OP’s point can be taken to refer to relationships generally, i.e. social skills. A lack of engagement with dating in and of itself doesn’t point to someone being sick or deficient, it could indicate any number of things. I don’t think there’s anything implied about judging individuals here.
A societal trend of young people having fewer healthy interpersonal relationships at all is troubling. We’re a social species living in a world that requires a certain amount of cooperation both for societal function and individual wellbeing.
Social isolation is a killer, both in terms of its effects on the person isolated and to society at large via the actions of (a statistically higher proportion of) those who are socially isolated.
A call for ameliorative measures against such a trend is not a personal attack on anyone.
Both of you are absolutely right - I think that the OP’s emphasis on romantic relations is actually a symptom of the fact that an excessive amount of emphasis is put on forming romantic relationships over platonic ones