Love seems to be over for college students. That’s at least what I gathered from a recent conversation with a student in Texas. I’ll leave him unnamed—and because he wants total anonymity, I won’t even tell you what school he goes to. But I will tell you he’s not scoring dates. And it’s not for lack of trying, nor for his lack of looks, nor even for lack of conversation skills—purely a professional assessment.
When dating apps failed him, he did what any man might do: he took up dance classes, thinking surely this would be an arena to meet women. “Turns out the whole thing was a giant sausage fest,” he said. “Every guy on campus had the same idea—just none of the women shared it.”
But this Texas student is not alone.
Essays abound about the past, when sprawling quads teemed with awkward flirtations and stolen glances. Now, they’re barren. College girls have stopped looking for dates, and the men—well, they’ve learned to keep their eyes glued to the ground, lest they star in a viral TikTok captioned, “Guy looked at me—send help.” (A trend on TikTok saw women publicly shaming men for perceived “gym creep” behavior, often filming and accusing them of staring or invading their space, even when the evidence is ambiguous.)
The usual suspects for this dating drought are familiar: COVID-19, which turned flirtations and coffee dates into nights of doom-scrolling, and the academic grind, which leaves little time for human connection.
These explanations make sense, but they’re only part of the story. I think to really understand why a romance recession is gripping campuses, we have to look at three deeper forces: the algorithmic wizardry of dating apps, the widening political chasm between young men and women, and the moral derangement and cultural decay cultivated by higher education.
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Begin with the apps: Platforms like Tinder and Bumble have left men adrift in a sea of rejection.
A 2020 QuackQuack survey found that men liked roughly 35 out of 100 profiles they saw, while women liked only four. With Bumble’s users about 67 percent male and Tinder’s roughly 76 percent male, men are inherently devalued in the online dating market. Women, facing an abundance of options, are also far more selective—simulations suggest women might receive over 90 likes a day, while men get fewer than 10.
And, unfortunately for men, dating algorithms concentrate attention on the top 10 percent—those deemed most attractive—rendering the majority effectively unseen. This imbalance has led young men to coin the term “hoeflation,” the grind of chasing women they might barely fancy, but will date just to escape loneliness. (Young American men experience loneliness at rates far exceeding those of their counterparts across other developed countries.)
The consequences of not matching with women online are more profound than mere frustration. When men receive few or no matches, their loneliness grows. In that isolation, many turn to pornography as an easy substitute for intimacy. Surveys indicate that about 70 percent of men between 18 and 30 report regular pornography use, though exact figures differ depending on the study. (Fight The New Drug, a nonprofit that raises awareness about the harms of pornography, notes that usage rates are likely underreported.)
But porn use doesn’t soothe loneliness; it amplifies it. It undermines confidence, distorts desire, and dulls the skills needed for genuine relationships. A man who fails online becomes less sure of himself offline; that lack of confidence gives women what they call the ick (“a sudden feeling of being repelled or disgusted by someone and no longer attracted to them”), leading to even more rejection, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of withdrawal and resentment. It’s no coincidence, then, that nearly 63 percent of men under 30 are now single. (Read “What Porn Does to Us” on Christianity Today).
But if the apps are the rigged roulette wheel, political polarization is the force field zapping any chance of cross-aisle chemistry.
Even as women have gained greater equality, they continue drifting left politically, while many men are moving right. Among Gen Z, the gender gap is widening: a recent Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics poll finds that 44 percent of young women identify as Democrats, compared with just 32 percent of young men, while only 18 percent of women lean Republican versus 29 percent of men.
This is more than a shift in policy preferences; left- and right-leaning individuals now inhabit fundamentally different moral and cultural worlds. A right-of-center man, for instance, is unlikely to date a leftist woman who views masculinity itself as suspect—and if he’s white, the arguments between the two will only multiply. (As Proverbs 21:19 puts it, “Better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome and nagging wife.”) Conversely, a moderately right-leaning woman is just as likely to recoil from a leftist man whose values clash with her own. It’s hard to imagine, for example, a Republican woman eager to date a man who’s afraid of guns.
Moreover, political affiliation has even become a strong indicator of the kinds of sexual ethics and relationships someone finds acceptable. The left, for example, increasingly embraces polyamory as a form of sexual liberation, while the right tends to see such arrangements as morally objectionable. (Read “It’s Time to Push Back Against the Glamorization of Polyamory.”)
So, as men drift further right and women further left, the pool of romantically compatible partners narrows, leaving fewer people who share not just political views but fundamental beliefs about love, commitment, and relational norms.
And if political polarization is the fire, higher education is the wind fanning the flames.
Colleges and universities have actively reinforced a culture that delays dating, marriage, and family formation. The language of “self-discovery” and “personal development” has become a euphemism for indefinite postponement. Students are encouraged to focus on their careers, their activism, or their “journey,” but not on building lasting relationships.
This ethos permeates campuses in both subtle and overt ways.
To give one subtle example: this August, a University of Tennessee professor canceled class to celebrate Taylor Swift’s engagement. Rather than using the moment to critique Swift’s portrayal of marriage as the ultimate career capstone, his canceling class quietly reinforced the idea that dating and partnership are secondary to education, career, and financial goals. (I expand on this idea in my essay “When Taylor Swift Gets Engaged, Class Dismissed—What That Reveals About Campus Culture.”)
In a more overt demonstration, student newspapers and campus events amplify the same message.
For example, the University of Rochester’s Campus Times, in its “Sex & the CT: Beginner’s Guide to Casual Sex,” frames hookups as low-stakes solutions and encourages students to move on if a partner isn’t “doing it for you.” Similarly, events like “Sex in the Dark” at Texas State University or “Kink Across Diverse Bodies” workshops emphasize pleasure and self-exploration over commitment. Harvard University also has a history of hosting sex fairs, complete with porn screenings and sex toy raffles. This November, it will hold its thirteenth annual “Sex Week,” featuring workshops and panels led by sex educators on topics from BDSM and kinks to body positivity and queer sex.
Together, these practices unmistakably communicate that relationships are optional, transient, and subordinate to personal gratification.
To be sure, the issue is not sex itself. After all, healthy sexual expression is essential to relationships and, of course, the continuation of the human species. The problem lies in how these programs, and universities generally, frame sex: divorced from intimacy, mutual responsibility, and procreation.
Moreover, somehow, this cultural script has been most fully embraced by women. Women now dominate the classroom, earn more degrees than men, and increasingly outpace them in professional and financial achievements. Many women see careerism as the ultimate marker of empowerment and are taught to view partnership not as collaboration but as a potential threat to their own success.
And because women now dominate professional arenas, the effects ripple beyond individual ambition. This has, as Helen Andrews puts it, produced a broad feminization of our institutions, which, to say the least, is not a good thing.
As organizations, schools, and workplaces become majority female, they tend to prioritize empathy over rationality, cohesion over competition, and conflict avoidance over decisive action. These norms often conflict with the aims of pursuing truth in academia, maintaining impartiality in the legal system, or taking calculated risks in business. Feminized institutions, moreover, marginalize men, reward consensus over independent thinking, and discourage dissent.
For young men, this environment creates conditions wherein their contributions and instincts are not recognized, and their ambitions feel out of step with the surrounding culture. Meanwhile, women, pursuing their own self-fulfillment and career advancement, are operating within a system that reinforces their priorities. The result is a profound relational imbalance: fewer men and women share compatible social scripts, expectations, or goals, and the cultural distance between the sexes grows.
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Perhaps nothing captures the distance between the sexes more vividly than the empty, womenless dance floor that greeted our Texas student.
Dancing, at its best, reveals the elegance and mystery of male and female complementarity. Yet today, the trifecta of rigged dating algorithms, hyperpartisan politics, and a higher education culture that prizes hustle and pleasure convinces many young adults that they can dance through life without a partner.
The Texas student’s plight is not just his, but his whole generation’s. To this cohort, the truth is the only thing to be said: they have been sold a counterfeit map of fulfillment, one that inverts life’s true north. And this whole generation, if it wishes to find a partner to dance through life with, will need to reckon with the cultural detritus that has left them isolated.The good news is that many, entering just into their late 20s and early 30s, still have time to do just that.
For the next wave of college students, though, prevention beats a cure.
While apps may remain a wild card, true preventive care certainly involves reforming higher education. We should dismantle the careerist catechism that emanates from it and shutter its sex fairs that peddle pleasure as a proxy for partnership. It would also do much to de-trench institutions of leftist professors, who, bent on fueling radicalization, are largely to blame for the chasm between the sexes.
Such changes would, hopefully, reclaim campuses as crucibles for young love, teeming once more with stolen glances and tentative steps.
Follow Jared Gould on X.
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