Junior is in his twenties, he works as a cybersecurity analyst in Dundee, and spends most evenings alone.
He has three other friends, two of whom are technically his cousins, and they are all in their twenties.
Good-looking male with all the fundamental characteristics of the heterosexually healthy, and yet all of them had never been in a relationship.
Testosterone, the primary driver of male sex drive, is highest in every man in his early twenties, peaking around the age of twenty-two
Sexual physical stamina is at its peak also in the twenties as recovery times are much shorter and erectile responses are at their finest and most frequent. Some young men could have sex eight times a day in their twenties without the aid of any drugs and sometimes without much of a break in between.
Historical research by Alfred Kinsey also noted that at this age, men report the highest raw frequency of orgasms
The four boys got together to make some barbecue for their female cousin’s birthday. I remember where I was at their age. I was in a relationship, learning how to communicate with a woman, learning how to navigate the treacherous waters of a relationship, learning the intricacies of the feminine anatomy and the emotions that come with certain behaviours and actions.
It was puzzling to me that none of the young men had ever been in a relationship, not even the usual phone call-dominated ones in which the guy and the girl get to talk for long without actually meeting each other constantly due to academic commitments or distance.
I called them and asked them, why are you young folks not in relationships?
Of course, they want to be. They told me that clearly.
They want a relationship — want it the way most people quietly want things they’ve started to believe they can’t have. They notice women on the subway, at coffee shops, in the particular way people notice someone they wish they could talk to. And then they don’t talk to them.
The fear isn’t irrational, exactly. It’s something they had absorbed slowly, over the years — from the internet, from cultural messaging, from watching other men get publicly humiliated for approaches that, in a different era, might have been called charming. “I never want to make the other person feel uncomfortable,” Junior said. “I want to be respectful.” So he stays quiet.
He waits for a signal that never quite comes. And the evenings keep passing.
What makes Junior’s story quietly heartbreaking isn’t the loneliness itself-it it’s that the loneliness is self-imposed by a man who is trying, in his own paralysed way, to be good.
They are not outliers. They are the portrait of a generation.
One of the guys looked at me and said: “You guys have been telling us all our lives to keep away from ladies and face our studies, and suddenly now all of you are asking us where our girlfriends are or when we are getting married or whom we are seeing?”
Some parents do say that, but they really didn’t expect you to listen or to obey them like a robot. They say that so that you are careful, not so that you become antisocial or a monk of sorts.
Another said, “The ladies here can just wake up and embarrass you just for the fun of it. I don’t want any lady crashing out on social media with my name on her lips because she wants to chase some clout”.
“Usually, when a young couple are in a relationship, they have some difficult moments when they hurt each other or have a row or an argument or a disagreement, and both of them reason it through on their own or they talk to a friend or their parents or keep quiet for a while and then sit down to hash it out as reasonably as possible. That is not what happens nowadays. The ladies put on their phone cameras, and they talk to the internet. I have seen too many videos of ladies calling out their boyfriends or talking stages or even admirers who didn’t summon the courage to approach them, and I don’t want anybody pushing me in front of the mob for love,” he concluded.
The third guy, a Caucasian friend of theirs, watched us silently as we talked, then he said, “Today’s ladies are scary to approach. It’s hard to distinguish between the sane ones and the insane ones, and nobody wants to vouch for or recommend anybody to anybody anymore. My parents were match-made by some friends of theirs, and they hit it off, but nowadays match-making seems so old-fashioned, and everyone wants to do their things their way or figure it out by themselves. It is what it is.
At this point, I turned to some of the ladies at the party and asked them why they had not introduced their friends to these guys.
I got this reply: “I don’t want my friend to date my brother because if it does not work out, it will ruin that friendship and make things awkward between my friend and me when they break up.”
The fourth guy spoke about the struggle to find the right lady without having to go through so many in the name of dating and having to develop feelings and kill feelings, have heartbreaks and heal and meet people and then not meet them anymore, all in the name of having a relationship. he said the unpredictability was a bit of a challenge for him.
I told him he does not need to date many people to find the one. He could find the one and date her. The one is always close by if the person who is determined to marry her is paying diligent attention. Sometimes, the one will see you and come to you, start hanging around you and give you what we call the green light. You must, however be open and willing to see that light and pursue it.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Something quietly seismic has happened to young men and dating, and the data is hard to ignore.
A 2025 survey of 1,000 single college-educated men found that 44% reported fear of being labelled “creepy,” significantly reducing their likelihood of initiating contact with women. That’s not a fringe group — that’s nearly half of single men paralysed by the prospect of a simple hello.
Zoom out further, and the picture gets starker. According to the American Institute for Boys and Men, 44% of Gen Z men didn’t have a single romantic relationship as a teenager — compared to 32% of millennials, 23% of Gen X, and just 20% of baby boomers. Each generation is less practised at romance than the one before it, and Gen Z has fallen off a cliff.
A 2022 Pew Research study found that 63% of men aged 18 to 29 were single, and many of them weren’t even trying to change that. Meanwhile, 57% of all single adults said they weren’t actively looking to date. Only 13% of single people reported wanting a committed relationship.
Technology has changed the way we communicate, and fewer and fewer people are getting the hang of it
The Fear Is Real — Even When It Shouldn’t Be
So what happened? Several forces converged at once.
The “creep” problem. The past decade of (necessary and important) conversations about consent and harassment has had an unintended side effect: many men, especially younger ones who grew up watching men get publicly shamed for unwanted advances, have internalised a near-paralyzing fear that any uninvited approach will be received as predatory.
Grant Greenly, a 24-year-old from Texas, said he’s sworn off approaching women entirely after receiving responses like “Eww. Who are you?” to what he intended as a polite greeting. “Approaching women today isn’t worth the hassle,” he said. “Nowadays, guys, including the ones who aren’t creeps, get posted online as a joke when they ask a woman out.”
The viral shame spiral. Social media has made the downside of rejection asymmetric in a way it never was before. A clumsy approach in 1995 meant a quiet “no thanks” and some personal embarrassment. Today, it can mean a video clip circulating on TikTok. For a risk-averse generation raised on screens, the math just doesn’t pencil out.
You go into someone’s DM, and they screenshot your approach for the timeline in exchange for likes and reposts. Some ladies would have their baths on camera, cream their bodies on camera, do their make-up on camera, dress up on camera, and a lot of young men would watch them do this and send them some money for it. This then becomes a daily ritual as they forgo real connection for the commercial one on the screen, which they cannot have but can share for a few minutes.
Dating apps were supposed to solve this. Instead, they may have made it worse. A Forbes Health survey found that 78% of men have felt emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by dating apps — and among Gen Z specifically, that number climbs to 79%. Tinder lost nearly 600,000 users in a single year. Bumble has shed 90% of its value since going public. The apps never delivered on their promise, but they did succeed in replacing the muscle memory of in-person pursuit — and now that muscle has atrophied.
Young men are drifting toward influencers like Andrew Tate, who tell them the entire system is rigged against them and that women aren’t worth the effort. It’s a cynical, self-defeating worldview — but it’s filling a vacuum. When mainstream culture doesn’t give young men a clear, affirming script for how to respectfully pursue women, the internet’s most extreme voices are happy to fill that void.
Here’s the part that should surprise everyone: women, by and large, want to be approached.
The same 2025 survey that found 44% of men were afraid to initiate? It also found that 77% of women aged 18 to 30, and 68% of women aged 30 to 40, hope to be approached more. One woman on social media put it plainly: she has “the utmost respect” for any man who has the confidence to approach her, “because it’s so admirable, in this day and age, to actually have the nerve to go and do that.”
Men are retreating from something many women are actively wishing they’d still do.
Both sides are waiting for the other to move. Nobody’s moving. And everyone’s getting lonelier.
What’s Actually at Stake.
This isn’t a minor cultural blip. Researcher Daniel Cox of the Survey Center on American Life has been sounding alarms about it for years. Not dating as a teenager, he argues, isn’t a harmless personal choice — it deprives young people of the developmental experiences that teach them how to set and respect boundaries, how to handle rejection, how to communicate intimately. “Really important to providing you with experiences to know how to set and respect boundaries, to know what you’re looking for,” Cox said.
A generation of men who never learned to approach is also a generation of men who never learned to connect. That has downstream consequences for marriage rates, mental health, and social fabric in ways we’re only beginning to measure.
A Way Forward
Let me be clear about what I’m not saying here. I’m not calling for a return to the era of aggressive, entitled pursuit — the kind that made women dread walking to their cars alone or smile politely at a man they found frightening just to avoid a scene. The
#MeToo reckoning surfaced real and serious problems with how men treated women, and those lessons are worth keeping.
But I think we’ve overcorrected in a way that’s quietly breaking something important. We’ve created a culture where the fear of doing it wrong has made an entire generation of men stop doing it at all. And that’s not safety — that’s just a different kind of damage.
The answer, as best I can tell, isn’t a script or a course or an app. It’s something simpler and harder: we need to make ordinary human risk-taking feel okay again. A man should be able to say, “You seem really interesting — could I take you to coffee?” and face either a warm yes or a kind no — not a viral video, not a public shaming, not a label that follows him around. Rejection should sting a little, not ruin you.
I also think we need to stop pretending that the “right” way to meet people is through a curated algorithm. Some of the best relationships I’ve witnessed began with someone just showing up — nervous, imperfect, trying anyway. That act of courage, however small, is not harassment. It’s humanity.
What young men need most isn’t to be told to be bolder. It’s to be told that vulnerability is still allowed — that trying and failing and trying again is the whole point, not a red flag. And what the rest of us can do is stop punishing that vulnerability when we see it, and start recognising it for what it is: someone brave enough to want connection in a world that’s made connection feel dangerous.
We built a world where men are afraid to speak, and women are waiting to be spoken to. The mountain refuses to go to Moses, and Moses also refuses to go to the mountain and yet the mountain must be climbed.
Drop your phones two days a week, pick a novel and go sit down where young men and young women gather. When the right person comes in, look at him or her politely. Wait for that smile, it will come and wave or say hello.
It worked for Rebecca at the well with Abraham’s servant
It worked for Jacob at the well with Rachael
It worked for Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman; it will work for you.
-GSW-