Something fundamental has shifted in how men and women view romantic relationships, and the internet deserves much of the credit—or blame. We’re living through an unprecedented social experiment where every grievance, every disappointing date, every relationship failure gets documented, analyzed, and amplified across social media platforms. The result? A generation increasingly skeptical about whether the opposite sex is worth the trouble at all.This isn’t about technology making us lonely, though that’s part of the story. It’s about information overload fundamentally altering our perception of what relationships offer and what they cost. For the first time in human history, we have immediate access to millions of perspectives on dating and relationships, and the picture they paint is often deeply discouraging.
Consider what men encounter online. Scrolling through social media, they’re bombarded with stories about women who seem primarily interested in men’s financial status. They read thread after thread about divorce courts favoring women, about child custody battles that feel predetermined, about men losing half their assets after marriages fail. They encounter narratives about women having extensive dating histories while simultaneously expecting to be treated as prizes. They see viral posts celebrating women who manipulate multiple men for free dinners, or influencers coaching women on how to secure a “high value male” primarily defined by his earning potential and willingness to provide luxury experiences.These men read countless testimonials from divorced fathers who feel alienated from their children. They encounter statistics about sexless marriages presented as inevitable. They see forums dedicated to men sharing stories of infidelity, of being taken advantage of financially, of sacrificing their ambitions only to be left anyway. The algorithm feeds them content that confirms their growing suspicion that modern relationships represent a terrible deal where they’re expected to perform traditional provider roles while receiving none of the traditional partnership benefits in return.
Meanwhile, women are having their own disillusioning experience online. They’re exposed to a seemingly endless stream of content about men’s behavior that ranges from disappointing to genuinely alarming. They read about weaponized incompetence, where men pretend to be helpless with household tasks to avoid doing them. They encounter stories of women who work full-time jobs yet still shoulder the vast majority of childcare and domestic labor. They see data suggesting that married women do significantly more housework than their husbands, and that women’s happiness decreases after marriage while men’s increases.
Women scroll past countless accounts of emotional unavailability, of men who refuse to go to therapy or discuss their feelings in healthy ways. They read about partners who watch excessive pornography and develop unrealistic expectations about sex. They encounter discussions about men who expect girlfriend benefits from casual situationships, who ghost after getting what they want, who breadcrumb and string women along. They see viral posts about men in their thirties and forties pursuing women barely out of college, about partners who become controlling or abusive, about the mental load of managing a household that falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders.
Both groups are consuming content about the other’s worst behaviors, filtered and amplified through the distorting lens of social media virality. The most outrageous stories get the most attention. The most bitter perspectives get the most shares. Nuance disappears in favor of sweeping generalizations that treat entire genders as monolithic entities with predictable, negative characteristics.The comment sections become echo chambers where people bond over shared grievances and validate each other’s worst assumptions. Someone shares a bad date experience, and hundreds of replies confirm that yes, they’re all like that, whatever side of the gender divide “they” represents. The algorithm notices what keeps users engaged and serves up more of the same, creating filter bubbles where people primarily encounter evidence supporting their growing cynicism about relationships.This digital environment has given rise to entire subcultures organized around romantic pessimism. Men retreat into forums celebrating being single, convincing each other that relationships are traps designed to extract resources while providing diminishing returns. Women create communities focused on staying single rather than settling for mediocre partners, sharing stories that reinforce the idea that most men simply aren’t worth the emotional labor involved. Both sides develop elaborate frameworks and terminology to describe why the opposite sex has become essentially undateable.What makes this particularly insidious is that none of these perspectives are entirely fabricated. The experiences people share online are often real. Bad dates happen. Toxic relationships exist. Unfair outcomes occur in divorce courts. Unequal domestic labor is well-documented. The problem is one of proportion and selection bias. The internet has turned the exception into the expected, the worst case scenario into the presumed baseline.
People aren’t encountering balanced portraits of relationships online. They’re not seeing the couples who genuinely support each other, who’ve figured out equitable divisions of labor, who communicate well and grow together over decades. Those stories don’t generate outrage or engagement. They don’t go viral. They’re boring in the attention economy that drives social media.The result is a strange paradox. We have more information about relationships than any previous generation, yet we may be less equipped to form them. We know everything that can go wrong, every way we might be disappointed or taken advantage of, every reason to be suspicious of potential partners’ motives. We’ve done our research, and the research tells us to be very, very cautious—maybe too cautious to ever really try.
Young people increasingly report that they’re not dating at all, that relationships seem like too much work for uncertain rewards. They’ve internalized the narratives they’ve consumed online and decided the risk-reward calculation doesn’t make sense anymore. Why expose yourself to potential heartbreak, financial risk, and emotional labor when the internet has helpfully documented all the ways it could go wrong?
The internet has democratized disappointment, turning private relationship struggles into public spectacles that inform everyone else’s expectations. It has created a feedback loop where negative experiences get amplified, discouraging people from forming relationships, which means fewer people have positive experiences to share, which further tilts the narrative toward pessimism.
We’re left with a generation that knows everything about why relationships fail and surprisingly little about why they succeed. The information age has given us unprecedented insight into each other’s flaws while somehow making us less willing to accept that flawed people are all we’ve ever had to work with. The internet didn’t invent relationship problems, but it may have convinced us they’re insurmountable.
