Ren, 18, describes herself as “a big romantic.” Like so many teen girls that came before her, she loves love: Ren is obsessed with rom-coms, develops crushes quickly, and dissects texts from boys with her friends. But, like many of her friends, she hasn’t dated anyone; as a rising sophomore in college in New York, Ren has yet to experience her first kiss.
She wants genuine connection and intimacy. But Ren doesn’t find the current slate of options appealing: neither the cycle of what kids term love-bombing — excessive attention and compliments early in a relationship — and then ghosting that seems to comprise romance in her circles, nor an anonymous hookup at a frat party. “I want my first kiss to be with someone that I like, rather than someone random,” she says. “I feel like there’ll be someone who meets my energy someday.” (Vox is using a pseudonym for all the teenage sources in this story, so they can discuss their romantic lives freely.)
Ren’s experience is increasingly common among teenagers coming of age today. You may have come across some alarming (and alarmist) headlines about Gen Z’s aversion — and even hostility — to sex and romance: They’ve been branded “puriteens” who have regressive attitudes about sex; they’re more interested in their phones than dating; they can’t even stomach sex scenes in the movies.
Indeed, rates of sexual activity among teenagers have dropped in the last three decades: In 1991, about 54 percent of high school students in a government survey said they’d had sex; in 2021, it was 30 percent. But Gen Z may be getting unfairly maligned. Teenage romance has actually been on the decline for far longer, decreasing generation by generation for 75 years: According to a 2023 survey from the American Enterprise Institute, 56 percent of Gen Z adults report that they had a boyfriend or girlfriend as a teenager, compared to 69 percent of millennials, 76 percent of Generation X-ers, and 78 percent of baby boomers.
What’s certain is that while romantic connection has lessened, yearning for it certainly hasn’t.
“This generation is characterized by less in all of these areas: less dating, less sex, less togetherness,” says Lisa A. Phillips, who teaches a course on relationships at SUNY New Paltz and wrote a book on teen relationships, First Love: Guiding Teens through Relationships and Heartbreak. There are many possible causes, including the loneliness epidemic, overreliance on technology, fears of sexual assault, unrealistic expectations of relationships from social media, a rise in teen anxiety and depression, the ubiquity of porn, the gender disparity on college campuses, and a decrease in leisure time for teenagers. But what’s certain is that while romantic connection has lessened, yearning for it certainly hasn’t.
“The desire to connect is still very prominent, but the rules are different and confusing, and there’s a lot of reluctance and wariness,” Phillips says. The limited data on this group bears this out: A Hinge survey of Gen Z daters published in 2024 found that 90 percent of them hope to find love. In other words, it’s not that young people are too anxious and online to want in-person love and physical intimacy. It’s that they don’t quite know how to get it.
New (and confusing) rites of passage
In eras past, when teenagers didn’t spend an average of about eight hours a day behind a screen, the rites of passage of a typical romance may have looked something like this: you have a crush on someone from English class or home room; you flirt in the hallway and ask your friends to get intel from their friends. Someone works up the nerve to ask the other out, so you go on a few real-life dates and seek each other out one-on-one in bigger social settings, like at parties. That progresses into a full-blown relationship (which most likely ends in heartbreak after a few weeks or months).
Emily, 16, who lives in New Jersey, always imagined that those milestones would be a part of her high school experience. She was “not necessarily expecting a whole love story, but like High School Musical,” where you ask each other to dances, she says. “But that didn’t exactly happen.”
She was “not necessarily expecting a whole love story, but like High School Musical,” where you ask each other to dances, she says.
Unlike in the movies she grew up watching, she finds that crushes don’t develop in the cafeteria or school hallways. Instead, it all happens online, mostly on Snapchat. “The majority of my week, that’s how I’m interacting with people,” says Emily, who’ll start her senior year of high school in the fall.
Instead of a furtive note passed across class, if someone has a crush on you, they’ll send you the ultimate romantic gesture: a photo of their full face. “Not just of their ceiling or a half face,” says Emily. If you like them, too, then you’ll start sending texts back and forth on Snapchat.
This is “the talking stage,” a new — and extremely confusing — kind of milestone. It’s one version of a situationship, a type of relationship without clear boundaries, rules, or commitment. This gray area — when you both like each other, talk occasionally but don’t move toward exclusivity or more intimacy — has come to dominate Gen Z’s dating woes. “Normally, it doesn’t escalate from there, because most people don’t like to have labels or a real relationship,” Emily says. “It’s crazy because you can be in ‘talking stage,’ and you see them at school and just pass by each other. Social media is where it all happens.” Sometimes, two people in the talking stage will meet up in person, but that doesn’t last long.
Emily’s friends mostly hang out in big group gatherings, which are also arranged via Snapchat. “That could be at someone’s house, or at Chipotle, or at a school football game,” she says. “But you wouldn’t split off to hang out with someone one-on-one.”
Pau, 18, a rising sophomore in college, also describes the few relationships she’s experienced and witnessed among friends as nebulous and far more verbal than physical. She and her crush from a summer program in high school, for instance, would largely work on papers and take early morning walks together. “[People] are less affectionate publicly, so it’s more difficult to spot who’s in a relationship,” she says. “Then you find out by Instagram post.”
In the fall of her junior year, Emily had her most significant relationship so far. She and her crush started Snapchatting back and forth, and to her surprise, they actually talked in person, too. Sometimes they sat together at lunch; when their friend groups would hang out, he’d give her a ride. “In my head, I was like, maybe this is real, he actually wants something real,” she says. Then, after a few weeks, he abruptly stopped responding to her messages. “I tried to talk to him about it, like, ‘We don’t have to have anything, but I want to make sure I didn’t hurt your feelings or something.’ He just laughed it off,” says Emily.
When you never exit the “talking stage,” it can lead to an unsettling whiplash effect.
This is how situationships tend to end: an ambiguous tapering off instead of a clear breakup.
Connecting with someone emotionally rather than physically can be a good way to start a relationship, of course. But when you never exit the “talking stage,” it can lead to an unsettling whiplash effect. You get emotionally close, without the accountability inherent in an in-person commitment. You can easily confess feelings for someone online, and just as easily shut down and go silent, too.
Emily isn’t happy with Snapchat situationships. She wants a boyfriend or a girlfriend, someone to do “the corny stuff” with, like decorating gingerbread houses at Christmas and wearing matching pajamas. “I think [we] should go back to literally talking face-to-face, that’s so much more fun, honestly,” she says. “But I don’t know if people would be on board with that, because I think a lot of people enjoy being behind the screen.”
Practicing romance behind a screen
There’s plenty of concern about how the pandemic shaped the development of children who experienced it. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 22 percent of parents thought it had lasting negative effects on their children’s social skills, a slightly higher percentage than were concerned about effects on mental health or academic prowess. The worry about social skills was particularly acute for those whose kids were in middle school during the pandemic.
Teenagers, of course, have come of age online for the last 20 years, ever since the AOL Instant Messenger days of yore, and there’s always been anxiety about how that technology would shape their social development. But never has the contrast between teens’ online and offline lives been so dramatic as for those who experienced adolescence during the pandemic. Just as they entered a period crucial for developing independence and peer connection, they were cut off from most in-person interaction.
Emily, for instance, did school largely virtually from sixth to eighth grade. She and her friends learned what was normal and safe during an exceptional time. At the same time, screen time for teenagers increased precipitously: In 2022, nearly half of teens surveyed said they were online almost constantly, compared to 24 percent in 2014, according to Pew Research studies. “A lot of those fundamental years of growing and learning about sexuality and being with other people was online,” Emily says. “We started that process being behind a screen, and now that we don’t need to be, we’re choosing to, because it’s more comfortable. Now it’s hard to let that go.”
Yet she hasn’t pursued taking a step back from social media or questioned whether there’s another way. When I ask whether her friends are happy with a largely online social life, she’s not sure. “I’ve never really thought about talking to them about it,” says Emily. “But I’d be curious.”
“Being online is actually really safe, compared to doing something in real life.”
Curtis, now 17, was in seventh grade when the pandemic started. He, too, noticed how the isolation made his generation more emotionally risk-averse. “Ever since the pandemic, teenagers have been more afraid to actually show how they felt,” he says. “For years, most of us were trapped in our rooms all day, stuck on a computer, so the only way to express ourselves was through an anime profile picture on TikTok or comments on Instagram posts, [so our] idea of expressing emotions and feelings has been kind of limited.”
Restricting romance to the online sphere is a way of exerting control and protecting yourself, says Curtis, who lives in Kentucky. “Being online is actually really safe, compared to doing something in real life.”
That guardedness is especially true for boys, who often both have less experience articulating their emotions and face greater social risk from doing so.
Daniel A. Cox, director and founder of the Survey Institute on American Life and author of Uncoupled, a forthcoming book about the growing gender divide between young adults, believes that young men in particular struggle when it comes to romance. They have no manual for how to be truly intimate. “For boys and young men, friendships are much more activity-based and competitive, which doesn’t allow them space to share feelings of vulnerability and insecurity.”
As for Curtis, the emotional risk of putting himself out there feels especially acute as a queer teen. He’s had one serious crush, which started when he and a classmate started chatting more sophomore year.
Two years later, Curtis still thinks about him. When he sees a video of two queer teenagers on social media, he imagines him and his crush in their place.
Their romance followed all the same, enigmatic beats: They started sending each other songs, then memes, then baby photos; soon, they were messaging every day and FaceTiming late at night. They’d find each other at lunch and look forward to seeing each other in the hallways. The crush, who Curtis describes as a “popular kid,” would physically hang onto Curtis in front of his athlete friends and described Curtis as his best friend. This went on for a whole school year. Curtis said his friends said, ‘“It’s obvious he’s putting in effort to show that he cares about you.’”
Then they just…stopped texting. Two years later, Curtis still thinks about him. When he sees a video of two queer teenagers on social media, he imagines him and his crush in their place.
Curtis thinks about messaging his long-time crush, to share his feelings and get closure. But he’d never do it in person. “In real life, I’d probably be shaking, and my heart would be beating really hard. … I’d feel so crazy and emotional,” he says. “But if I tell him online, I could block him, or go to school the next day and ignore [him].”
Curtis is hopeful about finding a different kind of relationship once he starts college, but his first real experience with romance has made him undeniably wary. That’s a sentiment that Phillips often hears in her conversations with teenagers. Moreover, a study conducted in 2023 by the dating app Hinge found that 56 percent of Gen Z respondents didn’t pursue relationships because they were worried about rejection. “If I tried once and it didn’t happen, why should I try again?” says Curtis. “If I put in as much effort as I could at 14…it didn’t work out, why should I try to do it again at 17?”
Yearning for something more
When you talk to Gen Z teenagers, it’s clear that they long for romance and intimacy, even if they feel that they have no playbook for it.
“The news portrays us as engaging in it less, but people still want romantic relationships,” says Pau. She’d like to experience romance, but mostly feels like she hasn’t been able to think about it very much.
“Especially with the current political climate, the economic climate, and even just recovering from Covid — it’s kind of difficult to think of being in a relationship,” says Pau. “There’s so much going on with my family and immigration status, it’s very difficult to just breathe.” She’s already experienced so much vulnerability that she’s hesitant to seek out more through romantic relationships.
In a way, the situationships that reign among young people today feel more like the pseudo-relationships that could play out in middle school, as young people try on what a relationship could feel like and test the boundaries of what it means to date before they really experience it. “The pandemic stunted our growth a little; we lost two years of our life,” says Ren, who grew up in California.
She still wants a boyfriend: a primary person, someone who has her back, someone to explore physical intimacy with. In the meantime, she’s made a close group of friends, with whom she shares emotional intimacy.
As long as young people are having deeply meaningful connections through friendships, Phillips allows that it may not be so bad not to experience romance or sexual intimacy. It’s not a big deal if you don’t date or hook up in high school; that doesn’t predict worse outcomes socially or otherwise. What does worry Phillips is if teenagers aren’t finding closeness in platonic relationships, either. “If this is the narrative: I can’t do these things because they’re risky and connection is painful, [then] I’m more worried about that than whether a sixteen-year-old decides to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” she says.
For Ren, her friendships are deeply meaningful — and they help her make sense of why romance hasn’t happened for her yet, as she approaches her second year in college. “I thought a high school relationship was normal until I got here, and I realized that being in relationships or kissing or having sex isn’t as normal anymore,” she says. “It makes me feel better — it’s the culture now.”
