As is tradition this time of year, the Hallmark Channel offers oodles of positive holiday and New Year love stories spanning generations and continents—all with happy endings involving women sporting long hair painstakingly waved and men in neat blue suits—or plaid lumberjack shirts.
To the contrary in the season for love, many celebrities and others are touting new trends of voluntary celibacy, including Khloe Kardishian confessing to a three-year dry spell.
According to the Kinsey Institute’s 2024 report that shows 16.5 percent of women and nine percent of men are single and not sexually active. A key factor in this choice is the claim of a demoralizing dating scene in this country, most often blaming men.
“Let’s Be Honest” podcast host Kristin Cavallari is also open about her trials of dating as a single mom of three, divorced from NFL superstar Jay Cutler.
An attractive, successful single woman in San Francisco made headlines for advertising her availability on billboards, instead of dealing with dating apps.
What millions know for sure is, it is not so great out there. Surprise. This is not new. And it is not one gender’s fault.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports as of 2023, 117.6 million Americans age 18 and over are unmarried—including never married, widowed or divorced. That’s about half of the U.S. population.
According to Statista, the number of dating app users worldwide is expected to reach 462.5 million worldwide by 2029. Tindr’s 2024 Green Flags Study of 8,000 men and women shows 91% of men and 94% of women on the app “agree that dating is more difficult.” A 2025 comprehensive study out of Norway finds a common thread of “framing online dating as emblematic of troubling changes in how people pursue love and relationships.”
For the past year or so social media waves have been afire with essays, posts and fascinating studies on 21st century dating. The supposedly shocking news is that now is the dawn of an unprecedented straight partnering crisis damned with new labels of women’s burden of mankeeping.
Experts declare the world is in a new era of “heteropessimism” or “heterofatalism,” also known as “normative male alexithymia.” That last diagnosis is for those who cannot express emotions.
As a happily divorced single mother of three grown men, I declare, I am not a heteropessimist, but a heterorealist. Yes, there are forever couples, but not everyone is as lucky as Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, or John Legend and Chrissy Teigen. Or all the smiling, happy people on Hallmark.
I do witness colleagues, clients, business associates, friends, siblings and my grown sons thrive in loving and fulfilling relationships. I also see the reverse. This is true now and always.
The dystopia for some male and female relationships, dating, courtship, partnering, pairing, and marrying is absolutely not fresh. The dissatisfaction of some women and men about their couplings is a forever problem, not to be blamed on either sex, any gender preference or combination of the above.
There is a reason the dramas of the Middle Ages and Renaissance explored the tragedies and disappointments of seeking, defining and retaining love; it is constant and universal.
The drama and high rate of failure was recently revisited in the Amazon Prime series thriller, The Girlfriend, which unleashes some ways dating and relationships can go way wrong in the 21st century. Spoiler alert: it all goes really, really wrong.
With notable exceptions, coupling has historically been a rough path for all men or women– in any combination.
“In many cultures, where heterosexual priorities are the norm, they are seldom associated with love and even less with passion,” Louis-Georges Tin writes in his 2012 book, The Invention of Heterosexual Culture.”
In the 19th century, American men were expected to acquire “character,” writes Kevin White in his 1993 book, The First Sexual Revolution: the Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America. Women were deemed to embrace “passionlessness” while it was assessed that for men, “too much attention to sexuality distracted from more important matters—not merely work, but also men’s responsibilities to the community or larger pubic work.”
When I was growing up, I watched the TV network series, “The Dating Game,” that aired from 1965 to 1973, ending when I was a high school sophomore desperate for any advice on dating—in addition to what my three older sisters and two older brothers had already warned me about. (My brothers told me never to order the most expensive item on the menu if he is paying, and my sisters told me not to appear too eager. The nuances evolved.)
The show came back in five iterations: 1973-74; 1978-80; 1986-89; 1996-1999 and for a one-time dive into hetero pairings in 2021. Dating rarely seemed easy on screen.
Diane Keaton’s recent passing brought to mind not only her glorious independence in her later years, but her terrifying role in the 1977 film, “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” that steered a generation of women like me away from ever having one-night stands.
“Love Is Blind” has been elevating complicated relationships to the point of virality since 2020. “Sex and the City” and it’s now ended, updated series, “And Just Like That,” (with Carrie Bradshaw being alone) revealed a rough patch in a relationship—or four —every episode.
Two authors connected to the original SATC, Liz Tuccillo and Greg Behrendt, cashed in on the characters’ dating advice with the 2006 bestselling dating bible, He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys.
As a journalist and author who is a lover of history, literature, art, music, theater, film, and popular culture, I observe it has been a challenge since the dawn of time for adult men and women to meet, connect and share their lives together fully, peacefully and with love and respect across all identities. Some succeed marvelously and achieve lifetimes of bliss and euphoria.
Yes, to date or not is a forever quandary. Given human history over the last million years or so, finding and maintaining a healthy love relationship hetero or not, is no day at the beach. Every contestant on “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” can drink to that.
Even if life does not always imitate holiday movie plotlines, successful relationships do exist and deserve high praise and a round of applause.
