Statistics are shit. They’re tedious units of pedantry which tedious people slap on their tedious arguments like an intellectual quality assurance. Used correctly, a stat can be the foundation of an irrefutable argument. But using them correctly is more or less impossible, because charlatans can mail off to any dubious website or AI they fancy and in seconds are equipped with a hand-selected stat to support a stance they’ve already decided they believe in. Adam Levenstein put it best; “statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” Statistics are rarely the foundation of any serious intellectual enterprise anymore. They’re the scaffolding.
Also, I suffered through a Statistics GSCE and I’m not very good at maths even when it’s interesting, so I’m prejudiced.
So it’s frustrating when Gen X and Boomers, browsing through the Telegraph probably, come across figures exposing our generation’s comparative lack of intimacy and then start pontificating on it. This is the disingenuity of stats. Yes, we get into relationships less readily than previous generations. We are more frightened of commitment and of making the first move – or any move. And yes, Gen Z shags less. The stats which I’m not going to bother finding will tell you that much. But they can’t tell you why.
Our elders and betters seem to enjoy discussing this topic. Gen Z’s impoverished romance figures give them the excuse that so many seem to yearn for to sneer at – or worry about – the socially stunted, chronically online, self-absorbed, unconfident, post-literate kids; another opportunity to correlate wokeness with contemptibility. As with lots of stats, this is partly true, but only in the least useful sense.
Why are so many young people – men in particular – scared by the idea of “committing to a relationship”? Why do lots of others claim to be uninterested in the entire concept? One of the reasons for the downturn compared to our predecessors is because the terminology has shifted.
In our parents’ book, a “relationship” could constitute a fling lasting a fortnight. What your dad called his “girlfriend” we could be calling “a friend.” What your mum conflates with “boyfriend”, we could be envisaging as “pen-pal.” Whilst your (great) grandparents bleat about “happy young marriage”, our minds conjure horrifying images of emotional repression, suffocating childcare, Victorian gender roles and Americanised domestic materialism. The pilgrimage away from the 20th century understanding of these words is a digitalised story of sinking ships; relationship sinking to situationship sinking to the murky depths of friendship.
The other factor is that generations preceding us were either post-war or 1960s adjacent, and were going at it like rabbits of historic proportions which unfairly skews the score.
Digitalisation is important. It goes without saying that phones have blunted people skills. Antisocial media has been fraying the strings that tie us to all that is useful and beautiful and worthwhile for decades now, with surgical precision. That’s going to have implications for our love lives, but dating apps perhaps even more so. Dating apps are the epitome of the psychological warfare being waged against us by the techno-feudal overlords. Data-harvesting bazaars where you set up your stall to flog your wares – except all you have to sell is your integrity, whilst stocks last. The “male loneliness epidemic” is not an illness, caught from a dodgy sandwich and you nip to Boots to get Imodium and antibiotics. It’s the Elon Endgame.
This inter-generational debate often lurches into “cancel culture”. There is an obvious interpretation of this hair-trigger phrase. Young people are afraid that romantic advances will get them accused of assault, and that whether genuine or otherwise, an accusation like that stains your record forevermore. We’ve all sat through this at some point, maybe when your Christmas dinner devolves into an excruciating debate in which your drunk uncle insists his right to say sexist things remains untouched by the woke thought police.
It ignores something important; Gen Z tends to actually know what consent is. Whilst a long way from eradication, sexual assault is now something in the public discourse. Piers Morgan, spluttering into his mic with apoplectic red-faced fury at our meek generation, is unlikely to acknowledge this. If the price of consent is a scarcity of rampant top shaggers, that’s probably a price worth paying.
All of this is to say nothing of the truism that Gen Z is undeniably a mentally unwell generation, something for which innumerable compound failures are to blame. If you believe in nurture over nature, you believe that our faults are the faults of our ancestors – for poisoning us with malevolent technology, for repeatedly blowing up the economy, for voting in the Tories for 14 years, for turning their children’s identities into a violent political battlefield… take your pick.
But then every generation blames the previous for something. And whilst pointing fingers is fun, it isn’t helpful. What is helpful is to block out the statistics, the wittering boomers, the smug millennials. What is helpful is to delete Hinge, brave any social anxiety, and do our best to have real conversations with real people in the real world. Absolutely none of that is easy, but that’s probably what makes it worth doing.
