Christine Emba

First, I think, is a general sense of anxiety around interacting with other people.

So one of the things that I cited in my New York Times piece was this major survey that came out.

It was done by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute at BYU.

And they did a nationally representative study of Americans ages 22 to 35.

And then they narrowed that down to people who

explicitly said that they were interested in relationships or getting married one day and who are currently not married.

And they asked about dating.

And the first line of the report is,

so dark to me.

Their like top line conclusion is that we are in a depressed dating economy, which like makes me depressed just to say, frankly.

And then the reasons that people cited for not dating were

really just like anxiety-based.

First, there was the idea of like money, which speaks to the precariousness.

Like dating is expensive.

I'm not sure if I have enough money, et cetera, to take people out on dates.

But then also like 50% of people

talked about having issues with what the survey described as dating efficacy, which really, when they broke it down, meant that they didn't think that they knew how to or were confident enough to approach someone of the opposite sex.

They weren't confident that they could read social cues.

They weren't confident that they could accept rejection and bounce back if they dated someone and it didn't work out.

So because of their anxiety, it's exactly the cycle that you stated.