Picture a Friday night in 1995. A pub with a patio opening onto a green park, the sky still pink at nine o'clock. Someone is here because a friend phoned them at the last minute; someone else because the alternative was staying home. A bar full of strangers becoming gradually less strange to each other. Two people end up at the same corner near the speakers, and share eye contact over a terrible song choice, and a laugh between them shifts the entire evening. They don't know each other yet, only the way they hold their glass, the way they look at each other. The unknown is the adventure.

Now: a couch, last Wednesday. The week has been long and expensive and there's yet another dark news cycle the shade of crude oil. She picks up her phone out of habit. First profile: "Adventurous soul 🌍. Dog dad. Work hard, play hard. Not here for hookups 😅." Second: a photo taken at the same angle, a different name, another hiking photo. Third: holding a freshly-caught fish, holding a deer head by the antlers. Fourth: "Lover of tacos and The Office. Looking for my partner in crime." Profiles scroll as a catalogue of a single person with many faces. Personality assembled from the cultural shorthand for someone worth loving. None resemble the stranger at the bar with the unexpected laugh. She puts the phone down. She picks it back up. Back and forth until sleep finally hits.

How are people supposed to fall in love, nowadays?

Love seems to be increasingly tricky, doesn't it? Take this with a grain of salt, but I've noticed a lot of people younger than me struggling with relationships—either never being in one at all, or only ever being in one and in turn not learning what is learned from being with multiple people, often unknowingly adopting codependent behaviour. Or, maybe they're just lucky enough to have sincerely found their person, and have smartly anchored.

86% of American adults aged 18 to 24 are currently unpartnered, a figure that dwarfs every other age group. 91% of men and 94% of women believe the dating environment is more difficult than ever before.

A survey of 1,000 American dating app users found that 78% felt emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by online dating at least some of the time, with younger generations registering the highest burnout rates. A longitudinal study out of the University of Zurich, published in early 2026, followed more than 17,000 young people in Germany and the United Kingdom and found that extended singlehood in young adulthood is associated with rising loneliness and declining life satisfaction.

Another reason that comes to mind is that people are exhausted. Work is exhausting and the cost of living rises like floodwaters. We are also, collectively, well-aware of the tragedies and atrocities and existential crises threatening every corner of the world. The Doomsday Clock is 85 seconds to midnight. How are people expected to have the time and energy to be a good partner—a good lover?

This, really, is the problem funnily enough. People care so deeply. They don't want to half-ass a relationship and hurt someone else. They don't want to overstep or make others uncomfortable by attempting to initiate something romantic. They also don't want to get hurt themselves, though that is another topic entirely—a ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

People yearn.

The Yearning

Yearning has become its own microgenre. Dazed writer Dominique Sisley charted this in early 2024, around the time Netflix's One Day remake was making everyone weep into their phones. "Yearning on main," issuing "third degree yearning" diagnoses, and "yearnposting." Soft image slideshows with mournful captions vaguely wanting something that isn't here. Google Trends showed searches for "yearning" and "longing" climbing steadily for years.

The most beloved prestige films of that period, like Saltburn, Past Lives, All of Us Strangers, shared the common denominator. A gap between the life you're living and the one you couldn't stop imagining. Paul Mescal, who seemingly only accepts roles as tortured male yearners, became its unofficial patron saint. But in her article, Sisley pushes past the meme. She invokes bell hooks, who wrote that beneath the yearning in most people lies something she named a "longed-for liberation—the freedom to control one's destiny." And Sisley cites the late cultural critic Mark Fisher, who wrote about a collective longing for "fugitive time, lost afternoons, conversations that dilate and drift like smoke." Not a yearning for love, no. But for an unhurried way of being that late-stage capitalism denies us.

Writer Mary Retta, in her essay "Why We Yearn" (The Good Trade), reads the whole cultural moment as "pro-pleasure, anti-work, and striving towards envisioning a gentler and more fulfilling future." Rest is a luxury and connection is a project, so yearning is what's left.

Decolonizing Love

There is, too, the active resistance towards traditional relationships—pushback against the idea that the shape of love always looks a certain way, and protest against the increasingly untenable Nuclear Family. Polyamory and relationship anarchy are practised as forms of decolonized love.

The theoretical grounding for this comes in part from Indigenous and non-Western scholars who have argued that rigid monogamy—the expectation that love takes exactly one shape, and that shape is the nuclear pair bond—was itself a colonial imposition.

Kim TallBear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), writing in her essay "Looking for Love in Too Many Languages" (archived at the Anarchist Library), argues that relationship anarchy offers a framework for resisting settler heteronormativity—though she remains cautiously ambivalent about whether any practice lived inside colonial systems can fully transcend them. On her Substack, she points to Indigenous colleagues who write about decolonizing love, including Cree-Métis writer and graduate student Kirsten Lindquist and her Nitâcimowin blog. Residential schools and forced boarding schools targeted Indigenous ways of relating, because those relational structures were understood as a threat to colonial order.

Of course, as the Aguirre Center for Inclusive Psychotherapy cautions, polyamory is not inherently decolonial. Many mainstream polyamorous spaces remain dominated by white, middle-class perspectives that fail to seriously reckon with how race and colonial history shape whose non-monogamy is legible and safe.

The Resistance

Women in particular are decentering men in their lives, a concept popularized by Charlie Taylor who literally wrote the book on Decentering Men. In the East, there's the Sheng nü in China, and the 4B Movement in Korea. Decentering men does not necessarily mean not dating or being romantically involved with men. Rather, it's a reorientation of life and sense of self so that men, patriarchy, and the pursuit of male approval, are no longer the organizing principle around which everything else is arranged.

In South Korea, the 4B movement emerged between 2017 and 2019 on Twitter and the feminist platform WOMAD, taking a more radical position. The name refers to four Korean words all beginning with bi (비, "no" or "non-"): bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), and bisekseu (no sex with men). South Korea has the worst gender pay gap in the OECD. Beyond that, there's widespread digital sexual violence (including a recent epidemic of AI-generated deepfake pornography) and a political establishment that has actively dismantled gender equality infrastructure. The 4B movement gained enormous international attention after the 2024 U.S. presidential election; searches for it spiked 450% and American women began invoking it on TikTok as political protest. As gender equality specialist JiHye Joeng told the LSE via The Week, 4B "is not about rejecting men for the sake of it" but about "rebalancing power in a world where power is skewed against women."

Sheng nü (剩女) translates to "leftover women," a derogatory label invented and propagated by the All-China Women's Federation, applied to educated urban women who remain unmarried past their late twenties. Scholar Leta Hong Fincher, in her book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China and in a 2024 interview with the Shanghai Literary Review, describes the term as "a very deliberate propaganda campaign to push educated women into marrying and having a child." The government has anxiety about birth rates, and China's marriage registrations fell from 13.47 million couples in 2013 to 6.1 million in 2024. Some Chinese feminists have reclaimed the label, rewriting shèng (剩, leftover) as a homophone shèng (胜, victorious). Others, as research published via The Conversation found, are using economic independence to carve out alternative lives. Not by confronting the state directly, which carries serious risks, but simply by living another way.

Enter Myself

Looking back on my own life, I have to think I'm a serial monogamist. I've jumped from one long-term serious relationship to the next, with my previous three relationships totalling around thirteen years combined and little breathing room between. There was always talk of marriage, but it never panned out, for one reason or another.

When I was younger, I had a deep desire for a traditional family—of being a provider and giver and to sacrifice myself for those closest to me. In truth, I think this aspiration was because my own homelife was so turbulent and volatile. I wanted the idea of stability and regulation, and it's easy to see how that bled into my relationships in retrospect. This is the longest I've been single since I was in high school, and I think it's been really good for me.

For I love easily and I love openly. And many forms of love exist: The romance of Eros, yes. But also the platonic friendship of Philia, the familial love of Storge, the playful love of Ludus, the self-love of Philautia, the obsessive love of Mania, the enduring love of Pragma, and of course, the universal love of Agape.

Agape love is altruistic, selfless love extending to humanity, nature, and all the world. The unconditional care and compassion given without expecting anything in return.

I think with the several projects I've been creating and maintaining over the past few months, I am trying to find that Agape love within myself. That is why I write freely to you, and why I am trying to build a digital commons. I want to pour myself into work that will benefit others, asking nothing in return.

If you ask me how I have something to write about nearly every day, the answer is because I am deeply curious about the world, and I am curious because I love so much in the world, so deeply.

I don't know if romantic love is in the cards for me and my future at all anymore, but I feel at peace with the love I'm giving out, now.