Relationships as a Gen-Z Guy: What it’s Like

Hi! I’m Gecko Madsen,¹ and I’m a young man. Nobody ever uses the term “young man” unless they’re talking about a social problem.

“Why aren’t young men going to college?”

“Why are young men getting into the far-right?”

“Why do young men go on killing sprees?”

That kind of thing.

Today, I’m not using it exactly like that. Today I’m separating it out into its constituent parts: “Young” and “man.”

The “young” part is important because we’re gonna be talking about Gen-Z, who aren’t as young as Gen Alpha, but are still pretty young. A lot of weird shit is going on with Gen-Z, especially when it comes to sex and relationships, and I wanna talk about it.

The “man” part is important because right now a lot of people are trying to figure out what’s going on with men in America, and I’ve seen a lot of really bullshit theories thrown around. I feel, as a young man myself, I have some personal experience to contribute to this discussion. One of the things I’ve learned in this life is to not let other people tell your story for you.

Before we begin, I gotta point out that I’m writing this as myself. I’m just one guy. This is how I see the world. Other members of Gen-Z will give you different takes on these things.

With all that out of the way, let’s get to the heart of the thing:

A lack of knowledge and a lack of trust have poisoned relationships for Gen-Z.

Let me explain.

None of my friends are in relationships right now. Most of us are also virgins. The thing is, most people would say these aren’t huge problems. A bunch of twentysomethings not getting laid ain’t the end of the world.

The thing that worries me is something deeper: Most of the relationship talk I hear in my generation, both in-person and online, is about fear.

Fears of rejection, commitment, and having shitty sexual performance are all pretty common, but there are darker fears:

Fear of loneliness. Fear that you’re fundamentally unlovable. Fear of being exploited. Above all others, fear of sexual assault. Fear of sexual assault takes different forms depending on who’s doing the fearing. Fear of rape is the big obvious one, especially among women. Fear of false rape accusations is pretty common among men. We’ll get back to that one.

Below those are the more obscure fears: Fear of consenting to something you shouldn’t. Fear of starting a relationship with someone who’s gonna try to pressure you into doing sex acts you don’t wanna do. Fear that the person you love is just using you for the sex. Fear of your crush being afraid of you. I got a bad case of that one.

I bombard you with this huge list of fears to give you an idea of what the headspace is like: constantly calculating all the ways this could turn bad, and eventually wondering if any of this is worth it.

The way I see it, the general discussion around relationships among Gen-Z folks is focused way more on the potential negatives of being in a relationship than the potential positives.

I blame Harvey Weinstein. We grew up in the era of the MeToo movement. People go on about all the damage that’s being done to teens because they’re learning about sex from porn, but that wasn’t my experience. I learned about sex from the news, and let me tell you, that shit’s no picnic.

I remember the time I first heard the term “oral sex.” It was in a news story on the radio. If I remember correctly, the full phrase was “he demanded oral sex from a hotel maid.”

I had to ask my mom what it meant, which was awkward.

I heard the whole Bill Cosby story when I was fifteen. Louis CK, Harvey Weinstein, Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Roman Polanski, Bill Clinton, R. Kelly, Woody Allen…

It just keeps going.

This was my early exposure to sex. My mom had read Where Did I Come From? to me when it was time to have “the talk” but that was a mechanical explanation. I learned about what sex was like in the real world from news stories about famous rapists. I distinctly remember a moment in my adolescence when I was thinking about Bill Cosby drugging those women, and I thought “Well, Gecko, that’s evil, so you’re just gonna have to not have sex.” And then another thought entered my brain: “well, a woman might have sex with you willingly…” and I did a kind of cognitive backflip as I reevaluated my entire thought process. Why hadn’t that occurred to me sooner?

And now I’m pretty sure I know. I didn’t ask my parents questions about relationships. When they gave me a copy of What’s Happening to Me? in my mid-teens, my ideas about sex had already become pretty grim, and the good-natured but slightly awkward tone of a book trying to teach teens about safe sex without scaring them too much kinda rolled off me. It felt like a book from some weird utopia unrelated to anything I knew. To be clear, I wasn’t some hardened kid. I was a white boy from the suburban Midwest. I just grew up in a time when a lot of bad shit was getting aired out in public. I’m sure any teens alive now know that feeling.

I don’t blame any of the people who came forward as part of MeToo or my family for letting me hear this stuff. I mostly blame the rapists. I blame the twenty-four hour news cycle a little bit, but I blame them for everything.

Now, some of you may have seen an issue with this: “But Madsen!” you cry out, index finger pointed accusatorily like Phoenix Wright about to turn the tables on a prosecutor, “what about the guy your age who don’t believe any of those celebrities were sex criminals!”

I’m glad you asked. See, the thing is that those guys believe all the women (and some men) who came forward were liars. Their view of relationships also got pretty dark, because they believed there were a bunch of women throwing false rape accusations around with no consequences. They view sexual relationships as a dangerous thing marked by malice and antagonism just like other people do. The fear of getting “MeTooed” has become its own thing, and I’ve talked to guys who’re won’t ask out women for fear of being accused of sexual predation.

Look, I’m not asking for you to sympathize with anybody here. I’m just saying that if this doesn’t sound like anybody you know, this is how the other half lives. This is what it’s like.

You’ll note that I’m not talking about the manosphere here. That’s because a lot of other people are already talking about the manosphere. Andrew Tate and suchlike fuckery are easy to write about, because all their shit’s immortalized in the amber of social media, free for you to extract dinosaur blood from and make your own redpilled reptiloid clone. Fuck, maybe a redpilled avian clone. A dinosaur’s at least kind of like a reptile, right?²

This brings me to a related point: sometimes people will ask why men get so defensive when you talk about other men doing sex crimes: “We’re not talking about you. You know we’re not talking about you. Why are you so desperate to establish that not all men are like this/this guy is actually totally ethically fine?”

As I see it, on some level most boys and men identify with every other boy or man. If one man is bad, or if many men are bad, you’re bad by implication, and the important thing to do is to exonerate yourself. The two most intuitive ways to do this are to get the other person to localize the issue to “a few bad apples” or try to argue this guy’s innocence. This is a product of two other really shitty ideas in our culture:

1. All acts of misogyny are equivalent. Plenty of guys in arguments think they have to prove they’re totally, impeccably morally clean, or else they’re socially equivalent to any of the rapists I mentioned earlier. This isn’t how being part of an institutional problem works, and the same logic also applies to fear of being seen as a racist. A lot people’s response to this: deny, deny, deny. Fight tooth and nail to prove either the system doesn’t exist or you’re not part of it, because otherwise you’re ontologically evil.

2. This is a real big one: There’s an entrenched idea in our society that all men are degenerate sex-maniacs. This is some truly powerful magic.³ It’s both a harmful stereotype and an excuse. So much fuckery comes back to this: “I’m a man, I can’t help it,” “what were you wearing?,” “we can’t have mixed-gender locker rooms because men will abuse it.” It turns me and my brothers into a brood of sex-ogres.

“Spit, turn around twice, and sprinkle a little salt on the doorstep before you leave the house or the Men will come for you.”

It’s amazing, because it takes away our status as beings with free will and consciences, but it also means whenever one of my brothers molests someone, it’s really not that bad, because the Men always do that. It’s in our nature.

I don’t think many guys have thought about it that way, but I think it’s entrenched itself pretty deeply in our psyche. What this means is that if a guy is gonna be held to account for molesting someone, it’s really men and our nature on trial, and you’re gonna have to defend him. I can safely say this shit’s pernicious slander because I’m not constantly dogged by the urge to rape women. I am often horny. This idea that all men are rapists has an interesting alchemical reaction with our cultural idea that all sex is on some level immoral, and the output is that guys do identify with the sex-ogre, because if you think sexual thoughts, you’re basically a rapist. Hence “people are demonizing men for having sexual feelings” becomes a constant talking point among guys in the antiwoke camp.

Speaking of not being good enough and just kinda accepting that, here’s something less disturbing:

There’s a certain level of discussion going on online about men “doing the bare minimum” in relationships with women.⁴ This is stuff like washing dishes, doing laundry, taking care of any kids you might’ve picked up, etc., enough that the task split is roughly fair for your female partner. It also includes being willing to discuss shit and provide emotional support when necessary. I defer to the common explanation for this one: culture has taught guys they don’t have to do any of this shit. In truth, I find this embarrassing. I put a lot of stock by capability. Adults should be able to do basic things. I still need to learn how to change the oil in my car, but I do my own laundry, I wash my own dishes, and I do my own tax returns. If we can’t do those things, we’re a bunch of giant babies.

Unfortunately, culture has decided we’re a bunch of giant babies. So I say unto every guy who wants a mommy GF or a tradwife: “Wouldn’t you rather be able to do shit yourself?” I’ve lived on my own and handled my own shit. It was alright.

But then there’s the twist: See, I identify with every other guy, and I don’t think I’m better than the average man on most things. That leaves me with the nagging suspicion that if I were to cohabitate with a women I might suddenly lose my willingness to do all those things I did fine when there was no one else to do it for me. If millions of guys all over the world are like this, what shot do I really having at outperforming them? “Doing the bare minimum” sounds kinda intimidating. I’m a piece of shit and I often struggle to meet the bare minimum in things. Another reason not to get into a relationship.

Then there’s all the “setting boundaries” and “emotional labor” stuff. I’m still not entirely sure how those work in practice, but they’re more marks on in the “cost” column.

Which brings us to the column marked “benefit,” and it seems to be a bit smudged. Unclear.

None of the guys I know have relationship goals, myself included. In conversations about dating and such like, largely of the extremely hypothetical variety, none of us could really articulate what we were looking for.

I’m not talking about not wanting to be in any kind of relationship. That’s a concrete goal. Most of us are open to the idea of being in a relationship, but haven’t articulated what kind.

I’m deliberately keeping the term “relationship” broad to indicate this vagueness. One time I sat down a seriously gave this some thought.

Am I just here to hook up?

Am I trying to find “the one,” get married, and raise a family?

Am I here for a relatively serious romantic relationship that I still expect to end at some point?

The only tangible thing I could get was this: I have an emotional need that Friday night D&D with the boys isn’t filling.

It rattles you a little to strip all the layers away and find out there’s basically nothing there.

To be clear, I’m not talking about indecision. This isn’t a case of vacillating between the options. This is a case of drawing a big fucking blank.

The thing is, a lot of boys don’t get sold a cavalcade of idealized relationships when they’re growing up like girls do. For much of our formative years, romance meant the forgettable subplots in otherwise entertaining stories. I’m pretty sure women being constantly bombarded with idealized relationships in media and being told that marriage is the ultimate goal of life has wrought its own kind of damage, but I don’t have as much first-hand experience with it.

There’s a disconnect. Women have been fed a cultural expectation of what a “good” relationship is and how it’s gonna make everything better. Guys my age just seem to have a collection of moments they’re trying to reach.

I’ll always remember this one guy I knew on a Discord server. Let’s call him “Thomás.” Thomás was porn-brained. He was the guy who posted most in the NSFW channel. I’m not talking about dirty jokes here, he was posting links to full-on hentai doujins.⁵ He talked a lot about what he thought was attractive in two-dimensional women.⁶ He was, in the modern sense of the ancient word,⁷ a gooner. He approached porn and masturbation with a hobbyist’s enthusiasm.

He contained multitudes. We got into a discussion about the GTA 6 trailer, and he said it was weird there were so many black people in it. “It was like if they’d made the city all Asian.” He relented when I pointed out it’s set in Vice City, which is based on Miami, and there are lot of black people in Miami. He once said South Korea is a country that “loves beauty” because parents will pay for their daughters’ first plastic surgery there. On the other hand, he once got really upset talking about the Japanese culture of victim blaming, specifically how many J-pop idols’ claims of abused in the industry get ignored and they have to apologize for being sexually harassed. Talking about the mother of a rapist visiting the grave of his victim to spit on it, he said:

“like bish your son is who you should spit on”

Thomás was pretty convinced game developers in the west were deliberately making female characters in games uglier than the actresses that provided their face models. On the subject of racism he said:

“i wanted to make ajoke but seeing how today is no one can take jokes anymore lol

people need to realize there no reason to hate for a lot of things it’s dumb

good ass is good ass regardless of color

be respectful lol”

But the thing he said that really stuck with me was a response to this meme:

“true

hell even handholding

or just playing games together on the couch”

This got me thinking about relationship goals. When I see women talking online about what they want out of a relationship, it’s usually pretty thought out: what they expect from a partner, whether they want kids or not, what their boundaries are, etc. With guys, it’s almost always in terms of moments. The sex, yes, but also the romantic stuff: finally confessing your love, your loved one holding you and telling you everything’s gonna be okay, them falling asleep on your shoulder as you watch TV. It’s life without a future or a past.

Personally, I think this is beautiful, because I’m one of the guys who thinks this way. But this is also an issue. It’s a view of romance with no clear idea on how to get from Point A to Point B. If a guy’s idea of love is 50% fevered sex fantasy and 50% moments that look like they were pulled from a nostalgia-tinted highschool movie, he’s not playing with a full deck.

There was a slightly disturbing moment recently when I realized that my friend group of men and a few enbies in their early twenties, despite being legally adults and mostly having our shit together, had the collective relationship knowledge of a bunch of highschoolers.

We’d all been told we were smart as kids, and we’d spent a lot of time studying and doing stereotypical nerd shit. Dating was for suckers who didn’t care about learning. Some of us took certain perverse pride in never dating,⁸ because that meant we were improving our minds while the rest of the world went to go be loud and obnoxious somewhere else. We didn’t talk to other people about relationships, because why would that matter to us? We had more important things to do. None of us were asexual, but a lot of us hated society.

Personally, I thought I had this shit figured out. I thought I was the Michael Jordan of puberty.⁹ I’d evaded all the teen angst. I’d beat off now and maybe find a girlfriend later. Hell, maybe a boyfriend. I was down. What I didn’t realize was that I hadn’t sidestepped the teen angst. I’d just delayed it.

I was gonna have to do it all in college.

The first thing that I learned about dating: Asking someone out is painful. We live in a world where it’s not common to just approach someone and talk to them. The general impression I have is that people aren’t too fond of it. The few times it’s happened to me I was confused. Most of them turned out to be Mormons or Jehova’s Witnesses looking for converts, except for the one guy who gained my trust and then diddled me.

Point is, at a base level, asking someone you don’t really know to hang out with you feels wrong. Then you bring the relationship stuff in. Dating, in its very nature, is emotionally fraught. You’re rolling a whole bunch of dice that could land on anything. One night stand? Life-ruining abusive relationship? Just get shot down? It’s all a possibility.

The other problem is that you’re not doing this in a vacuum. This seems to be generally a men approaching women problem. To the best of my knowledge, women receive a way higher level of unwanted sexual attention than anyone else. Straight women going to gay bars to avoid getting hit on is an established principle. If you have a realistic attitude towards life, you understand that you’re gonna be part of the unwanted sexual attention, and if you care about other people’s feelings, you’re gonna wanna avoid doing that. On top of all that shit, we live in a low-trust society and people are understandably wary about strangers.

So that rules out the old “just go up and talk to her.”

Then there’s dating apps. I don’t use dating apps. Very few of my friends use dating apps. I have it on good authority that dating apps are deliberately shit because if you actually connect with someone you might stop using the app for a while, possibly forever. Also, the idea of giving my data to a mobile app for a shot at romance hurts my pride.

Then there’s the old “slow-burn.” The old “friends to lovers,” maybe the old “friends to fucking.” As we’ve established, the goals here are hazy beyond “relationship.” Meeting someone in a class, a club, or a tabletop RPG group, hitting it off, and then possibly becoming intimate sometime in the future is the nonthreatening Gen-Z dream. It’s practically cozy. This is my pro strat, and it hasn’t worked well for me.

First of all, it’s heavily dependent on random chance. The likelihood that you’re gonna end up in a friend group with someone you’re actually attracted too is lower than you’d think, and then there’s the additional low percentage that they’re into you nonplatonically.

Second of all, it’s mostly effective in college. There are just fewer options to socialize in-person when you’re not in a weird bottle ecosystem actively trying to give you a social network, especially if you live in an out of the way spot like a lot of my online friends do.

Thirdsies is time. As the name would suggest, the slow-burn is slow. It takes a long time to build up a rapport with someone to the point where you’d ask them out on an actual date, especially if you’re super nervous like a lot of us Gen Z fucks. By the time you’re at that point, the semester’s over, or the Pathfinder campaign has ended, or you suddenly have to leave town due to circumstances beyond your control, and the moment to get things off the ground has passed.

So that’s where we stand. Dating is shit and confusing, and all my friends who’ve tried it also think it’s shit and confusing. I really want to have a relationship with a woman¹⁰ and I wish I had a more eloquent way to say that.

Verily, we are all just taller children.¹¹

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