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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that 21.6% of adults received mental health treatment in 2021, up from 19.2% in 2019 – young adults between the ages of 18 and 44, particularly women, were more likely to have received treatment. Back in 2018, NBC News reported results from a survey by the Hopelab Foundation and Well Being Trust which found that “90% of teens and young adults with symptoms of depression said they had gone online for information about mental health issues, compared with 48% of those without any symptoms.” Big Tech and social media are knowingly responsible, as Brad Wilcox observed in the Institute for Family Studies blog, for the rise in young adult anxiety, depression, and suicide, “among other pathologies.”

A recent article in The Guardian tells the stories of longtime dating app-users who quit and found love offline. Many of those interviewed said they left behind dating apps due to “burnout” and “exhaustion,” as well as disturbing demands made people with whom they’d matched. As one woman explained, “it felt exhausting, like a full-time job. I had one guy who wanted me to start sending sexts to him before we’d even had a conversation.” Another woman articulated her sense that the apps themselves engendered bad behavior and transactional attitudes, noting that “you don’t have to reflect or make changes when something goes wrong – you can just swipe to the next person.” Some users have tried their luck on dating apps with great success, but far more have experienced a loss of hope and deteriorating mental health. As long as demand for such apps exists, they will continue to shape the dating landscape – for good and for ill. But the experiences outlined in The Guardian give us a glimpse into how we can best live with these apps, whether we are users or receivers of their society-wide effects.

In 2011, sociologist Mark Regnerus proposed that sex had become cheap – accessing it came to require less “emotional and financial investment” from men. While some have interpreted this idea as sexist or denigrating to women it is rather accurately describes a dynamic that has played out over the course of the past two decades with considerable consequences for both sexes. As men and women have adopted and manifested a consumeristic attitude towards each other, the result has been an overall decline in happy commitments – fewer and later marriages, higher rates of divorce and marital dissatisfaction, as well as higher levels of loneliness. These are the fruits of a culture that has failed to honor chastity, discernment, and indeed marriage as the locus of sexual activity, leaving young men and women with the sense that committed relationships are burdensome and complicated.

A recent article in the Daily Princetonian highlights two divergent worldviews in its latest “Ask the Sexpert” column. In response to a new student asking how to approach relationships during their first year of college, the Sexpert predictably echoes platitudes about college as a time for experimentation and closes with an invitation to check out the university’s “Safer Sexpo.” What hardly qualifies as direction for someone with the idealistic, yet understandable, desire to find their life’s partner on campus, demonstrates just how polarized views about marriage have become.

Those familiar with the atmosphere on college campuses over the past decade or so will recognize the plight of this student from Dartmouth. The author, in the style of The New York Times’ Modern Love column for The Dartmouth, writes of her dissatisfaction with relationships at her school, not simply because of the lack of privacy afforded at a small school, but the tendency of students to treat everything from hookups and “situationships” to dating relationships as “casual and meaningless.” Her concerns echo those of a growing number of young people who, as documented in Christine Emba’s recent book Rethinking Sex, find the sexual culture increasingly dysfunctional, anti-relationship, anti-intimacy, and anti-person.