The disastrous decade of dating

I talked with Ali about much of this – please circulate our video discussion and take a look at his Substack, where he's posting articles related to his work. He brings something rare to this debate: a young man willing to speak openly about his own heartbreak, and an outsider who grew up in a world where dating didn't exist, now looking at ours with fresh eyes.

His most important insight is about what that decade does to young men. Years of invisibility and rejection leave scars that don't simply vanish when their fortunes turn in their thirties. Imagine finally meeting "a wonderful woman who might never have paid attention to you ten years ago," Ali says. "But if you are still bringing all the bitterness, the invisibility, the rejection and the painful experiences of your twenties into that relationship, it's not a recipe for a healthy relationship either. It's simply a lose–lose situation."

Fifty years ago, we told young women to put marriage on hold but never stopped to ask what that would do to their chances of finding love, marriage, kids – the whole shebang. Writing for The Weekend Australian last week, Louise Perry points to what's been called a "relationship recession", with young men and women living ever lonelier lives. Interestingly, she suggests it may also explain why the sexes are pulling apart politically: they no longer "deradicalise each other through sustained, loving relationships."

What's extraordinary is how little attention we have paid to these issues. We've rewritten the timetable of young adults' lives and barely anyone has stopped to ask the cost. We fret endlessly about falling birth rates, male disengagement, the epidemic of loneliness and the growing political divide between young men and women yet rarely connect the dots. One of the biggest social experiments of our time is unfolding in plain sight and we've hardly noticed.