1. Relationships take real effort, work, at all aspects. I've often joked about not having sex now that I'm married/have a kid "Yeah I've had sex once, and I have living proof [points to child]," sort of self-deprecating dad jokes. But honestly behind that joke is a reality that my sex life is waaaayyyyyy scaled back from what it was 3+ years ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and 15 years ago. My wife and I were never comfortable with that, but it also takes a lot of work, resentment builds, and even among married couples who love each other I'll still have "Fear of rejection" or fear that she's not in the mood, resentment that I'm putting in effort and she's not, etc, and she'll have resentments and frustrations with me on the flipside, and it'll be easier for me to just put on my headphones and play videogames while she's watching true crime shows, rather than put in the effort. Along with kids who interrupt everything it can be hard to have those spontaneous moments and also "planning it out" will feel embarrassing (but IMO necessary for us a lot of the time, and that's kinda been a major win for us in the last 6mos, getting over the embarrassment). Sometimes when we do have date nights, it's so rare that we do that we'll over indulge, eat a shit load of food, drink a thousand beers, and then 1045pm will roll around and we're both like "eeehhhhhhh.... I kinda have to take a massive shit...... let's do it tomorrow....." And then tomorrow rolls around and there's some other reason "ugh I'm hungover as fuck and I gotta get the kid in 30mins..."
2. We're in a major cultural shift around work. Something like 1/3 of relationships begin at work (long term, hookup, whatever), and as this major shift has taken place around work over the last year especially for college educated working people, it's a major disruption to how people have traditionally met. Dating apps, hookup apps, etc, aren't a replacement for that.
3. Another aspect is that in 2020-2021, there's less opportunity for social mixers... Bars, clubs might be closed, limitations, or when people go out if they are open they might go out in limited groups... 4 friends "taking a chance going to the bar" might not be willing to mingle socially with other people. Or people who do go out like how they did pre-2020, there's a self-selection process with that, like if you're willing to go out to hook up with people at a bar in 2020, you're kind of opting into a self-selection process that has a smaller pool of potential partners.
4. We've all been going through this crisis the last couple years, many of us are stressed, mental health on the precipice, depression and anxiety on the rise, and those are all things that make hooking up more difficult.
5. Distractions + things moving inside the home, off of the TV, more personal. It's not even about how media has moved out of the movie theatre, but at every level media moves more personally. I'd say the majority of video media I consume in a day is personal... On my phone, on my laptop, personalized to my tastes. It's not communal (outside the house), it's not communal inside the house. It's personal in a way that it wasn't even 10 or 15 years ago.
I think the rate of change is probably a bad thing, and as a social species we're not really sure what to do. I also think this growing chasm of under-sexualized people is probably a bad thing too. It's a very quick change in a relatively short period of time, and those sorts of things usually aren't good. Along with a rise in under-sexed people is also lonely people, isolated people, etc. It's all related. The 40-year-old Virgin was a cultural joke that *most* people shared, like even if you didn't look down on the idea of a 40-year-old virgin, there was general acceptance of "well... that's pretty bad for that guy." But, at the rate of change that we're in, the idea of a 40 year old virgin is not going ot be novel, it's going to be common place, but the cultural opinion that being a 40 year old virgin is a bad thing is going to persist, which is going to lead to more resentment, isolation, feeling of being alone, etc.
