The premise of the reality series is simple: is love really blind, or does physical attraction make or break a relationship? In the show, men and women from the same city — in this series, Boston — go on remote “dates” in separate pods, where they can only hear each others’ voices. They narrow down their options and, when they really hit it off, they get engaged. Only after the proposal can the couple meet in the flesh. The reveal is often disastrous because one party has exaggerated their hotness out of cunning or delusion (men and women alike). This delicious discomfort is exactly why this otherwise boring show of dense try-hards is popular. 

Our “Kennedy” is one such culprit. He had compared himself to a young Jude Law in the blind booths — but despite being conventionally good looking (tall, good hair etc.) did not clear that admittedly very high bar. After their in-person meeting, Jax informed producers that she would not be staying on the show. Asked about his appearance, she said she “didn’t want to be mean”. Oof. Stew was unceremoniously dumped by proxy, let down gently by a man from the production company. 

The clip quickly became a talking point online, further inflaming the mutual resentment among X’s embittered men and women. For one largely male camp, Stew had suffered the slings and arrows of what certain corners of the internet call “hoeflation” — the expectations of women rising far beyond their proportionate sexual market value. His being considered a “comically hideous man”, to echo one tweet, was the ultimate blackpill, evidence of the unrealistic expectations of shallow women who themselves routinely overestimate their own hotness. In reality, this group argued, Stew was at minimum “her looksmatch” — the looksmaxxing metric for partners in the same sexual league. Maybe he even mogged her; Jax, they spat, was in fact an “orange ogre”.

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For the other camp, mainly women, both Stew’s physicality and personality were unattractive. He was a “freak”; he resembled a frighteningly ugly cartoon character. They took issue with his apparently overabundant teeth, his supposedly dorky manner, his “crazy eyes”. It was all rather cruel. If we’re being reasonable, Stew Stewart is no Jude Law — but he’s no munter either. Many women would be happy to have him.

The clip comes at a time of mutual anxiety around the sexual status of men and women, with vast culture wars intruding on every candlelit dinner. The romantic chasm between the sexes yawns wider by the day. We are told that tumbling birth rates will soon spell the collapse of the West — and that this is the fault of the encroachment of “the manosphere”, or of feminists sabotaging the happiness of other women, depending on your favorite flavor of conspiracy theory. It is somehow never pointed out that this paranoia, enmity and constant squabbling is itself a central cause of the problem. A frank and respectful discussion about the nature of male and female desire does not rake in the clicks as much as scrumptious vitriol.

Instead of taking our culture’s romantic breakdown as a concatenation of factors — the gains and losses of liberal feminism, social-media echo chambers, political bifurcation, the vanishing of third spaces, the ineffectual premise of dating apps — a small-but-vocal proportion of men simply blame women for being picky. Which, of course, we are. In matters of the heart, everybody is choosy. Desire isn’t a sort of public utility, distributed like volts on the national grid. The only remotely common exception is the indiscriminate way in which some men scattergun casual sex — and that is hardly inspiring. 

Yet for some reason, women having physical preferences has this week come as a surprise. At least, it was a shock to an X poster called Ryan Lee, who gained a million views and counting with his huffing over a clip in which three charming Christian women yak about whether they’d turn a man down based on looks alone. “I’m telling you, I can look at a photo, and I will know,” says one, who Lee notes with disdain is single at 36. Lee posted: “All that matters is if you’re really attractive. THEN they’ll go on a date with you… they’re seeking Chad.” (Chad, for the uninitiated, is the best-looking masculine ideal originating from incel terminology.) If you’re not hot, Lee raged, “even these women in ministry will swipe left on you in an instant”. Christian women, he implied, should be less sexually superficial; they ought to overlook a weak chin or a hairline in retreat for a man well versed in Ephesians.

In reality, of course, they will not — just as most men will not express interest in an ugly woman simply because she is kind, or virtuous, or whatever. Lee was duly dogpiled for this logical lapse. It was the Kennedy fiasco all over again: men being horrified at the shallowness of women, posting about it, and being told off by other women online. Yet again, nobody wins. 

It should not surprise men that women are superficial. It is true that as a sex we have become pickier; changing mores have made partnership optional, and so women are now motivated by desire rather than duty. Women’s metrics have become, in other words, closer to those of men. If men balk at this, it is because they see an unflattering reflection of themselves. Increasingly today, women are the more educated, higher-earning party, and so implement stricter selection methods so as to conserve their self-made status. Yes, that can hurt. But judging women for exercising preferences — the realistic ones, at least — is pure hypocrisy. Modern male sexual culture is aggressively “lookist”, with men constantly ranking women out of 10. Yet hints of the same attitudes among the fairer sex are framed as evidence of a civilization in decline. 

Men are not shamed for preferring beauty — nor should they be. It is natural, after all… and aren’t we constantly reminded that male sexuality is “highly visual”? Yet when women express similar “visual” preferences, they are called picky. How’s that for a double standard? Castigating choosiness as a feminine pathology is naive. Nevertheless it’s all the rage. One popular meme at the moment plays on the idea of a state-mandated girlfriend, though clearly restricting choice will not furnish the way for true love — unless begrudging toleration is your thing.

The fate of Stew Stewart is what happens when we indulge the fantasy that love is blind. In the absence of ambient traditionalist pressure, women must have active incentives to date. Telling them they must suck it up and go for the kinds of men who look like they’ve been asked to leave several garden centers is not an attractive proposition. The sexes must find one another again; the romantic isolation of 2026 is depressing and unhealthy. But the solution isn’t to turn back the clock to a time when women had no other choice; instead, it’s to train for the league in which you want to play. In this, perhaps the looksmaxxers are right after all.

Social media would have us believe that this dynamic is now the norm in heterosexual relationships. Men err like bumbling toddlers; women manage and chastise and cajole them. These videos are fed to me continually on TikTok: women telling horror stories about terrible dates; women offering advice on harnessing “dark feminine energy” to manipulate love interests; women fresh out of breakups denying the value of romantic love at all. Associating with men, these videos tell us, is a matter of tragic compromise — an embarrassing slip into an enclosure of backwards baboons destined to disappoint us. The assumption, borrowed from the language of motherhood, is that girlfriends have a monopoly on reason and on perspective; their partners, on the other hand, are hopelessly in thrall to impulsive urges and emotions, base creatures reliant on sex and drink. In this dynamic, the woman’s celestial faculties have one major source: therapy culture.

The cult of the Therapy Girlfriend was thrown into relief last week in a skit which went viral on X. In it, a woman sits across from her date; she quizzes him on various attributes. Age? 28. Attachment style? Secure. Credit score? 780. Therapy? Once a week. So far, he passes muster. But then the guy scuppers the deal by asking her to “go to my place”; she weighs anchor.

Yet it wasn’t the woman’s skittishness about casual sex that summoned discourse; it was the fact that attending regular therapy was on her list of requirements — once a week being the bare minimum for dateability. Assessing it later, the commentator Colin Wright wrote that the requirement made sense because of “how thoroughly many Left-wing women view nearly every interaction through a kind of ‘therapy ideology’ with its own special language”. He went on to describe how such women conceive of therapy as a sort of “mental-health gymnasium” — part of the necessary upkeep of every healthy adult.

Rather than emerging fully fledged into the adult world, there to deal with the ups and downs of life, therapy culture has us with one wing dangling from the chrysalis — always ready to be bashed by a gust of wind. To go through life unscathed requires Joan Didion’s vision of self-centered psychological labor: “[We are] something to work at, work on, ‘make an effort’ for and subject to an hour a day of emotional nautilus training.” With all this self-discovering, who has any time for seduction?

Clearly, there are occasions when therapy serves a purpose. Men and women alike benefit from it when living with grave psychiatric disorders; in many cases, these interventions should be lifelong with otherwise disastrous consequences. But should all men, even those without troubling histories, be marched off to a headshrinker for the mere purpose of neutering defects, buffing out the bad before they are allowed near a relationship? Any reasonable dater would say no.

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And yet, increasingly, social media pins romantic disappointment on the sins of untherapized men. The language of relationship “attachment styles” is a nauseating example — a bullshit taxonomy of daters said to be doomed by early parental relationships and who, in a better world, would simply be called “desperate” (instead of “anxious”), “not into you” (instead of “avoidant”) and “normal” (instead of “secure”). The greatest trial sent a dater’s way seems to be to fall for an “avoidant” — those who run from intimacy because their mother didn’t rush in when they cried in the crib, or something — and advice on how to “handle” such partners is everywhere in the online femosphere. Such women would do better to avoid those who don’t like them back. Put that on a T-shirt. But the comforting delusion that this attachment-style discourse affords women is that it lets them avoid the horror of simply not being wanted; instead, they are free to meditate their way through an “avoidant discard” (when said partner ups and leaves out of nowhere) by a man whose inner child feels abandoned, and so is scared of intimacy, or whatever the rationale may be. As usual in the theater of hyperindividualism, everyone else is to blame. Easy to see how this flattering framework might have gained traction.

Equally, any amorous mishap can be palmed off on a partner who has failed to do “the work”: the usual, devastatingly reasonable causes of breakups — loss of feeling, wandering eyes, the contempt of familiarity — are traded for ego-friendly explanations: “He is frightened by his enormous passion for me”; “He wants to be with someone less emotionally challenging”; “He is afraid of replicating the mistakes of his parents’ marriage” and so on and so on. Let’s not face the fact that, sometimes, he’s just not that into you. Humility and resilience around this truth is an essential lesson of adulthood — far more valuable than any therapy package going.

This is not to say that the Therapy Girlfriend intentionally weaponizes counseling-speak in her romantic campaigns. In fact I’d contend that the assumptions of therapy — that we must continually enforce “boundaries”, manage “disclosures”, hold “dialogues” and seek “growth opportunities” — pervade Millennial and Gen Z dating culture to an extent that they no longer bear the antiseptic stench of their clinical birthplace. Therapy culture is hopelessly in bed with identity politics, and adherents of one are all but guaranteed to cleave to the other: its obsessions are the same, primarily the unimpeachable traumatized individual, whose needs and expectations supersede those of all others. Its emphasis on “empathy” always seems to go only one way: towards the therapy subject. Even in the context of couples’ therapy — something which, shockingly, I have known unmarried couples in their twenties to do in London (just end it!) — the “discoveries” of therapy seem far more likely to advantage the woman, who is encouraged by our culture to be more analytical, perfectionist and cautious in heterosexual dating. We go through our teens and twenties being told by TikTok dating gurus to fear and loathe men who are both guaranteed and determined to take advantage of, two-time and/or abandon us, such is the culture of fear around relationships; therapy culture is the peg with which we can hold our noses if we must associate with one. We women are encouraged to wield theories about personal growth and the emotional trigger as a sort of disinfectant: get with the program or be cast out — you’re a romantic biohazard.

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Now, don’t get me wrong — our exasperated kitchen-berator from the bed-puke breakup video can clearly do better: this man is an unsalvageable loser. The problem is that when women are encouraged to use the teacherly language of pop therapy (which, unlike real therapy, flatters the help-seeker rather than challenging them), they make losers of everyone they date. Yes, some men — like some women — are unstable to the point of being beyond saving; but a reasonable dating culture would tell us to avoid them, not to reconstruct them. But the Therapy Girlfriend necessarily turns the entire male dating pool into a shuffling army of bashful apologetics, self-flagellating for their criminal lack of “inner work” or suffering through ritual weeping sessions to show their emotional literacy.

And, critically, the Therapy Girlfriend avoids all fun. Love interests should not be cowed by a watchful therapist lingering in the background of all amorous encounters, like the forever-scowling HR team of a midsized corporate office. Men are right to be suspicious of women steeped in the language of “grounding” and “journeys”. These concepts are so often rigged towards things that do not a good relationship make: cautiousness, endless analysis and fragility. At the precious center is always the therapized person, cradling their own self-esteem. In striving to be perfect, placid and invulnerable beings, we miss out on the thrill of romantic risk; the pleasure of being around people who are perhaps not precisely like ourselves. Falling in love is by its nature “dysregulating”, a spinning blizzard, a waking dream. It very often ends in tears — but it’s always worth it. Therapy Girls reading this: send your inner child off to crèche. At some point the grown-ups have to do the talking. If not, you might just let the good times pass you by.

You weren’t one of those dieting puritans; you were a sensualist, and the steak in front of you proved it. You were also deeply self-contained and mysterious and could pretend to yourself you were in a film. Still, there would come a point in every such meal, half a bottle down, when the projected glamor of the occasion would wear off. Your hilarious wine-fueled thoughts would be wasted on an audience of one. The photos you were taking of your own food were no substitute for a second pair of eyes, looking at it — and you — from across the table.

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The non-fiction book Two Women Living Together — a sensation in South Korea when first published in 2019, and now out in English — begins with a similar epiphany for one of its authors. Hwang Sunwoo, a 40-something fashion editor living in Seoul, has come to believe that “aloneness resemble[s] order — efficient, comfortable, beautiful”. But then, during a solitary surfing holiday with nobody to laugh or drink with, she is forced to face up to the fact that some experiences are “best enjoyed with other people around”. Meanwhile a new pal, blogger Kim Hana, has been “aware of the demands and efforts of living alone” for some time.

Feeling anxious in her too-quiet apartment, the thrill of exerting total control over where the bathmat is placed on the floor has rather worn off. Visiting her parents’ house and waking up to the relaxing sound of other people cooking, Hana determines to radically change her life. Against societal expectation, the women decide to buy a house together in the up-and-coming Magwon-dong area. Along with two cats apiece, these platonic heterosexual friends — once proud atoms — are now a “molecular family”, and the bonds that develop between them during co-habitation seem touchingly strong.

Indeed, a fascinating aspect of this jointly composed narrative, alternating between authors, is how much it resembles a romcom. First there is a courting period, though Hana is on the lookout for a housemate not a soulmate. Out drinking with Sunwoo for the first time à deux, and finding her “charismatic”, she starts to wonder — anticipatory italics —“What if it’s her?”. Sunwoo, for her part, is fascinated by this new friend: “I’ve discovered a new continent named Kim Hana; another world opens.” Once agreed on their plan of action, there are obstacles to overcome: will their cats get along? And even more important, can they afford it? Eventually they get the funds for an expensive family house, partly by asking their parents to “think of it as if we were getting married” and give them a loan.

There’s more jeopardy on the day of the move. Sunwoo is a disorganized hoarder, while Hana is intentional and orderly. Faced with her friend’s “egregious quantity of belongings”, Hana has a crisis. “[N]ow that her mountain of crap was eating into my space, reality hit me like a brick: I was looking at the topography of Sunwoo’s forty-year-old habits, and I’d have to live with this monstrous wave.” Every neat-freak who has ever lived with a chaos-merchant will be able to relate to her pain.

How the pair get through their subsequent fights and achieve mutually beneficial co-existence is the undramatic story arc of this charmingly lightweight book, but there are barely sketched sociological implications too. The falling marriage and birth-rates in South Korea are well-publicized. In its competitive economy, expectations of domestic labor still fall mainly upon women, both in their own homes and those of their in-laws. At various points in the book, Hana and Sunwoo each express relief that they can enjoy each other’s families without having to make the elaborate displays of filial piety that would be expected of daughters-in-law: cooking for the extended family during festivals, making regular visits, sending grateful gifts. As Sunwoo puts it, convincingly: “[i]n South Korea, going from the princess of the family, a competent worker or a carefree individual to a daughter-in-law is a significant drop in rank.”

Many women are apparently voting with their feet. Hana talks about the “lightness of being single”. Sunwoo says she is glad she isn’t married, though she once assumed she would be. But one result of all this lightness is a national loneliness epidemic: fewer spouses, children, grandchildren. A fifth of South Korean households are now single occupancy. One third of elderly people living alone reports having nobody to talk to.

Fed up with parental expectation and intense educational pressure, young people are apparently opting out too. One estimate says that 5% of them are “hikikomori” — originally a Japanese term — meaning socially withdrawn and economically inactive, “with little to no interaction with others”. In the past decade, various Korean neologisms have emerged to describe a lifestyle without need of friends or family; words like “honjok” (doing things alone), “honbab” (eating alone), and “honsul” (drinking alone).

In this desolate context, Hana and Sunwoo’s joyful sociability is something rebellious, the inverse of Carrie Bradshaw’s solo dining. They both love drinking and enjoy the marrying of their respective liquor cabinets. Hana, in particular, seems to be a genius at bringing people together. Her various neighborhood projects include the “Frivolous Knowledge Club” (members take turns “to share about a particular topic”); a ping pong club (“our thighs and friendships have firmed up”); and a “Catchball weekly” club (motto: “Let’s idle away the hours, friends!”). The idea of taking friendship so seriously will seem mockable to awkward British readers, though many of us would probably be the happier for a friend like her.

Some have criticized the authors for setting a bad example in a demographic crisis, yet they are unrepentant. Indeed, in an afterword about the book’s enthusiastic reception, Sunwoo writes that “Women in their twenties and thirties tell us we’ve given them the courage to live the lives they want”. She also writes appreciatively of ongoing attempts to recognize “kindred spirits” in Korean law, with tax breaks to match. But really what this book underlines is that you can’t reasonably expect women to keep playing the mothering game under harsh economic circumstances requiring dual incomes; and especially not when caring for your in-laws is presumed as much part of female biological destiny as caring for your infants.

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Attempting to lessen the one-sided burden, the Korean government is now radically expanding free childcare; though whether that entices women away from contraception remains to be seen. Meanwhile, in response to the loneliness problem, technologists are leaping into the breach. For elderly people devoid of family care, thousands of Hyodol dolls have been distributed — “AI-based companion robots” with cartoonish children’s faces — which are supposed to provide “emotional comfort” while issuing prompts about medication. Trials are also being run on “AI-based eldercare services aimed at reducing the risk of solitary death”: automated check-in calls that analyze the respondent’s voice patterns, looking for signs of abnormality or distress. Some of these services also ask for daily health checks, and offer “audio-based mental stimulation activities such as quizzes and music”.

There are also inventions that target younger generations — and not just in South Korea. In China there has been a lot of fuss recently about a new app on the market called “Are You Dead?”, facilitating a way for singletons to establish that they have not yet been eaten by their pets. In the US, meanwhile, the “Friend” AI has been developed; a companion chatbot, residing in a pendant to be worn round the user’s neck. Yet even assuming such devices help to keep people alive and remembering to take their SSRIs regularly, it is hard to see how they can possibly solve the more basic issue. The cliché goes that you can feel lonely even in a crowd. Presumably all the more so, talking to a creepy doll or being emptily praised by an automated voice.

It would be better to notice from the enthusiastic response to Two Women Living Together that for most people, human companionship still appears to be part of an ideally satisfying life; perhaps even to openly acknowledge this fact in the quest to incentivize fruitful partnerships, in the biblical sense of the word. So much of contemporary discourse focuses only on the perils of domestic partnership: the daily misunderstandings and struggles for control, the resentment about chores, the foreclosing of other possibilities.

As sociologist Zymunt Bauman put it, writing in 1994 about our modern “privatised society”: “there is a point … at which people find it very hard to conceive of any benefit they could derive from joining forces: of any improvement which could come from managing a part of their resources jointly, rather than individually.” Yet it is striking how Hana and Sunwoo, well aware of the alternative, seem determined not to let the claustrophobic irritations of cohabitation sink their carefully constructed ship. Despite the lack of romance or sex gluing them together, they work through the frictions and the fights in order to reap the rewards of mutual care; to experience something that still sounds very much like love.

It-girl Carrie Bradshaw may have fearlessly embraced single lunches; but 26 years later, at the bitter end of her own story arc she was still waking alone in a massive apartment and talking a bit too much to the cat. Over in Mangwon-dong, things are sounding a lot more fun. In the words of Hana: “our little greetings (Did you sleep well? You’re home! I’ll be right back!) add a splash of color to our daily lives”. Sometimes the best way of ascertaining you are not dead yet is the presence of a well-known face across the breakfast table, making you feel alive.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was using a well-rehearsed psychological trick to seduce women. If a slightly awkward young man approached you in the late 2000s, or early 2010s, and told you that the little speck of gunk in your eye was cute, he might have been a pick-up artist, and his trick of choice might have been a “neg”. This was short for “negative feedback” — meant to both compliment and demean at the same time, in the hope that you’d seek his approval. In answering my host’s question about Joy Division, I was already doing just that. We ended up dating for two years.

During that time, the pick-up artist surprised me by how open he was about the psychology behind his art — PUA for short. He unpacked some of the vocabulary and discussed some of the favored ploys: negging, comparing hand sizes, showing off card tricks, and, above all, appealing to fate. The more you call upon any universal system — astrology, tarot, destiny  — the less personal agency women have to take in making an impulsive or risky sexual decision. He introduced me to some of his pick-up friends too. “When done right,” one of them told me, “PUA should be like make-up. It should enhance rather than cover. It should be invisible.” I was being given a privileged glimpse of what lay behind the curtain. I felt like a trusted ally. That, in hindsight, was part of the pick-up.

These young men would all have read The Game, one of the most infamous books of the 2000s. Neil Strauss, its author, had ghostwritten memoirs of Jenna Jameson and Marilyn Manson, but PUA proved to be his most controversial topic. Strauss immersed himself in what was then a nascent subculture. Having rebranded himself as “Style”, Strauss attended a bootcamp led by an arch-seducer known only as Mystery, whom he managed to befriend. Strauss joined the pick-up community, imbibed — or rather, got drunk on — its teachings on body language, dress and conversation starters, and put these lessons into practice. Ostensibly a memoir of that period in Strauss’s life, The Game was also a manual, promising men secret tips on how to get any woman into bed. Published with a Bible-black leather cover, the book was a bestseller, catapulting Strauss to the status of talk-show celebrity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was wildly popular among certain types of young men — including those I met when I was 18. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, the publication did not win Strauss friends in the women’s liberation community. The feminist blogosphere accused Strauss of advocating for anything from objectification to rape to merely being a pig, making The Game subject to one of the first digital-era moral panics.

It is now 20 years since the book’s publication. In the era of Andrew Tate, the initial backlash seems almost quaint. I was struck, on rereading The Game this year, by Strauss’ success in making the story feel more charming than sleazy. Our narrator is quick-witted and happy-go-lucky as he leads us through a simple story of boy-meets-girls. He picks the reader up, preempting their reticence with jokes, anticipating their frustration with vulnerability. It worked on me.

Strauss himself came to disavow pick-up, hosting a funeral for “Style” in 2013 ahead of his marriage to the model Ingrid de la O. (They are now divorced.) In hindsight, he got out in the nick of time. Social media was not only changing the face of dating, but of feminism as well. Young women became more organized and vigilant; consent classes and thinkpieces sought to stamp out any remnants of PUA. Apparently innocuous behavior, like staring or giving compliments, suddenly acquired menacing undertones, and neither men nor women could feel safe. Strauss’s former colleagues, still in PUA, fared badly. In 2014, Julien Blanc, a PUA instructor, was denied a visa from the UK after it was argued that his interpretation of pick-up veered towards the coercive. The movement naturally dwindled, and its methods began to appear antiquated. Why bother women on a street, or in a bar, when they are more likely to be on an app?

While PUA might have shrunk in practice, it continued to lurk in spirit — Patient Zero for digital-era misogyny. It was PUA forums that popularized the “red pill” meme, adapting terminology from The Matrix. Swallow the “blue pill” and you’ll share the unchallenging majority view that men and women are roughly the same and that neither is, or should be, in charge of the other. Choose the red pill, and you’ll see the world as it apparently really is: men and women are fundamentally and irrevocably different, female sexuality needs to be controlled rather than enabled, and there is nothing worse or more humiliating than being involuntarily celibate. Incels, and their occasional acts of violence, are another offshoot of the red-pill view. It’s almost tragic that Andrew Tate looks like a gritty reboot of Neil Strauss: a badly re-articulated echo that is angrier, shinier, and more ambitious and famous.

Today’s discourse about The Game tends to focus solely on its gender-wars aspect. But these critics seem not to notice that the book’s principal focus is homosocial: on male relationships, male approval, and male identity. These men kiss women and think about what their friend might do in that situation. One pickup artist tells another that while kissing a woman, he was so preoccupied in focusing on imagining what it’d be like for his friend to kiss her, he forgot what the kiss was like altogether. The pick-up artists imitate each other, get ready  for nights out, and they go out together. In the end, they even live together. In the book’s climax, Style and his comrades decide to launch Project Hollywood — a house of pick-up artists. Here, the squabbles become so all-encompassing that the pick-up artists seem to forget what they thought they wanted all along, which was to get laid.

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The phrase “intrasexual competition” is usually used to denigrate women as petty and duplicitous, always looking to slyly damage each other. But in The Game, men are constantly fucking each other over. They steal each other’s targets and squabble with the gossipy urgency of fourteen-year-old girls. Despite this ostensibly being a book about women, the real romance story is between Strauss and Mystery. They fight; they get back together; they fall out of love and get jealous. Their dynamic has much more feeling and commitment than any of the relationships depicted with women. There is a queasy reverberation of the famous adage: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a man picks up a woman in a bar and no one is around to witness it, did he even pick her up at all?

Rereading The Game again, I was also struck by how much of a role magic played in their stories. Perhaps it made sense that I was dressed as a magician’s assistant when I met my first pick-up artist. Unbeknownst to me, I was entering the domain of the fantastical and magical.

The pick-up artists learn card tricks, read palms and perfect their mind-reading routines. Mystery outlines plans to become a professional magician as an exit route. Attempting to peacock, he and many of his fellow PUAs dressed in frilly shirts and furry hats: the universal dress code of the magician. As well as playing conjurors’ tricks, they often spoke to women about mystical magical concepts: not just horoscopes, but “the stars”, “auras” and “healing energies”. For women, there is nothing more enchanting than someone knowing you better than yourself.

But magic is more than a modern way of getting women into bed. It is the folk-underbelly of religion. Tradition without the infrastructure. And seduction is magic. It’s what draws two people together in a way that feels natural, easy, but is also rare and urgent. Many of the pick-up artists were clearly deeply unpleasant; but a lot of them wanted genuine enchantment, I think, even more than they wanted to simulate it. Yet we want our magic without magicians, for the existence of a magician undermines the validity of the magic.

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One of the main criticisms that feminists, and women in general, make of PUA is that it’s just another magician’s con: a form of lying. And perhaps it is: but when it comes to dishonesty and sex, where do we draw the line? Persuading someone into sex isn’t a crime — but at what point is someone pressured, or tricked?

In the post-PUA era, “consent” has come to mean that we want all the facts available before we make a decision. But there’s still no consensus on which facts are relevant. Women wear make-up, but we’d be hard-pressed to see this as a form of lying (though in China, a man successfully sued his wife for not disclosing that she had extensive plastic surgery after seeing the birth of their ugly children.) People also lie about their jobs — does that violate consent? In Israel, people have been successfully prosecuted for pretending to be brain surgeons, or even pretending to be Jewish in search of sexual conquest. And what about alcohol? Alcohol can cause the hard edges of the world to blur handsomely. In that attractive mist, we might find our lips gravitating towards those of a stranger, only to wake up the next morning and regret our loosened inhibitions. We pad our CVs, we pad our bras: is any of this so dishonest as to make a connection no longer consensual?

An encounter is magical, rather than a lie, when the fantasy is shared between the two participants, when both sides want to believe in the power of the moment, and get swept away in the mutual frisson. That is what the seducer should aspire to, and it is timeless.

But The Game still feels like an artifact. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. The well-worn opening of The Go-Between rang through my head when I was reading the book. Today, if awkward young men went to the smoking area of Fabric to proffer their business cards to a group of Goldsmiths freshers, they’d be cruelly giggled out of the club. I almost feel retroactive sympathy — and then I remember how reductively PUAs thought of the women they’d hit on.

Back then, and up till some point in the 2010s, people used to go out to bars to flirt and be flirted with. Were we more likely to believe in magic then? Magic needn’t be True Love, but the sparks could come from someone who asked you for a lighter in the smoking area of a sticky bar. But sometimes I think that millennials and Gen Z are now too cool for magic. It’s become old hat, like Santa Claus or the concept of a “dream job”. By “magic”, I mean the spark. The capacity for good faith between the sexes. The pick-up, and then letting the chips fall where they may, and maybe, within that, finding love or something like it. We might call this new attitude street-smart. We might call it cynicism.

It’s not that we no longer believe in magic. It’s that magic itself is less present in us. Why? Many try to proffer their pet issues. Maybe it’s men and their lowered testosterone or their addiction to pornography. Maybe it’s women and their sex-positive feminism, their sex-negative feminism, their hormonal birth control, their academic superiority over men, or the fallout of the #MeToo movement. Maybe it’s something else: dating apps, capitalism, socialism, or post-Covid atomization. With all these competing diagnoses, it’s hard to imagine what a cure may be, or if we indeed believe a cure is even desirable.

Some years ago, I was reading Philippa Perry’s agony-aunt column in The Guardian. That week, a woman in her sixties had written in, riven with disgust because she’d walked in on her husband watching porn. Perry drew on the woman’s “teenage trauma” as a possible reason for what she patently believed to be an overreaction. She ended her response with this sentence on porn which has played in my mind ever since, and which I for a long time used to settle my own discomfort about some guy or other I dated compulsively watching it: “Porn is what the genitals enjoy in private. This might be very different to who we each are with each other.” I even remember repeating this line to a pal with similar worries. It’s not who he is, I told her. It’s just what men do. They all do, and they can’t help it. 

I no longer think this. If my peers are anything to go by, I am not alone. Porn destroys sex and nukes relationships. It makes ordinary men strange, twitchy, impotent losers, and it endangers and repels women, leaving us unsatisfied. Watching it, or being with someone who is addled by it, is an active choice. I finally accepted this when I dumped a boyfriend who, as a result of his porn addiction, was both violent and absolutely abysmal in bed.  I know so many women who have been through the same thing. Many are learning to leave at the first sign of pornsickness. Either that, or squander your youth on someone who would attempt to conjure manipulative justifications (“you’re just a prude!”) as a way never to have to even try to stop.

That pornography is a growing social ill is somehow still controversial, but anyone who reads Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s new compendium of horror Pornocracy cannot fail to be convinced. In it, one interviewee remarks how “extraordinary” it is that “women are expected to love, sexually service and live with men who are excited by images of their degradation and violation”. The book proposes that straight women would do better to “swear off men” rather than put up, shut up and put out. It also tells us that married men who started watching porn during their marriage doubled their chances of divorce — and that, in the words of one “porn widow”, the habit is “a staggering waste of connection, a waste of humanity”. Feminists have long been blamed for the so-called male loneliness epidemic; in light of the horrifying escalation in the volume and extremity of porn the men we’re supposed to save from loneliness are gobbling up, it might well be time for a name change. The “male consequences epidemic”, perhaps?

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The cheerful prospect of having sex with a porn-addicted partner is laid bare in Pornocracy, which describes what many an ex-girlfriend knows to be true: “These men no longer have mutual sex; they masturbate inside their partner; and sometimes, as porn teaches, onto them. She becomes little more than a flesh pocket; a dehumanized sex doll into which he thrusts while replaying porn scenes in his mind’s eye.” And that’s when they can get things going: another deflating fact is the hidden epidemic of erectile dysfunction, in one study affecting 60% of men who watch porn. Before blaming women with careers, those wringing hands over birth rates should first take account of these miserable developments.

Clearly, defenders of porn do not listen to feminists; the Seventies activism of women including Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon has never cut through to those who had long ago sacrificed serious adult lives and arguments for compulsive masturbation. But these same men may be starting to realize that it is not just feminists whom they disgust; it is the women who block them on Hinge for asking if “it’s pink”, the ones who decline second dates after you spend hours wanging on about your rarefied and special fetish, the ones who avoid eye contact at work when gooner slang slips into your daily verbiage. Repulsing feminists has never been the porn guy’s concern (the feeling is mutual), but at a time when throbbing flesh on screens has not yet eclipsed the appeal of a real girlfriend, repulsing women in general might be.

Why do so many women put up with partners stupefied by pornography? One very forceful reason is that the language of progressive toleration is, like other areas of feminism in 2025, baldly used to intimidate women out of saying no to men. To paraphrase one of the most prominent and courageous victims of porn-powered rape culture, Gisèle Pelicot, shame has changed sides — from the red-faced chap scuttling to the adult section of the video rental store to the woman who now finds herself opposite him at a bar, trying in earnest not to laugh or recoil in horror when he brags about his predilection for cross-eyed, writhing e-girls lest she be called a bigot. It is now shameful to shame a man for his venerable kink — but what counts as “shaming” in this case? Rejecting him? Refusing to do what repulses her?

In the gender debacle, the other major feminist bunfight of recent decades, we have seen how refusing to roleplay objective falsehoods, to maintain the fantasy, is cancellable in itself. In both transgenderism and the kink community, the influence of porn is manifest: Bartosch and Jessel inevitably quote Andrea Long Chu, the transgender Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote that “the essence of femaleness” is “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes” — laying bare porn’s grip on male-to-female transitioners. It is difficult not to see the weaponized shame of gender ideology playing out in the bedrooms of coercive “cis” men too, where partners who decline to do certain sexual acts are reprimanded for being intolerant, narrow-minded or, inevitably, “unkind”.

Sod that. If you ever need permission: it is OK to find things disgusting. It is OK, on a date, to sneak out the back, leave him staring into his cider. You don’t need to tolerate his weird desires; you don’t even need to see him again. It’s OK, in a drought of nice and normal men, not to date anyone at all. Nothing is worse than having to comfort a boyfriend who can only get aroused by the pyrotechnics of porn. There, the humiliation is total.The porn lobby may have duped credulous queer theorists into enveloping socially malignant interests into identity politics (“I’m into consensual non-consent”; “I’m into age play”; “I’m a choker”) but being proud of your desire to hurt women or children won’t improve your chances of having a good relationship. Hentai addicts, feet guys and furries are smirking themselves into solitude, and the partners they compel to fulfill pornographic fantasies do so with a grimace at best, however well they hide it. At worst, they’re out the door, consigning you to a growing dossier of dinner-party stories. Them’s the breaks, fellas.

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Porn is a vengeful Reaper, a pestilence growing more visible as the sexes grow apart and young men disappear into moaning, grunting vortices on their phone screens. Porn is in a death spiral; the accelerating superstimuli of “gooner” material — the subject of a recent viral Harper’s article — can no longer be ignored. Things are getting worse — they can only ever do that, because the more extreme the content, the more hooked the users, the more likely they are to stay on the site, to pay, to return.

Porn feels good until it doesn’t — until the afterglow is gone, until you see the bruises on your girlfriend’s neck, the rings under your eyes from another night’s sleep lost to watching strangers on all fours, the news reports of industry darlings who killed themselves. There’s nothing liberated about this. Once, self-discipline was a virtue. Once, shame provided guidance about how much we could expect others to tolerate or participate in our fantasies. Now, gratification is the means and the end: it flattens all moral values, tramples on women and deflates your dick. Top-down legislation can only do so much — this week’s announcement of a ban on choking porn is a start, and anything that stops 12-year-old girls being strangled during their first kiss is a good thing. Ultimately, though, it’s up to men to pack it in. So stop, for all our sakes.

Lauren was eventually booted off the show — probably, fans speculate, by producers who hoped to limit her humiliation. But she wouldn’t go quietly. Instead, she burst into tears and begged Harrison to leave with her, uttering the immortal phrase: “I think everything we’ve had for the last 10 days is real.” Twenty-four hours later Harrison, no doubt encouraged by producers in the wake of the Women’s Aid statement criticizing the show’s “unhealthy patterns of behavior”, decided to quit to win her back. In a final scene also probably set up by producers, he apologized to Toni, crying manfully as he said he’d be “mortified” if someone treated his little sister as he had treated her. Off he went into the Spanish night, wheeling his monogrammed suitcase into a dubious future and preparing to face a British public who had come to hate him. Covert clips of him mopily journeying home, filmed by Brits on their way back from their own Mallorca holibobs, appeared all over TikTok over the weekend. It seems that Love Island, which acts as an annual record of British sexual culture, has finally killed off the fuckboy.

Harrison is not the first Love Island “boy” to choose a path of romantic villainy, nor will he be the last. But his shaming has been exceptionally vitriolic this year. Why? Well, a few short episodes ago Harrison, who the other male islanders have nicknamed “Young Bull”, made a critical error. He had sex on TV.

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Lauren met Harrison in the Lynx-fug of Casa Amor, where new girls must “graft” the boys at all costs in order to win a spot in the main villa. Because of the format, each year Casa Amor becomes little more than a brothel: the men know the women will make themselves sexually available to secure their places on the show, and even the ones in solid couples take advantage of this before returning to their “wifeys” anyway, albeit covered in love bites. When Harrison brought Lauren back to the main villa, she sensed him slipping through her fingers in the magnetic pull of cabana girl Toni — and so did the one thing that could be relied upon to keep him. She had sex with him. Unfortunately, this didn’t work: the next day, he abandoned her, leaving her a puddle of tears. Learning of their clinch, Toni told her: “It’s really off-putting to me. How can he do that to somebody?” Lauren replied: “I don’t just sleep with anyone… it’s not like a kiss or something. It’s a big thing.”

We should not let the importance of this moment pass us by. In one sense it is trivial, a conversation between two wannabe reality stars about a man whose name we will soon forget. But in another, it signals a revolution in how women today are supposed to talk about sex.

Let’s be clear: if this exact tryst had happened 10 years ago, nobody would have batted an eyelid. But the era of the swaggering fuckboy is over; the sun is setting on his randy reign. Between 2007 and 2017, the proportion of 18 to 23-year-olds who’d had casual sex in the past month dropped from 38% to 24% among men, and from 31% to 22% among women. In the years since The Atlantic published its 2018 cover story about the “sex recession”, young women have dreamt up increasingly bizarre ways to reframe chastity, from “boysober” and the “nun phase” to the 4B movement and “voluntary celibacy”, generally inflected with the vibe of wellness or healing.

What we’re seeing is a revolt against a culture which has taught young women to make themselves available to men in order to be liberated, telling them that sex is “no big deal” — and so we mustn’t complain about being blatantly used for it. Hook-up culture, supercharged by the progenitors of Love Island — Geordie Shore, Ex on the Beach — celebrates those who have “no-strings” sex as not being uptight or needy. Women’s magazines coach readers to be “sexually adventurous” in order to retain a man; sex columnists encourage women to indulge their boyfriends’ fetishes not because they desire it themselves, but in order to “affair-proof” their relationships. Girls are encouraged to act out their partners’ favourite porn scenes, have anal sex, be choked and slapped, for the prize of keeping him around a bit longer. The greatest insult is being “frigid”. Attention and affection from men, we are told, is a trade deal: our part of the bargain is putting out. Fail to do so, and you deprive him of a sacred entitlement. Like a hungry animal, he will stray and pounce on another, more liberated woman. He can’t help it: it’s in his nature.

But all this has begun to tumble. As Lauren put it, scrambling for the final scraps of her dignity on national telly, sex is a “big thing”. The rewards of availability at all costs are meagre; rejection hurts more when you realise you’ve literally been had. Casual sex, as I’m sure Lauren discovered, is rarely good anyway — but the liberal taboo on being cautious about who you sleep with mistakes discernment for prudishness, and wisdom for the desire to control women’s bodies.

These attitudes will be familiar to those who read Jia Tolentino’s takedown of Louise Perry’s book, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, in the New Yorker last month. Perry’s advice, targeted at younger female readers, is to “avoid putting yourself in a situation where you are alone with a man you don’t know, or a man who gives you a bad feeling in your gut”. Tolentino calls this sensible suggestion “fundamentalist”. Perry’s counsel to avoid men who are “aroused by violence” is met with a sneer as Tolentino notes that she includes “things such as spanking and choking”; what a square! Tolentino seems to say. In response to the book’s underlying advice to be careful about who you sleep with, Tolentino makes a single smug observation: “I have been with my partner for 16 years… this central relationship in my life… would not have happened if I had followed any of her advice.” Never mind that this fact has precisely nothing to do with casual sex, and that her age, 36, automatically alienates her from the book’s intended young readership who will face pornography-twisted sexual realities far worse than any generation before them.

What many women younger than Tolentino have realised — those TikToking their celibacy journeys, or blogging their boysobriety — is that the doctrine of sex positivity is no longer fit for purpose, and the whoring of its male profiteers is grotesque. What advice would sex-positivity fans have for Love Island’s Lauren, whose reasons for sleeping with Harrison we can never truly know but which certainly looked, at least, like a last-ditch attempt to keep her man? Would they have anything to say to her red, tear-stained face after she realised she’d been shagged and bagged? Would they congratulate her for having been “adventurous”, after bonking in a dorm room full of people with cameras beaming the whole thing out to the British public?

Sex positivity is a maximalist ideology: more sex is better, and any constraint is negative. But in the coming years, as pornography and misogyny continue to warp sexual dynamics, women are likely to become more prim as a self-protection measure. When the risk of a casual encounter becomes greater — sexual violence, for example, becoming a normal part of many men’s repertoires — the understandable response from many women will be not to bother. And as encounters become more cynical with the continued growth of dating apps and the consequent lack of accountability between strangers, women will become more cautious about false promises from men who only intend to abandon them. This is a depressing situation, but paranoia and hypervigilance is the only possible response to a sex-positivity movement which has eroded our right to protest against being used.

Poor Lauren’s future is uncertain. In a predictable face-saving exercise, she and Harrison have reunited (for now). She did not win much sympathy from viewers, who tend to slut-shame rather than reflect on the broader culture which compels women to sleep around. And she lacks charisma, so a television career seems unlikely. But she will be remembered — and, I hope, commended — for the moment that she admitted, on national television, this fundamental fact: sex really is a big deal.

Welcome to renting in 2025. What did you think I was talking about?

The perils of modern dating are well documented, but the concurrent battle for housing — the uncanny tonal similarities, the vibe of existential uncertainty — is little discussed. For those between 25 and 34 — that Gen Z/Millennial crop now looking, in many ways, to settle down — the confluence of these twin concerns is not news. This group makes up a third of the UK rental pool; in the capital, the average age of the renter is rising. If the analogy of renting and dating is indulged a little, then marriage would be the logical equivalent of buying. The data here is what you’d expect, with the number of unmarried couples in Britain in the 25-35 age bracket doubling between 1991 and 2021.

The cost and uncertainty of the housing market is often cited as the keystone in the collapsing birth rate, a more sensible analysis, in my view, than blaming social vogues (or feminism) alone. It is understandable that couples looking to start a family would wait to first cobble together a deposit; it must be frightening to think of the site of your baby’s first few years being at the whim of a landlord, with creeping rents which threaten to outstrip pay rises. The marital custom of house then kids also makes financial sense: having children is expensive, so getting your ducks in a row by prioritizing a mortgage seems prudent. In this sense, falling birth rates is a policy failure — an unchecked housing system which has doomed Millennials to the status of tenant is a direct cause. But what of dating?

The game of seduction, in both the rental and romantic sense, has become more miserably cynical in recent years. Both are subject to a scarcity mindset; both have moved almost exclusively online. This was intended to provide the “customer” with a bounty of choice and customization — will I filter for a garden, or a dishwasher, or a brunette? — but the reality is a sense of fraught competitiveness. In London in particular, the restless urgency is exhausting.

I suspect Boomers forget, or have little sympathy for, how soul-destroying it is to queue up for viewings with your begging bowl, gazumping other young professionals with ever-higher security deposits, lugging your worldly possessions across the city to a borough you’ve never been to when your last landlord unexpectedly hikes the rent out of your price range. It is disconcerting, unnatural even, to form attachments to a street — even to get to know the shopkeepers, the barmaids, the postman — only to be booted into a different postcode a year on. Similarly, dating apps engender a dread of insecurity: it is peopled by the romantically homeless, sofa-surfing and subletting hearts in empty situationships. Settling down young is not, in a romantic sense at least, something my crowd has ever aspired to — but the alternative, the promised sexual freedom, takes its toll.

In both scenarios, the true villain is the timewaster; estate agents, like daters, have been known to ghost would-be tenants when a better offer comes along, while triggering the break clause is the instinctive get-out for bad Hingers (“we met on an app; you didn’t think it was serious, did you?”). Recently, my estate agent held a series of viewings in my flat; it occurred to me how similar that initial look-around really is to a first date. I watched as bashful viewers dutifully took their shoes off, gave the right compliments, asked tactical questions — do you get much noise?; do you get used to the stairs? — only to scurry off, as I have done after many a viewing and many a date, and debrief with a friend. Bit cramped, they say; definitely lied about his height. Needs doing up.

What does this grand theory amount to? The fate of daters and renters in modern Britain really boils down to one thing: casualization. I don’t believe young people desire marriage any less than they desire home ownership; while there is less social pressure, and certainly less religious imperative for wedlock, the fact remains that my generation has been conditioned to expect uncertainty and insecurity by an array of economic factors which have shaped a lifestyle of casual impermanence. A buoyant, optimistic generation — like our parents’ — is one that comes of age both socially and financially confident, which knows ease and ambition, and for whom the trappings of adulthood (a spouse, a car, a home) are not just appealing but within reach. Can we say the same for young people today?

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If those trappings are less fashionable among Gen Z, it is because we have been weaned on post-2008 bohemianism: the further into my twenties I get, the more I realize that the lifestyle we have been taught to accept as cool — bouncing around different living situations, gliding from moldy flat to ketamine-dusted warehouse to freezing-cold houseboat, all the while jumping from lover to lover too — is in fact “cope”. Nobody wants this. Our generation was promised a lifestyle of choice; what it got was instability; our low-low expectations of dating are colored by our expectations of how we have to live, the dire roommates we have to endure, the grim proximity to grimmer neighbors. We are used to being buffeted around, at the mercy of a hostile market, told to accept imperfection at great expense.

A perceptive joke flying about social media at the moment is that we are seeing the return of “recession indicators”. The theory goes that the return of Millennial pop culture — its fashion, its TV, its heavily filtered selfies — heralds an impending economic collapse. This month Trump’s tariffs threatened to plunge America and its trading partners into recession; the return of 2008’s economic headwinds seems less and less a joke. But I predict a stranger consequence of the return of Credit Crunch mores: a doubling down on its depressing romantic values, the injection of even more uncertainty, casualness and insecurity into the dating world, an even darker cloud of pessimism sailing over pub tables as Hinge voyagers steel themselves for summer. The consequence of miserable economics is miserable daters: romantic paralysis is the result of a culture in which commitment is framed as a luxury. Having the means to settle down, the confidence and security, seems almost quaint now — an echo of a different time. Nothing, and nobody, belongs to us. We are the recession-era precariat, and our sex lives suck.

In late 2013, she was found guilty of harassment and given a suspended custodial sentence. “Stalking” borrows its name from the language of hunting. When it happens to you, you know that you’re the prey, even if it’s hard to say exactly what you imagine will happen to you at the end of the chase. So I was eager to know something, anything, about this person who had caused me so much angst and misery from behind her screen name.

The stalker was gaunt and scruffy, said my friend. So overwhelmed by the courtroom she could barely look up, never mind speak. Terrible teeth. I felt both good and bad about this. Good, because it’s nice to believe that the people who torment you are ultimately tormented by being themselves. Bad, because it was embarrassing to have been psychologically scarred by someone so obviously pathetic. Bad, because the only reason she’d been able to get to me was that I’d welcomed her in.

I had posted a tweet about an outrageous piece in a lad mag and it went viral. In reponse to it, there had been firings, apologies and a donation to a women’s charity. It was 2010, and though I’d written a few bylined pieces, this was one of my first experiences of being a somebody. I liked it. A day later, the stalker arrived in my mentions: who do we go after next, she asked. Did it feel a little off? Yes. Did I follow her? Also yes.

I hadn’t thought about any of this for about 10 years, and then, when I was watching Baby Reindeer, it all came rushing back. In the show, main character Donny (played by, and based on, the show’s writer and star Richard Gadd) is working in a bar when Martha walks in. She’s crying. Something, obviously, is not quite right about her: she claims to be a high-powered lawyer, but says she doesn’t have enough money for a cup of tea.

Donny feels sorry for her. He gives her a cup of tea on the house, and this becomes the inciting incident for a nightmarish harassment campaign spanning years. In real life, Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours of voicemail from his stalker — making the woman who pursued me look like a rank amateur. If that was all Baby Reindeer was about, though, it wouldn’t be a very interesting show.

What makes Baby Reindeer particularly interesting is that it examines, in mortifying detail, Donny’s complicity with his stalker (which, by implication, is Gadd’s own complicity). Pity explains the cup of tea, but it doesn’t explain why he would continue to indulge her on repeat visits; why he would give her his email; why he would agree to take her for coffee. But Martha gives Donny something. Through her obsessive eyes, he can appear to himself to be as funny and fascinating as he dreams of being. “I went along with it,” he says eventually, “to satisfy my own stupid need for attention.”

For Donny, and Gadd, this is compounded by the fact that he’s living in the aftermath of being groomed and raped by an older man; feeling worthless and questioning his accustomed straightness, the heterosexual adoration of his stalker is irresistible. But even this disclosure doesn’t turn Donny into a perfect victim. He was an aspiring comic and his rapist was someone senior in the industry. As harrowing as the abuse was, Donny kept going back “for a little peep at fame”.

There has been a lot of praise for Gadd’s bravery in admitting to being a victim of sexual violence as a man. There should be more, I think, for his bravery in admitting that he helped to create the conditions for his abuse. Not every victim will recognise themselves in this, but there’s an important truth to it. “Victim blaming” is taboo, but sometimes, the most important way to protect yourself from future harm is to take responsibility for the ways you put yourself in harm’s way.

The impulse behind the bar on victim blaming is a well-intentioned one. Victims, especially female victims of male violence, often find themselves put on trial for what was done to them: what were you wearing, why didn’t you leave? The implication is always this: what did you do to deserve this? When Donny first tries to report Martha to the police, the officer on duty asks him why he didn’t do anything earlier.

The twist is that the officer’s question is actually a good one. Donny downplayed the danger of Martha, partly because he was getting some gratification from her, partly because he was in desperate denial about his rape: how can you complain about some weird emails when you didn’t complain about being physically violated? It’s only when he recognises that he’s trapped in a terrible cycle of shame and attention that Donny begins to crawl his way out of it.

In the book The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker argues that most violent situations are recognisable before they turn violent. There will be a shiver of discomfort that you choose to ignore — maybe because acknowledging it would cause social awkwardness, maybe because there’s something else in the encounter that you want enough to overlook your qualms. The next time you feel that shiver, you listen to it: that’s what “the gift of fear” means.

Telling victims that there’s nothing they could have done is a false consolation, because it tells them that they have no power to avoid such situations in the future. The question isn’t: “What did you do to deserve this?” It is: “How can you protect yourself from this ever happening again?” I could have refused to change my social media behaviour on a point of principle, but I think I would have been very stupid to do so.

It’s worth pointing out that Gadd’s experience isn’t typical. Most stalkers are male. Most victims are female. This doesn’t make his stalking (or my own, much lesser one) any less distressing, but it probably does help to explain how he walked himself (and I walked myself) into that position. A woman doesn’t seem like a physical threat. Though the interest is asymmetrical, it can appear — at least initially — manageable when the source is female.

To the stalker, though, the relationship is real and reciprocal. Every response from the subject, whatever the content, however hostile, is treasured as confirmation. In Baby Reindeer, a throwaway comment Donny makes about curtains is elaborated by Martha into proof of his intense sexual desire for her. This is why the number one piece of advice anyone experiencing this kind of unwanted contact will receive is: say nothing. Don’t even tell your harasser to leave you alone — or, rather, do it once, unambiguously, and then record all further communications to forward to the police.

This is hard advice to take, because to the stalked, the stalker can become the dominant presence in their life. When Martha falls quiet, Donny is anxious. If he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, how can he know what to expect? But there’s more to it, of course. When he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, he’s overtaken with the fear that she’s not thinking about him. Martha is the proof that he matters. He masturbates over her. Eventually, he goads her.

I wasn’t that insane. But I did feel bereft, as well as relieved, when mine seemed to drop off the internet sometime in 2015. I had to make the painful admission to myself that I had got something from being her victim. It had made me feel frightened, cornered — and important. I still googled her sometimes.

Sometimes it struck me that I might be the only person left who cared what happened to her: the relationship she’d forced me into persisted after all. Over the past few years, she has been reported missing several times. In the posters, she looks haunted and ill. There’s no mention of her being found after the last time, which is the only reason I feel OK writing about this now.

Baby Reindeer’s stalker, though, is alive at the end of the show. Inevitably, internet detectives — fresh from cracking the case of the missing princess Kate — turned to identifying her. If they have correctly identified her, they have probably given her the most thrilling weeks of her life so far. For a stalker, being told to get lost can be interpreted as a coded message of interest. Imagine what being the subject of a limited Netflix series must feel like.

Part of me thinks Baby Reindeer should never have been made. Not to protect the real-life Martha from public interest, but to protect Gadd from the now-provoked real-life Martha. Maybe he isn’t, after all, completely over the weaknesses that dragged him into Martha’s orbit. It doesn’t seem incidental that, in the drama, Donny has his revelation about his complicity on-stage, during a standup set. It’s only with a roomful of people transfixed by him that he can separate himself from his need for Martha’s gaze.

This makes sense. Maybe it’s impossible for someone who’s truly recovered from attention addiction to honestly explain what attention addiction feels like. Maybe, if you recognise yourself in Donny’s story, it will save you some pain in the future. To use a worn-out term from the worst kind of criticism, Baby Reindeer is “problematic”. If you judge it by how well it serves Gadd’s own self-preservation, it might be indefensible. But it wouldn’t be worth watching if it were anything else.

The “rat boys” in this case can only be described as Hollywood’s scamps — Barry Keoghan, Timothée Chalamet, Josh O’Connor, Jeremy Allen White. The “rodent boyfriend” is a left-field choice of partner for the “hot girl” but has a certain something that mainstream beefcakes could never provide — an angular broodiness, a wiry weirdness.

Of course, we must remember that the trend is, at its heart, a joke. This is the phrase that has launched a thousand thinkpieces in the past two weeks; it would be a mistake to earnestly use it as a litmus test for “Gen-Z sexuality” or what not. But what it does provide is a fascinating framework to see how male bodies move within the romantic world. Are men tired of being categorised — or liberated by an alternative to rippling abs and broad shoulders?

Although it’s tempting to frame Rat Boy Summer as a baseless media invention, the concept does speak to many of my peers. One tells me she would “date Roddy the Rat” from Flushed Away if she could. “I exclusively like rat boys because they’re flawed and cheeky,” she says. “Most rat boys have a little sparkle in their eye. Alex Turner [the Arctic Monkeys frontman] is the original hot rat boy, and I won’t hear otherwise.” Throwing in another layer of complexity, however, she adds: “I’m disturbed however that no one is distinguishing between rat boys and bird boys. Jeremy Allen-White is definitely a bird. It’s a vibe thing.” Another friend says she prefers “more feminine” men; “I mean, they aren’t actually more feminine,” she qualifies. “But something tricks my brain into thinking they are.”

One committed rugby WAG isn’t convinced. She has just two words for me: “Thumbs only.” Another shares her sentiments: “I like to feel protected. I think for me I feel weakness when a man isn’t physically strong and doesn’t have much muscle definition. And I don’t like weakness in anyone I meet because I’m mentally strong, so I can’t relate to it.” She laughs, telling me she found her latest conquest at Soho House: “That cesspool is full of rodents but he’s a good guy, actually.”

This could all be easily dismissed as just another Gen-Z in-joke blown up by the desperate media. But desire matters — and holds a mirror up to the times.

There is a clear class element to physical preferences within heterosexuality: the ripped, tanned, Daz-white-toothed Love Islander and the lanky, princely rogues of Made in Chelsea are only the start of it. On Hinge, these two tribes are sure to pack out their profiles with class signifiers. One wears the Stüssy t-shirt, bumbag slung over the chest like a bandolier, Gucci belt glinting in the disco lights of a regional Pryzm. The other sports a Schoffel gilet (logo visible), skiing gear (cheery pint on a mountain) and, if you’re really lucky, an exotic holiday photo (Kenya or Sri Lanka) involving girls in floaty linen trousers. Body type, in this context, becomes another of these signifiers, with stocky muscularity and wispy ease tied in the cultural subconscious to ancient ideas of labour and leisure.

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While Rat Boy Summer is just the latest incarnation of this, one distinctive feature is its feminisation: Rat Boy Summer shows how male attractiveness is, for the first time, framed exclusively in ways (however weird or tongue-in-cheek) that relate to the female gaze. No straight men are describing each other as “boys”, least of all “hot rodent boys”: the giggly absurdity of the sleepover, the giddy solidarity of the club toilet, has crept into public lexicon. The primarily male-male signifiers of being sexually competitive have for now at least been shoved to the back of the cupboard (“alpha” behaviour, aggression, being a hustler) and have been displaced by camp fantasies which cast a sly glance at masculinity and make, for a brief summer at least, light of it all.

Think of the endless “types” women have forever been categorised into. “Girl next door”, “femme fatale” and “career woman” have done much for the way women perceive themselves (I cannot put on a cardigan or anything remotely “girl next door” without instantly subsuming the traits of Bridget Jones). “Jock” and “nerd” would be the only comparable stereotypes for men, but they are specifically American and not specifically about sex. Rat Boy Summer signals that men can now be dragged into such categories, as certain corners of online culture (TikTok in particular) are increasingly dominated by the dating stories of young women. This is not to assign it the power of a liberating force — that would be ridiculous — but suggests, if anything, that the power of the internet is inescapable for everyone, touching something as historically impenetrable as the male gaze.

Rat Boy Summer is also part of a wider project of making sense of the chaos of personality. The timing is important here: female tastes seem to be privileging unthreatening, low-testosterone men at a time when harmony between the sexes has hit a real low. While some women still certainly prefer hunks, it may be that less manly types — or “ectomorphs” — are associated with virtuous “feminine” qualities such as sensitivity and openness (this is, needless to say, a false equivalence). I myself have always found the “protective” vibe of hench lads instinctively offputting. There’s something about the performative alpha-ing, the “don’t worry babe, I’ll square up to him on the dancefloor”. A twinkle in the eye is infinitely more appealing than manly aggression. Of course, equating slender wrists and pretty faces with “being nice to women” is, as I have learned, a mistake.

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So, what do men themselves think? In 2021, Bony to Beastly, a bodybuilding website, conducted a survey of 423 straight women, showing them four male “body types” — ranging from, you guessed it, bony to very beastly indeed. Despite the website’s entire MO being the virtues of being really muscly, the most attractive type, according to the survey, was “athletic” — a tennis player-type build and the second skinniest, with no evidence of ‘roids or obsessive chicken breast consumption. Some 51% of women chose this, with 43% going for “strong”, a moderately muscly man.

The survey then goes on to poll respondents on particulars — preferences over leanness, neck size, “v-taper physiques”, whatever that means. The conclusion? “They [women] prefer men who are in much better shape than average but not as lean and strong as most men wish to be. Certainly not as muscular as most bodybuilders. Think of the bodies of soccer players, rugby players, and mixed martial artists.”

The comments under the article show us, albeit from a strange and small corner of the internet, how some men talk about their bodies with one another. “I wish this study could have ended with the participants getting scolded for their ableism and bigotry,” sniffs one. “A weird question: how big are those butts?” ask another, who goes on to enquire about specific measurements for the ideal behind. A third reads: “Skinny guys with fat wallets win in the end.” One can only imagine a bloke writing this in between gulps of Huel, forcing a smirk as a single tear rolls down his Gigachad cheek.

The frenzied defensiveness of these remarks tells us something: that many men, in an increasingly isolating world, are joining women in seeing bodies and conventional attractiveness as barriers to social fulfilment, even love. Of this, the greatest evidence is incel culture and “looksmaxxing”. Rat Boy Summer may be an ultimately empty TikTok invention, and the media’s recent obsession with it symptomatic of an unease about masculinity. But perhaps it can at least be a comfort to these men stalking the forums of bodybuilding websites, anxiously moulding their bodies to imagined female ideals. For it shows, if anything at all, the full range of human fanciability. Every dog has its day, and every rat its summer.

These are all classic signs of an avoidant attachment style. According to the Attachment Project, avoidant individuals “do not want to depend on others, have others depend on them, or seek support and approval in social bonds”, which is a pretty good description of my longstanding fear of relying on others.  The question is whether the broad understanding offered by attachment theory can really help me be a better partner, or enable my partner to better help me.

The concept of attachment styles has been rattling around in psychology for at least 70 years, but it has recently become inescapable. Pioneered by the British psychologist John Bowlby in the Fifties, attachment theory suggests that experiences in our childhoods, most significantly the way we were parented, play a large role in our later adult relationships. If our parents made us feel safe, if their attachment to us was stable, we carry that into adulthood and have healthy relationships in turn. But if we were parented in a way that was cold or uncaring or inconsistent, then we will bring echoes of that treatment into our friendships and romantic partnerships, to our detriment.

Attachment theory has gone in and out of fashion over time, but when it’s been hot, it’s been worked into self-help books, discussed to death by unhappy girlfriends, and used to analyse everything from societal trends to episodes of reality TV shows. The 2010 book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love has become something of a bible for adherents to this philosophy, and has kept selling, to the point that the New York Times wrote it up in a trend piece more than a decade after its publication. NPR, which is a good guide to the id of the overeducated American liberal, ran an explainer of attachment theory last year. And right now, topics related to it have hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.

The theory goes that there are four major styles, though there are variations depending on who you’re listening to. A healthy childhood, with loving and committed parenting, usually leads to the secure attachment style: these people tend to be dependable and self-confident, good partners who don’t let their relationships be influenced by fear of abandonment. The avoidant style presents itself as a commitment to extreme independence, which can threaten the mutual bonding of a healthy relationship, and which typically springs from the fear of relying on others and the vulnerability that brings. The anxious style is found in those with an unhealthy degree of need for their partner, and a constant fear that the person they’re attached to will leave them. The disorganised style combines aspects of both the anxious and avoidant styles, alternating between aloofness and deep neediness.

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The internet is a sea of dubious claims that your partner might be a sociopath, or that your relationships fail because of conflicting astrological signs; in this context, a simple explanation about the connection between loving and secure parenting and loving and secure romantic partnership seems sensible. The existence of the secure style does seem a little like a projection of a “normal” ideal that few people actually reach, and as always with this type of thing, there’s a question of how far you can deviate in any direction before you occupy another of the styles. But I’d certainly like to believe that there’s plenty of people out there who enjoyed healthy childhoods and are able to navigate adult relationships with confidence because of that. The assumption of universal childhood trauma that has grown over the years is good for no one.

Still, there’s little doubt that people who have suffered neglect in childhood often struggle, later in life, to feel safe in relationships — because they are either unable or unwilling to allow for true intimacy, or constantly afraid of losing it. But the disorganised attachment style — otherwise known as “fearful-avoidant”, “anxious-avoidant” or “mixed” — strikes me as just the kind of catch-all category that you often see with this sort of schema, into which people squeeze stubbornly complicated cases.

That doesn’t mean it’s a useless concept. What I’m suggesting here is that categories like these are helpful when our experiences conform to their guidelines, potentially unhelpful when they don’t, and dangerous when we begin to see them as science instead of interpretation. If we think of them as useful-but-artificial frames for understanding ourselves, they can be handy and healthy. If we insist on seeing them as a matter of scientific fact, we risk falling into all sorts of bad mental habits. For example, let’s consider me.

As I said, I’m typically avoidant. When I’ve wanted to end a relationship, I’ve simply pulled further and further away, making it clear to the other person that I was no longer invested, without sitting them down for a frank talk. When someone else has ended a relationship with me, I’ve responded by parting as quickly as possible, shutting down the opportunity for a sympathetic conversation, even when I was secretly very upset. In general, my inability to escape the fantasies playing out in my head was convenient to me: they became another world, in which what I was trying to avoid was not present.

This dynamic would only support attachment theory if it stemmed from childhood and my relationship with my parents. Here again my case study seems to support it. Both of my parents died when I was young, and I spent the remainder of my childhood without an adult to securely hold on to. I had a legal guardian, but she and I had an explosively unhappy relationship, and I left home as soon as I was able. I spent so much time in a state of emotional self-defence that I never really confronted what happened to me, and it’s taken decades of turmoil to put it together, with the help of therapy. My embarrassingly predictable response to a childhood where attachment led only to pain has been an adulthood in which I have craved intimacy but have consistently refused to allow myself to feel it. This is about as obvious an expression of the core of attachment theory as you’re likely to find.

And yet I’m also a good object lesson in the limitations of this approach. According to the Attachment Project, “parents who are strict and emotionally distant, do not tolerate the expression of feelings, and expect their child to be independent and tough might raise children with an avoidant attachment style”. But my parents were remarkably libertine, relentlessly loving, and gave us the opportunity to express our feelings. It’s true that we were raised to be independent and make our own choices. But this wasn’t a result of neglect; it was, in fact, a purposeful approach to parenting, and thus a reflection of love. Their belief was that allowing us to make our own choices and accept the bumps and bruises that came along with them was ultimately the only way to prepare us for real life.

There are also ways in which my behaviour, as well as my background, doesn’t fit into attachment theory. Avoidant people supposedly dodge arguments, which is not exactly a trait I’m known for. And they are generally less likely to fall in love, but as a younger man I would fall head over heels in no time at all. Within a given intimate relationship, romantic or not, I’m likely to withdraw, as a defence mechanism — but my heart still desires intense connection. My brain is just unwilling to countenance the risks.

Some would say, well, that means your attachment style is disorganised. But this is precisely my problem with catch-all categories like that one: anytime there’s an apparent internal contradiction, you just throw people into them. The result is a system that’s non-falsifiable, and thus not useful.

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If you dig around into forums devoted to attachment styles, such as the relevant subreddit, or look through the endless Instagram posts dedicated to them, you’ll find that this kind of confusion is very common — people will say something like, “my attachment style describes me so perfectly in this regard, but in this other aspect of myself, it doesn’t describe me at all”. And it seems that the more closely a given attachment style seems to reflect one part of your life, the more it stings when it fails to reflect another. An apparently scientific model that seems to fit us perfectly can feel like validation, like our problems and struggles are not incomprehensible to others. When we then fail to conform to other aspects of that model, it makes our original feeling of alienation — the one that had us Googling “what’s my attachment style” in the first place — all the more acute.

And yet, any broad categorisation of messy human people will, in practice, blur at the edges. People who subscribe to Myers Briggs or the Big Five Personality Test, or the most popular categorisation scheme of all, astrology always find this — it explains everything, until it explains nothing. Horoscopes are written to be vague and broad enough to be non-falsifiable. But as the industry of astrology has grown, so too has its claims to truth — which will inevitably and eventually fail, given that the stars can’t actually predict our destinies. People who are invested in attachment styles hate the comparison to astrology. But if you look at how these systems are discussed and experienced, you can’t help but note the similarities.

So, if they’re doomed to fall apart, why do we keep putting ourselves in categories? We all recognise that taking a Buzzfeed quiz about which Disney princess we are is a frivolous exercise. And yet the enduring popularity of that sort of thing — I remember the copies of Seventeen magazine that my sister collected and the endless personality quizzes therein — speaks to one of the most powerful urges in human life, which has only grown stronger in the digital age. We long to be understandable to others, to represent a type, so that we can be seen — especially in the cacophony of personalities that is the internet.

Of course, anyone who has ever known a teenager knows that this desire to fall into an easily-communicable category often goes hand-in-hand with extreme discomfort with being categorised. But in a culture that has effectively discarded religiosity — which has ironised defining ourselves by our professions and abandoned the communal markers that once created a sense of meaning — we find ourselves desperate to be something. Some people fill this need by overidentifying with their consumer choices — the person who has tried to make owning Beanie Babies a personality, the ones who thinks environmentally-friendly consumption makes an identity. Some people become “stans”, giving their autonomy to a celebrity to feel a sense of belonging. Some people join cults. And some people overinvest in systems like attachment theory.

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As an atheist, and one who feels that spiritual woo-woo is ultimately corrosive to many lives, I’m not a fan of people reading their horoscopes or Googling whether a potential match has a compatible star sign. But I also understand that most people use astrology for fun and perhaps to give them another lens through which to consider their own behaviour. Despite their scientific patina, attachment styles ought to be used in a similar way. They are useful rather than true.

If they are understood to be a metaphor for deeper patterns and pathologies in relationships, they can promote healthy romantic and sexual lives. If they are mistaken for some sort of transcendent categories into which we all fit, and which are existential or comprehensive descriptors, they are more likely to promote misery than healthy relationships.

It’s particularly easy for this sort of system to create self-fulfilling prophecies; someone who encounters attachment styles in popular culture, rather than therapy, might decide that they are simply cursed to be a certain way and act out avoidance or anxiety in response. A therapist who uses attachment theory to counsel couples in how to have better relationships will be well aware of this distinction between what is useful and what is transcendently real. But the internet is a machine for making people place undue faith in limited human concepts. “There are exactly four ways that adults attach to each other” fits comfortably in an Instagram meme, just like “Geminis are capricious and can’t be counted on”. “These concepts are useful descriptors of broad human behaviours, but they are necessarily limited and contextual and should not be relied on for literal or perfect advice” does not. And the latter doesn’t sell self-help books, which become popular by offering exactly the kind of certitude and totalising advice that we shouldn’t invest in them.

Part of the misery of the contemporary conversation about mental health is that the people who are best equipped to navigate its incredible and increasing complexities are precisely those that need it the least. An emotionally healthy person is more likely to accept the limitations of attachment theory, where an emotionally vulnerable person might get overinvested in it. An avoidant person is more likely to use broad concepts they find on the internet to make sense of their lives, because they lack the deep human relationships that would help them understand themselves. An anxious person is more likely to cast about for any reassuring explanation for precisely what they need to change in order to maintain their grasp on someone they love. A fearful-avoidant person might experience both at the same time. Each, in other words, is highly impressionable, and more likely to put too much faith in attachment theory.

The devolution of psychology to a crowdsourced “science”, popularised through memes, has done tremendous damage to our ability to let experts guide our complicated paths toward understanding our own minds. The solution here is for us to return mental healthcare to the status of medicine, not internet fads. There’s nothing wrong with reading about attachment styles — or boundaries, or gaslighting, or narcissism; nothing even wrong with learning about them through Instagram. The trouble is when we start to think of these frameworks for understanding relationships as “real”, as certainties rather than human tools, when in fact, like so much else in the science of human behaviour, they cannot exist outside of our collective effort to define them. We created them, and we would do well to remember it — but of course, that’s hardest for the people who need help the most.

His date (Sandra Bullock) recoils: “Ew! Disgusting! You mean…” — she can barely say it without gagging — “…fluid transfer?!”

This scene isn’t exactly pivotal to the movie, but with time it’s come to seem significant. “Rampant exchange of bodily fluids was one of the major reasons for the downfall of society,” Sandra Bullock says, explaining that the practice — which includes not only sex but kissing — has been outlawed in the name of safety. In our future, human touch has been deemed a luxury no enlightened society can afford.

Obviously, our own attempts at social engineering haven’t reached the point of outlawing physical contact, although the height of the Covid pandemic brought us remarkably and sometimes hilariously close. Remember when a Canadian Center for Disease Control recommended that couples have sex through glory holes to avoid breathing on each other? And yet, that instinct towards safetyism is one to which human beings have always been susceptible — and one that’s visible today in our ongoing attempts to streamline, organise, automate and make frictionless all the parts of life that used to be messy.

The vacuum left by the decline of old-fashioned dating and relationshipping, the kind that involved meeting someone in person and experiencing the exciting chemical process known as “hitting it off”, has been filled by a fair amount of explicitly anti-social behaviour as people eschew, or even fear, the possibility of making a connection without the intermediary of a screen. Meanwhile, the lure of the online world and its peculiar system of rewards has upended the etiquette surrounding romantic entanglements, particularly when it comes to being gracious with and about rejection. It is not frowned upon, for instance, to publicly share and mock the awkward messages men send to hopeful matches on dating apps.

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The more we delegate to the apps and the algorithms, the more we swipe and tap our screens, the less we ever actually touch anything else, including each other. In lieu of connection, what we increasingly have are services, which offer a safe, controlled facsimile of the real thing. A lot of these are also online: there are the camgirls who perform for a faceless crowd of observers, all competing for their attention through donations. There are the OnlyFans performers who offer the illusion of an intimate online connection in exchange for cash. There are virtual chatbots who will role-play as your girlfriend and talk to you for hours; some of them are even AI clones of real people.

But most interesting, and most controversial, are the services that simulate intimacy face-to-face and skin-to-skin. In the past, a person aching to be touched by another human being would make do with massage or having a stranger shampoo her hair; now, there’s a booming cottage industry of professional cuddlers who will hold you (or just hold your hand) for about $100 per hour. One, recently profiled in the New Yorker, has a menu of 80 different positions to choose from and says that the country is suffering from an epidemic of “skin hunger” in the wake of the pandemic — though he skirts the question of whether said hunger can truly be satisfied by this sort of transactional intimacy. All he knows is, his clients keep coming back.

A professional cuddle is safe and certified, but also explicitly non-sexual. For those who want more, who desire the intimacy but not the risks or vulnerability or self-doubt of a sexual relationship, there’s a whole new category of sex therapist, one who will not only discuss the physical act of love, but actually do it with you — at least sometimes, at least for a while. Their patients are people who struggle with physical intimacy, perhaps due to disability, military injury or gender transition. They call themselves “surrogate partners”.

A New York Times article about the practice is at pains to explain that they are not prostitutes, but nor are they just therapists. What they offer is something like psychology with a dash of sex work, with elements of self-improvement and skill-building. To me, they seem like a sort of sexual sensei, the equivalent of a fencing coach who has to spar with his client to help them improve their game. But also the word, surrogate, means substitute or replacement, and a central tenet of these relationships is that they’ll eventually end — that the surrogate partner will be replaced by a real one.

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Here, there seems to be something of a catch-22: how well do the teachings of a paid sexual sensei translate in real-world relationships? By the time you’ve hired one of these therapists to teach you how to have a normal sex life, don’t you sort of definitionally not have one? When you find a real partner, do you tell them about the sex therapy you’ve had, as you might discuss your sexual history — or keep it to yourself, as you might the intricacies of your medical one?

But the question of whether surrogate partners are effective is less interesting than the question of how they came to exist, what societal void they’re filling. Obviously, there’s always been a market for people who are willing to trade sex for money — but again, these are not prostitutes. (As one of the profiled therapists notes, sex workers do not generally require you to attend months of therapy before sleeping with you.) Their appeal, their purpose, must be something else. Maybe it’s this: they make formal and transactional what is, by nature, unpredictable and messy.

A surrogate partner will never ghost you, never blindside you with an “it’s not you it’s me” breakup; “sessions,” the New York Times notes, “are typically held weekly, in one to two-hour meetings until all three” — that is, the client, referring therapist, and surrogate —”agree that the therapy is complete.”

In this way, surrogate partners seem to be a product of a broad cultural desire to organise every emotionally risky endeavour into a rules-based framework that makes it safe — from refereeing the conflicts of children during their parent-organised playdates to making spontaneous flirtation taboo (“I didn’t consent to being asked out!”). We’re not quite at the point of finding the unbridled human experience revolting, or trying to make it illegal, but there does seem to be an emerging consensus that fumbling around in the sexual realm, be it literally or figuratively, is dangerous.

The controlled, controllable, bought-and-paid-for version of intimacy offered by professional cuddlers and surrogate partners is arguably one example of mitigating that danger. Another, perhaps, is the incursion into ordinary relationships of therapy-speak, which simultaneously obscures and exacerbates whatever actual conflicts a couple might have. A scroll through TikTok or Instagram reveals that normal dating and relationships have been all but pathologised, the conversation surrounding them rife with “red flags” and “triggers” and “boundaries” — the latter often used to describe things that might have once been called “preferences”.

In one recent and remarkable example, the actor Jonah Hill was accused of “coercive control” (note: still more therapy-speak) after his ex leaked a years-old text message in which he described his desire for her not to post bikini pictures on Instagram as one of his “boundaries”. On the one hand, the whole incident was just a piece of not-particularly-salacious celebrity gossip; on the other, it does reveal the mechanisms by which we try to protect ourselves from our own human messiness. To speak of boundaries in this context implies a sort of moral righteousness — the kind associated with the phrase “doing the work” — even as you seek to exert undue control over another person’s choices. It also implies that this is a high-stakes conflict in which the very integrity of one’s person is at risk. Yet scratch the surface of Hill’s so-called boundaries, and what do you find? Jealousy, plain and simple.

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Of course, it’s not hard to figure out why someone would prefer to frame this as a conversation about boundaries instead of one about jealousy. Boundaries are enlightened, elevated, therapeutic. Jealousy is ugly, and unpleasant, and ordinary.

And so is loneliness.

Here is where, I think, the worlds of therapy-speak and surrogate partners and professional cuddlers collide: people don’t want to feel bad. They especially don’t want to feel bad about themselves. And channeling our feelings of humiliation or loneliness or jealousy through a different framework, be it therapeutic or transactional, allows us to pretend that they’re something other than what they really are. To hold them at a clinical distance. To experience them as an inoffensive copy of a copy of a copy of the real thing.

It’s an understandable impulse, not to want to wade around in the mess. And maybe for some people, the ones who might never otherwise experience intimacy at all, the ones who fear losing control too much to ever allow themselves to be vulnerable, these risk-free relationships — or the illusion thereof — are as good as it gets. But it’s hard not to notice that, like the VR sex helmets in Demolition Man, the safe and transactional version of intimacy has a way of making everything a little bit less human — including ourselves.

This is where things got hairy: with each selection, the rejected partners would exit past the person doing the picking, who would see their faces for the first time. The point was torment, obviously: behold the sea of beautiful people you just canned for totally arbitrary reasons. The potential for regret in this moment was so powerful that the show eventually introduced a new gimmick, whereby the featured contestant had one “golden lifesaver” that could be used to save a passing reject.

In the era of dating apps, users are of course spared the anguish of a physical confrontation with all the people they’ve categorically rejected; the algorithm is the man behind the curtain, mercilessly dismissing everyone who doesn’t fit your preferences, out of sight, out of mind. We tell ourselves it is more efficient this way, ordering a human being via the same box-checking exercise we use to build a burrito bowl at Chipotle. We tell ourselves, more importantly, that not doing this is a risky proposition, maybe even a dangerous one. Without the algorithm, who knows what you might end up with? He could be short. Or a Nickelback fan. Or, gulp, a Republican.

Everything’s Fine, a new novel by Cecilia Rabess, seems like a cautionary tale about the dangers of too-indiscriminate, non-algorithmic dating. The relationship in this story is between two people who would never have matched on Tinder: Jess, a progressive and professionally ambitious black woman who works as a Wall Street trader, and Josh, a pragmatic fellow trader who describes himself as a moderate, but who Jess insists (sometimes to his face) is the personification of conservative cishet white male privilege. As a complicating factor, clues littered throughout the book suggest Josh might actually be Jewish — or rather, this would complicate things, if Jess had an iota of curiosity about it, but she doesn’t. Her obliviousness seems to be shared by Rabess herself: the only definitely Jewish character in this book, the main antagonist, happens to be a grasping, greedy, tax-dodging hedge fund manager.

Where other people see humans, Jess sees stereotypes. She is obsessed with voting habits as a proxy for character. If she had a dating app profile, she would emblazon it with one of those “Republicans swipe left” warnings. In this, of course, she would only be doing what the media has lately identified as the sole sensible strategy for selecting a romantic partner: in our obsession with “red flags”, political beliefs have become the ultimate dating dealbreaker. Everything’s Fine has already been cancelled on Goodreads by people arguing that a progressive black character dating a conservative white one is a way to “excuse racists”.

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A recent piece in the Atlantic reads out the writing on the wall, straightforwardly advising that politically heterogamous partnerships are a bad idea — “because research suggests that marriages across political or religious lines (when those things matter significantly to each partner) can be less happy, more conflicted, and more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses agree on religion and politics”. Note that the caveat appears only parenthetically, as if the eventuality that these things might not matter significantly to each partner is barely worth mentioning.

Indeed, to believe that politics is a mere drop in the bucket of multitudes that each human being contains is not only outré in elite circles, but often cited, contemptuously, as evidence in and of itself of a certain political affiliation. Jill Filipovic, in an essay responding to the Atlantic article, writes:

“There’s an impulse, especially among those on the moderate right, to talk about politics as simply a set of preferences, like what kind of shows you might select on Netflix. But politics, especially in the post-Trump era … reflect entirely different goals and certainly different values, as well as very different ideas about what our country and our world should be, and — perhaps most crucially for a marriage — very different ideas about the rights, rules, and opportunities for women, men, and children.”

It’s a bit of a Kafka trap: push back against the defining importance of politics, and ugh, that’s just what a Right-winger would say. Among progressives, it is increasingly an article of faith that the personal is, and always will be, political; if you don’t think so, well, you’re not one of us.

I suspect, though, that this extremism is less Trump’s fault than Tinder’s. Algorithmic dating is all about finding reasons to write off entire categories of people as undateable — and to be savage about it. If a certain type of human being doesn’t spark joy, then into the bin they go. For women, particularly, to be as discriminating as possible in one’s romantic life is positioned as an act of self-care: you are holding out for what you deserve, and what you deserve is a person who checks every box, meets every criteria. To give an unqualified man a chance represents a failure to respect yourself.

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And yet, I’m not sure that intentionally ensconcing oneself in a silo of perfect-on-paper people — and, by extension, seeing the values of everyone who thinks differently as an existential threat — is the best thing for any of us. Filipovic’s essay unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of entrenching oneself in this mindset: how intolerance gives rise to caricature, how stereotypes creep in to fill the empty spaces left by ignorance. Conservative men, in this view, are not just unsuitable partners but actual monsters: “With the demise of Roe v. Wade,” she writes, “a vote for a Republican politician is a vote to criminalise abortion, which is a vote to force women to risk their lives in pregnancy … If a man is willing to vote for that, why would you trust him with your body and your medical decisions? … Is he the man you want making medical decisions for your daughter, or teaching your son what masculinity looks like?

As visions of romance go, this one is absurdly catastrophic, not to mention dehumanising to everyone involved — the conservative men, obviously, but also the women who are depicted as brainwashed traitors to the sisterhood for even considering marrying one. (What of the fact that many of the most fervently pro-life voters are, themselves, women?) Its proponents might want to imagine how they’d feel if the tables were turned — if liberal women were being similarly caricatured and dismissed as amoral, unmarriageable ogres based on their voting patterns alone. In fact, this has happened within living memory: in 1992, the recently-deceased Pat Robertson decreed that feminism was “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. This was news to the happily married non-witchcraft-practising feminists of the world, who rightly roasted Robertson for his ridiculous pronouncement. Had the man ever even met a feminist?

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By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

At the risk of stating the obvious, even couples who vote the same way still have differences, political or otherwise; they still disagree, fight, and get divorced. The Atlantic article frets that “fewer than half (47%) of politically mixed married couples report they are ‘completely satisfied with their family life,’ compared with ‘61% of couples in which both spouses are Republicans and 55% where both are Democrats’.” That’s one way to put it; the other way, of course, would be to note that your chances of marital satisfaction are roughly 50/50 whether you pair off within your own political tribe or not, making it a pretty impractical criterion for deciding who to marry.

Of course, this is the type of pragmatic take that Josh is always offering in Everything’s Fine, which inevitably infuriates Jess. “It’s just a hat,” he says, when she discovers a red MAGA baseball cap, a gag gift from a fishing trip, stuffed in a storage bin in the home they share. “It can’t hurt you.”

“But it’s not just a hat,” the book sombrely intones. “It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings … and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings—”

That paragraph continues for practically a full page — there is apparently no malady in the world for which the hat is not an avatar — but you get the idea. It’s all about going to extremes: your Republican vote is literally killing women, your feminist book club is full of lesbian witches, your little red hat might as well be a KKK hood. Josh, of course, is the bad guy for thinking that none of this makes any sense: he’s the oblivious toxic white male who not only brought the hat into the house, but is so blinded by his own privilege that he cannot sense its evil.

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Because this is how Jess sees Josh, she treats him terribly, not that she treats herself much better. Her perpetual sense of victimhood, her certainty that she is at a permanent disadvantage owing to her race and sex and middle-class background, leads her to both take advantage of others and to sabotage herself. And while the book ends on an ambiguous note, her relationship with Josh is almost certainly doomed — not because she’s black and he’s white, or because she’s a liberal and he’s a conservative, but because he views her as a person while she views him as a collection of labels. Jess sometimes says she loves Josh, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even see him.

That inability to look past someone’s labels has always been with us, embodied by the concept of the dating dealbreaker. Sometimes it’s political (“I could never be with someone who votes Republican”), sometimes it’s practical (“I could never be with someone who hates dogs”), sometimes it’s utterly arbitrary (“I could never love a man who wears pants tighter than I do.”) But really, we have no idea who we could or couldn’t love. For all our attempts to plan and predict and control our romantic destinies, human beings have never been good at knowing what — or who — will make them happy. And god, isn’t that terrifying?

In a world where love makes fools of us all, red flags, political or otherwise, operate as a sort of fantasy: a story you tell yourself about what kind of person you are, or perhaps what kind of person you’d like to be, dressed up as a declaration about what kind of person you could never be with. The dealbreaker is a way of imposing order: I know where the line is. I’m in charge. These stories can be comforting. They can be exciting. But that doesn’t make them true.

They were either still in college or freshly out of it. But the reason they, rather than the young man, were able to go yachting off Sardinia while sipping Dom Pérignon was because rich older men ­had hired them to come on a luxury holiday with them. The job — look hot, be nice, and be ready to accommodate more without crying assault — is called sugaring. It is — though sugar daddies or babies might not admit it — sex work. My friend betrayed no sense of surprise at the arrangement; such things had, he explained, become totally normal in his age group.

Indeed, sugar daddy-baby “arrangements” are booming, with increasing numbers of female students in the UK and US advertising on sugar websites. Unlike traditional sex work, it’s popular among young women at elite institutions; destined for fine careers, they nonetheless see it as a time-efficient way to offload student debt and, as Molly, a 22-year sugar baby who read PPE at Oxford, told me, “get a taste of luxury”. In 2019, nearly 1000 students at Cambridge were signed up to Seeking Arrangements, the top sugar-brokering site in the Anglosphere. According to the site’s 2020 annual report, the number of university students in the UK seeking a sugar daddy, or a sugar mommy, increased 36% from 2018 to 2019.

The crux of “sugaring” is hardly new, as mistresses throughout history could testify. And Gen-Z and millennials are inheriting the earth at an expensive, professionally uncertain time. Nonetheless, despite the familiarity of the trope and the clarity of the need, the rise of elite sugaring among young, extremely upwardly mobile women points to two profound and rather shocking shifts. One: that dating, with all its messiness and the in-built possibility (if things go well) of an actual relationship — complete with compromise, give and take, and real intimacy — has imploded. And two: that feminism has morphed from a movement with ideals — which envisioned, for instance, a socialist world in which women might be free from sex work — into a hard-nosed, misandric, mercenary pragmatism.

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Feminists of the first wave looked for male allies to get laws changed. Those of the second wave, freeing themselves for the first time from the trappings of normative heterosexuality, had separatist instincts. But those of the present wave see men as pathetic, selfish, hard work — and only good for two things: sex and cash.

“All the sugar babies I know consider themselves feminists,” said Molly. “But it’s more misandry than feminism. It’s ‘men are scum’. Both parties sort of despise each other.” Aria, 25, a Cornell graduate currently in law school in DC, has been on Seeking Arrangements for five years. She, too, despises her clients, telling me over WhatsApp video from a Balkan city: “Men are nothing. They’re just fucking idiots. The hardest thing about being a sugar baby is pretending to give a shit what these older men have to say. Older men are so archaic and out of it.”

For these women, the sex is the ok bit — the easy bit. Aria “can have sex with someone without having any feelings towards them. I don’t even have to like them to have sex with them. Being a sex worker: that’s nothing. I can always pretend. Sex is easy.” This sentiment, almost down to the word, is echoed among other sugar babies.

The callous terrain created by ten years of dating apps and misapplied “sex positivity” seems to have rendered physical intimacy a shiny token whose value lies in shifting the needle of power up or down, while the relationship of sex to things like romance or affection has been cauterised. Increasingly, relationships are seen as exchange mechanisms. Last week, influential sex podcaster Dan Savage reassured a well-spoken sugar baby, who had called his advice show to express worries about telling her new (real) boyfriend about her arrangement: “I think all relationships are transactional … We all pay for it. We don’t always pay for it with money. We pay with time, affection, diligence, intimacy, care. If we don’t ‘pay in’, they end.”

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In the 70s and 80s, feminist sociology focused on the extra, “emotional” labour women had to do at work (as constantly-cheerful flight attendants, for instance) or, often on top of full-time jobs, at home (as the family glue and domestic drudge). In a twisted reinterpretation of that sociology, nowadays “women my age see all relationships as sexual labour,” says Molly. “Why not get paid for it?” She points out that Twitter is full of women who think men should pay a deposit before they go on a date with them. Aria put it more scathingly still: “Men have a dearth of people they can share their feelings with… Thanks a lot toxic masculinity. So if I’m performing all this emotional labour — if I have to listen to a man complain for an hour — I should get $500.”

Sex work has been transformed, or rather wishfully squeezed, into the same category as any form of work. At the same time, all relationships have been reduced to a form of sex work. To complete the bitter triangulation, these developments are seen as compatible with empowered young womanhood. Leah, 24, another brainy American sugar baby who messaged me on Instagram from Portofino, speaks the language of ambition: “We want that financial security while we go after our goals. Everybody sells their body. Construction workers sell their bodies. What’s different?”

It is perhaps no coincidence that sugaring has flourished since the MeToo movement. Beneath the reasoning of many sugar babies’ testimonies lies a terrible disappointment with how men are, and, one might infer, a desire to be treated considerately, tenderly by them. Molly sugared because she was “broke” but “at the back of your mind you think, well, you’re going to get treated badly anyway…”

The discourse of MeToo pitches heterosexual sex as barbed power play in which young women must aggressively have, or be had. Intimacy no longer comes naturally: boundaries have had to be erected and policed, the status of sexual consent constantly monitored. Against this backdrop, sugar relationships offer something more tranquil and easy to control — something, in photographer Elysia Nicole Downing’s  words, “much easier to navigate and manage because I’m not emotionally attached, I feel whole and like my needs are being met.”

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But MeToo also had a profound effect on the professional landscape by effectively ending male-female mentoring. “A lot of older men are reluctant to reach out to you now [on a professional basis],” notes Molly, who says that the “best gift” is a man using their contacts to “get you access to an industry”. By establishing the sexual utility of the young woman and professional value of the older man at the outset, the sugaring relationship circumvents the nasty power play pinpointed by MeToo.

But this is in a way the saddest irony of all: MeToo was meant to free women in the professional sphere from being treated as objects. Instead, it seems to have encouraged them to sell their bodies for work-related advancement. Aria is happy: her sugar daddy is one of America’s top political lobbyists. From the outset, he asked: “How can I help you [professionally]?”

However lucrative, helpful, easy, or apparently “empowered”, life as a sugar baby erodes a woman’s sense of self. But if the women are losing something wholesome, the men seem to be gaining, even gobbling it. After all, sugar daddying is about more than renting a hot body. It’s also about getting a friendly, sexy therapist; someone who will listen, even nurture. Sometimes the men just want friends. Aria’s political lobbyist prefers office gossip to sex, which fades into the background when they’re together, taking up “less than five minutes” of a three-hour session.

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Aella, a versatile star on OnlyFans (the meeting-place for many babies and daddies), has described some of her relationships with clients in strikingly therapeutic terms. “These men desperately want to be valued by women,” she has said. One man just wanted to cry on her; after talking about “his life”, they:

“held each other and sobbed for a while. Then we took off our clothes and just had skin to skin contact. So we lay, intertwined, hugging and that was the entire session … He said he didn’t have any other outlet like that. From then on he would hire me about once a month and I would come see him and he would just hold me and cry.”

With top therapists charging hundreds an hour, these men are actually getting quite a good deal. For a few hundred bucks, they get emotional succour as well as sex.

Sugar babies repeatedly describe providing the same service. It seems easy: the babies I spoke to, or whose accounts I read, all said ease was their primary reason for pursuing these arrangements. But in the end the cost is high. Molly felt despair and had a breakdown after her sugar daddy paid off her student debt. She is still struggling with the long-term effects of seeing all relationships with men in terms of a sexual quid pro quo. Like Molly, I suspect, a generation of sugar babies will eventually discover that money is worth an awful lot, but it’s not worth everything.

My yuletide impulse to latch on to the nearest warm body is, in fact, utterly par for the course. There is even a term for it: ‘cuffing’, defined by the Urban Dictionary as the season in which people look relationships, not just casual flings. The idea of cuffing isn’t rooted in empirical evidence, exactly, but it does capture a mood: according to Brand Watch, a social media monitoring firm, references to ‘cuffing season’ on social media sites begin to rocket as early as October.

The wintry urge to ‘cuff’ is partly associated with being actually cold, and wanting to stay in and cuddle rather than go out (see above). But just as important are the pressures of Christmas, and the dismal sense of failure that traipsing solo round festive parties and family events can bring. This, combined with the fear of facing a solitary and possibly dry January alone means dating sites are at their busiest between Boxing Day and Valentine’s Day, with 7 January — next Tuesday — said to be the busiest day of all. Match.com says 50 million messages are sent yielding 1 million dates during this peak season.

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The seasonal rush for intimacy gives pause for thought. What exactly are we doing? After all, we live in an age of plunging marriage and birth rates. Individualism and choice has taught us to pursue our own ends, making love hard and romantic relationships complex at best,  and often exhausting and disorienting. In their 1995 book The Normal Chaos of Love, the classic study of modern love in the West, the German sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim captured this perfectly. “In the New Era, everything [is] a matter of choice…one of [modern life’s] main features is a collision of interest between love, family and personal freedom.”

As the Becks saw, the rise of choice in all aspects of life drastically reshaped the romantic plane. But if choice was already a way of life in 1995, today it has been encoded and enshrined in our intimate lives on a whole new scale. Being accustomed to rifling through thousands of faces, as dating apps allow, gives us the sense that we have infinite romantic and sexual options. But this has negated the very kinds of outcomes those caught up in cuffing season may think they want. Finding true connection and commitment in a sea of callous shopping is extremely hard.

But even if the governing effect of dating apps seems to be coldness, and a blithe sense of expendability, their popularity has normalised a kind of romantic quest and pointed to a big hole in the market for some kind of affection. There is the basic mammalian element to the search; the pleasure to be had in a familiar body who is also a companion.  But the Christmas scramble for relationships is the tip of an iceberg which it seems all the distractions and connections of digital life do not assuage: loneliness. Loneliness is not only unpleasant, it could be lethal: some studies suggest that those without long-term relationships are far more likely to die in middle age. Singleness is expensive, too: according to the Office for National Statistics, the 7.7 million people living alone in the UK spent on average £21 a week more than couples. There’s nobody to share the mortgage with, or the cost of holidays.

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There is nothing new about the loneliness of the modern single driven on to a frantic search for a partner. Indeed the solitary malaise of the modern and usually urban solo is a potent image that evolved along with the city itself after the Industrial Revolution. As cities became clearinghouses for an ever-widening assortment of people looking for work as typists, clerks, civil servants, railways workers and so on, they attracted those who — in seeking work — had moved away from their home towns and communities and wound up disconnected, untethered and alone.

In this way, the lonely partner-hunter became a symbol of an age of modernity and anatomisation. Commercial matchmaking, singleness and urban alienation have been linked since the nineteenth century. London had long been known as a lonely place; what WT Stead called ‘the city of dreadful solitude’. In 1890, General Booth, advocate of marriage bureaux, decried the impossibility of provincial courtship rituals in London, where “many hundreds, nay thousands, of young men and young women who are living in lodgings, are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other, or of any one of the other sex!” But in the late 20th century loneliness, a ‘disease’ seen to face singles above all, extended far beyond the capital, sometimes even reaching a national platform. In the Crosby by-election of 1981, from an eclectic party mix, Donald Potter — the founder of a Young Conservatives lonely hearts group called Close Encounters — wanted to install a phone line for lonely people for The Humanitarian Party.

For the writer Jonathan Raban, the proliferation of dating services was a central image of the isolating experience of 1970s urban life. He noted that “coming out of the fog, making oneself visible and available, is prickly and difficult” but that “one can, if one is sufficiently bold or desperate, advertise one’s loneliness in the newspaper… Here loneliness has a solidarity, even a kind of respectability; fellow isolates are stacked neatly in columns of fine type.”

The launch and subsequent success of Singles Magazine (1977-1993), a lifestyle magazine for the unattached run by the owner of Dateline, the computer dating agency, testified to a new fascination with the psychological aspects of single life. The magazine was divided between the testimonies of people railing against what one called ‘couples’ society’ and attempting to bring about a kind of Singles’ Pride, and a more dominant strain concerned with the deprivations of going it alone.

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Isolation could be seen on the physical features of particularly unsuccessful singles such as case study Bernard. The magazine’s in-house psychologist wrote in 1977 that: “One only has to look at Bernard to see the disturbed nature of his body movements during communication to realize … Bernard has [never] been loved . . . he wants to be married, but seems to be an entirely sexless person.” The evidence of a lonely life was etched into his visage: “He takes no pride in his face. Only the mouth moves when he talks. The muscles at the side of his mouth are still and short of exercise. He does not gesture… His tone of voice is monotonous.”

The psychologist was clear that social isolation was bad, but romantic isolation could be even worse: the deprivation of intimacy had long-term and short-term consequences. “In the chronic cases sexuality can become so badly damaged by ill-use or lack of use that it is permanently destroyed, and the person has no will left to live socially,” he concluded.

All this sounds pretty grim and worrying in a rather 1970s way. But while ‘cuffing season’ has a jaunty ring to it, those who find themselves single at Christmas often feel like they’re the one left without a chair when the music stops and this can be very painful indeed. Though, I would wager, probably not bad enough to leave one’s sexuality ‘permanently destroyed’ — if there’s one thing the internet has done, it ensures nobody ever has to feel entirely, totally alone. The Bernards of 2019 can at least find people to chat to online and an array of therapists and therapies offering to help too.

A relaxing in expectations around marriage and family have also helped disperse some of the most concentrated aspects of singles’ suffering. And yet as cuffing season makes clear, along with the dating site frenzy around Christmas and the New Year, the well of loneliness continues to rises up and threatens to engulf. It seems there’s (still) no connection like a physical one.