Megan Rapino here. This week on "Why Are You Like This?" I'm talking with Vice President Kamala Harris. We talk about her thoughts on public service, how DC has shaped her, and we find out if she's planning to run for President in 2028. Check out the latest episode of "Why Are You Like This?" where we get your podcasts and on YouTube. Haven't had much luck on the dating apps lately? Don't worry. It's not just you. It does seem like across sex and dating and partnership, co-habitation, marriage. All of these behaviors are kind of on the decline. How to fight the romance slump and find a connection in real life. That's this week on "Explain It To Me." New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. I've used the sorts of dating apps. I glated my app and my profile earlier this spring, and I have only been making connections through people that I meet in real life or I call it in the wild, and it's been incredible. Maybe we're kind of going back to the 80s in that sense. Gating world is wide open now, but I don't think it's on the apps anymore. Okay, time for some real talk. I'm a single lady about town, and honestly, the apps haven't really been doing it for me lately. And not to be all "carry Bradshaw" about it, but I can't help but wonder, is it just me or am I a part of a bigger trend? That's the question that brought me to a singles event at a trendy metro car turned bar on an extremely hot summer evening. I grabbed a microphone, might also single editor, Amina Alsati, and Kelly Wesinger, our editorial wing woman. I wanted to find out more about why people are ditching the apps, and what they're doing instead. I'm John Fullen Hill, and this week on "Explain To Me From Vox," why does dating suck now? The event was a red flag party put on by Thursday. A company whose whole appeal is that it's not a dating app. Attendees walk around with bingo sheets to find out who among us was a DJ or referred to movies as films. I may or may not be guilty of that last one. And as everyone was mixing and mingling, I took the opportunity to ask questions of my own. Like, how much luck had they had on the dating apps? They've been decreasingly worse and worse, and I see that people are not as invested or not as engaged as before, so I don't know. As a guy, trying to like get matches and ask on dates, but not getting that engagement can really feel self-defeating and kind of hopeless, I think. So, I don't really communicate well through the dating apps. I don't like those that well. I love being in person, and I myself is better when I'm in person, so I thought it'd be a good chance to at least mingle and get out in the city a little bit. For all, yeah, it's been terrible. I read somewhere that it's like the apps make you interact with people you should have never met in real life. It feels so dehumanizing to be swiping on people, and it makes me feel gross, and super superficial, but also at the same time, it's like, what else am I supposed to do? Like, how do I, I've never been at a bar and saw someone across the room and been like, I'm going to go up to that person. It's never felt like the vibe. Everyone's kind of burnt out on dating apps, and I feel like at least this is a way to get out and at least socialize at least, I don't know, at the very least meet people. I think just thinking the pros and cons, like thinking the worst that can happen, you don't meet anyone, you got to socialize a little bit, and at best, maybe you make a connection. I don't think the risk or that high. You spend a few hours, but that's what you're going to be doing on the apps, hours and hours, and maybe money, and with no results at all, at least no immediate results, right? In college, you knew everybody was out there looking to make out on the dance floor. I was talking to someone and someone was like, bring back drunk make-outs on the dance floor. People used to be making out on the dance floor. People used to be grinding on the dance floor. None of that happens anymore. Thank you to Jonathan, Jill, KP and Priya. Coming up, people feel like the apps are broken. These romance broken too. Support for the show comes from Mint Mobile. If your wallet's feeling a little light after a summer full of travel and activities, then here's an idea to help you save money. Lower that expensive phone bill, and you can do that with Mint Mobile. They offer premium wireless plans for just $15 a month. We have a colleague here at VOX who's used mint, and he swears by it. He says he likes that he can save so much money and that he's never run into an issue where his data might be limited. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com/explainitomeat. That's mintmobile.com/explainitomeat. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com/explainitomeat. That's it. There's no catch. A front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month, plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Incluses up to 30 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. Seemitmobile.com. Support for Explainitome comes from granola. Sometimes you leave a meeting, everyone nods and agreement on what needs to be done, but then two hours later, they're still confusion as to who is doing exactly what? Sometimes you've even lost the point of the meeting in the first place. Granola wants to help fix that. Granola is an AI-powered notepad that makes sure meeting notes useful. It captures what happens in your meetings and turns them into clean, structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and made easy to find. And the best part is granola integrates seamlessly with how you already work. No setup, no configuration, no friction. It transforms messy meeting calls into something you can actually reference weeks later. Your notes become searchable, organized, and actionable, and you get better notes in a central place while you get to stay present in your meetings with no extra work. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's hard to go without. You can try it totally free. Head to granola.ai/explainit. That's granola.ai/explainit to get your time back. Go to granola.ai/explainit and try it on your next call. I'm Jake Hugh. This is explain it to me. I'm Faith Hill and I'm a staff writer for The Atlantic. Faith hasn't just written about the heroine experience of dating in 2026. She's also living it. And in her reporting, she found that it's not just the state of dating that's bad. We're kind of in an overall romance slump. Yeah, so of course romance is a really big umbrella term for a lot of different things. But it does seem like across sex and dating and partnership, cohabitation, marriage, all of these behaviors are kind of on the decline. So the marriage rate in the U.S. and many other countries has been declining for a while now. But you know, also we're finding the same thing, especially among young adults in terms of how many people are entering committed relationships, people are having less sex, and even among single people in the U.S., a lot of single people say they're not regularly dating at all. I would rather go to the dentist and get a root canal than go on a first date ever again. You don't actually have to date. You literally actually do not have to date. And I probably will never date ever. Again, I like being single. So there's a Financial Times data reporter named John Byrne Murdoch who did an analysis of data and found that the proportion of 25 to 34 year olds in marriages or cohabiting partnerships dropped really steeply from 1980 to 2022 by almost 10 percentage points for college graduates and more than 20 percentage points for people without a degree. Wow. In 2019, 42% of single adults, younger than 40, told Pew Research Center that they'd never been in a committed relationship. But at the same time, in surveys, you still see that the majority of people say they want marriage, they want partnership. So I still feel like it's worth talking about all those people who aren't getting something that they want. And I think it's this sort of simultaneous thing of, on the one hand, it's easier to be single in some ways than it used to be.
And yet dating is difficult in these very particular modern ways and when both of those are true at once, people will just start giving up and not getting something that they do in many cases really deeply want. But I would like a husband and unfortunately that does require me going on dates. But like I've kind of hit a point where I am just like content with the people and the things that I have in my life that asking me to go on a date feels like pulling teeth. I've been thinking a lot lately about whether I just accept being single for a while rather than continuing this process of meeting new people and going on dates and trying to find someone. Wow, when we talk about these surveys are the people doing them just asking straight people. We got a voicemail from a listener who said the apps are broken for gay men too. It's not just saying that as a gay man in a fairly big city, dating up suck, I think they set for street people, they set for gay people and I've found way more success at the club. How universal is this experience? I think that there is a romance lump happening across gender asexuality. I did, in reporting this piece, I tried to talk to people who were straight, people who were queer, people of different class backgrounds. I'd really tried to get a mix and I did feel like there were a lot of similarities in what people were experiencing and I think the apps is a big part of that. I've just heard from a lot of people who do say that I think the apps just really require sacrificing other priorities, other parts of life and really take a toll on people, so there's a sense of fatigue among queer and straight people alike. I do think that for straight people there's kind of an added element as well of frustration and tension and distance between men and women. That's something I get into in my piece as well and I think it's sort of just one of the many challenges that single people are going through. I wonder, the world is on fire right now. It kind of seems like the vibes are just bad overall. We're living in a very chaotic period in human history. Is everything that's happening in the world? Is that factoring into why people are in this romance slump? I think it's a big part of it. I think part of that just has to do with interpersonal trust and optimism about other human beings. We can see that in the U.S. at least rates of trust and other people in fellow Americans are pretty low, so I think people really have their guard up in that sense. In particular, when it comes to Gen Z, this is a generation that a lot of researchers have described as pretty slow to trust and afraid of rejection and risk. You can't really have romance without rejection and risk. Those are just crucial. I think it's really hard to put yourself out there for a lot of really valid reasons. As you're saying, the world is so chaotic and that gets reflected in people's personal lives too. When people have so much going on, romance just feels really hard to prioritize. Both, just in the sense that they have a lot on their minds and other things they want to take care of, and also just logistically, if you are someone who doesn't know what your work schedule is going to look like the next week, it's really hard to set up a date. There's a lot of people who have really unstable work conditions, a lot of people who are very worried about money. They're thinking about trying to make rent or saving up, and it's kind of like maybe later down the line. I'll date, and I do want that, but right now everything feels so insecure. Something that I find interesting about all this is that, despite how challenging and honestly demoralizing dating can get, the people you talk to, the people we met at that event, my friends that I talk to, still want relationships. Why do you think we're still seeking that partnership? I think people have a really deep yearning for connection and romance, and I think they imagine that if it, in its ideal form, it would be amazing, and a lot of people just don't think they can really find that ideal romance. I did certainly talk to some people who really just aren't interested in relationships, and that certainly exists and is great for those people, but I also talked to a lot of people who have completely given up on dating, and yet when you kind of push them on it, they will say, well, yeah, of course I would love a great relationship if I could find it, but I'm just not going to look for that right now, and I think I take that decision really seriously and I respect it because I don't think they're making it lightly. I think not to get so existential with it, but we all have limited time, and they did want to spend the time that they had on things that felt possible and meaningful and that were in their control. When it comes to love, there's so much of it that's out of our control, but there are three steps to try if we really want to find that romantic connection. That's next. Support for explaining to me comes from granola. 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Co-founded by David Beckham and built by leading doctors and researchers, IAMATE was designed by the world's best. 95% of people who tried it for 12 weeks felt more energy, and that's from a clinical trial conducted by the San Francisco Research Institute. Go to IAMATEHealth.com/explainit right now, or click on the link in the description and use Code Explained for a free welcome kit, 5 free travel sachets, plus 10% off your order. This code explained at IAMATEHealth.com/explainit, code explained at IAMATEHealth.com/explainit. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Hey, my name is Emma, and honestly, I refused to touch a dating app. Personally, I've been meeting people at church, at an adult, and volleybally. You know, this is the right person will come at the right time, and it won't be something that I'll have to search too hard for. I'm a lot more hopeful that I'll meet the person that I'm meant to, when the time is right. This is Explained It's Me, I'm Jake Kew. So we've established that the dating landscape isn't all that great right now, especially on the dating apps. And yet, a lot of us still want to find love. So how do you square those two things? That's what I asked Lily Womble. She's a dating coach and author of the book. Thank you more, please. A feminist guide to breaking dumb dating rules and finding love. That's really hard dating can be so exhausting, depleting, demoralizing, and I only think dating apps have increased that experience for single folks. That coupled with, you know, our societal pressure to be partnered and that, like, you know, the messaging that we receive from a young age that, like, to be partnered is to be ahead, right, to be single is to be behind. I think that pressure is there. I also think, like, how human of us to want romantic connection. So I totally respect people.
who just say, I don't want to meet a partner, I don't want to date. That's not what I want to do in my life. I'm cool being single. I don't think that singleness is a marker against one's value. I think that people are whole and valuable right now both. And if you do want to find love and romantic partnership, there is a more helpful and empowering way to go about it that centers you as the main character instead of, for example, centering men in whether or not you are worthy or valuable or lovable. And people are centering those that have been wrong for them in whether or not they believe their own desires. We've been chatting in this episode about getting out of our phones with dating and getting in the streets. But how do you go about that? If you're used to dating apps and you want to meet someone in person, how do you make that happen? It's really important to reset your brain off dating apps to get in person to build new connections. And it is as simple and as complicated as three steps. Number one, joy building. Joy is connective. You need to exit your house, get off your couch and go do something in your town or city that brings you some amount of joy with other people. The point is to make a new friendship, to make a new connection. You never know what 70-year-old you meet at your quilting night in your small town whose son's a boy friend's cousin comes to a party and suddenly you've met the love of your life. I met my husband through joy building. I went to an improv class. I made a friend, that friend introduced me to her social circle. Then I met Chris, my husband, like joy building does help you meet the right people. Secondarily, you've got co-conspiratorship. So helping your friends help you better, becoming your expert-wing person. Now, your friend might say, "I don't know any single people." To that, you say, "I don't either." So let's co-create creative solutions. We're both smart. You have a workplace. You have a work conference. Are you looking out for me there? Here's the kind of person that I'm looking for. Here's the questions I want you to ask somebody. Finally, we've got flirting, which is the most vamititious. You're lacking the part of this plan. And the good news is, is that it's a buildable skill set. It's not just something that your favorite, like, friend who is so naturally flirty has and you don't. I think that flirting is essentially joyful, courageous connection. People overcomplicate flirting to be this like game, but I really believe and have seen in my own experience, my client's experience, that flirting is just simply approaching somebody, asking a genuine question and seeing if that person wants to co-create a conversation with you, continuing that conversation, and to see if it's romantic, you literally just ask, like, "Hey, random questions. So are you single in the conversation?" All of this requires 10 seconds of courage to get it to just do the thing, to go to the speedating event, to ask the question, to go up to somebody and say, "Hey, you're cute. I just wanted to come tell you that. One of my clients did that on a crosswalk with a man that she found cute." And they ended up dating. I'm not kidding you. This works. It just takes the willingness to be uncomfortable in the pursuit of making new connections for yourself. Okay. I will say, you make it sound so easy, but that joy building, that getting out and talking to people, that can be really hard. What? It's hard to be joyful when it feels like the world is falling apart around us. Also, some of us are more shy than others, and there are people who lost a lot of valuable learning to flirt, skill building time during the pandemic. Like, I hear you, but like, how do you do it? How do you do it? Great question. We have lost a lot of social skills. Like, those years that we were in lockdown were reps missed, especially, I think, for Gen Z, who, like, literally were in school during that time. I'm a millennial, so I had already, you know, cut my teeth in, like, New York 2015, 16, 17, with IRL flirting. It does require a couple of things, a rejection resilience plan. I recommend that people have in the notes up their phone a plan to be courageous and to know how they're going to react and care for themselves after a hard moment, because there are people when you flirt or joy build who don't want to be your friend, who don't want to talk to you, who are uncomfortable themselves. And so that rejection resilience plan can really, like, prep you to be courageous and know that no matter what you're going to be okay, it's just as simple as, like, understanding that your brain's going to think it's dying after an experience of rejection. Just say, I think I'm going to die after rejection it's a thought not a fact to write it down, then have a plan to be compassionate towards yourself. I also recommend a flirting ladder to increase your distress tolerance. So you start at the very basic level of, I'm going to make eye contact with somebody for one second and then look away. Great boom, done the first level on the flirting ladder. Next level, I'm going to hold it for three seconds. It's in small steps. I'm going to go up to somebody and say hi and then literally run away. Plan to do it in small bite-sized steps so that you can increase your distress tolerance window. One of my clients did a wink and run, put it on her ladder. Oh my gosh. Literally planned to wink and then freak out and run away. When you plan to do something courageous and just say underdo it for 10 seconds and then I can totally bail, you're more likely to do courageous things. You're more likely to have more connection in your life and you're more likely to meet the right people for you. Okay, this is advice anyone can take but I have to say there is a part of it that I struggle with and that's, you know, the way I was raised. What do you struggle with? The way I was raised, the way I was socialized, women do not approach men. That is his job to do. If you do it, you will be chasing him for the rest of the relationship. There is a way supposed to go, men are the pursuers, you wait to be pursued or else the relationship is off balance from the very beginning. You're doing everything. It's like you got to do everything around here. Well, it's interesting that we're talking about literally a first move and then people's minds go to, I'm going to have to do everything. It's important to understand that adult relationships have to be co-created. One of my feminist rules of dating is that you need to be shooting your shot 100% of the time to be in the flow of asking for more, to be in the flow of receiving opportunity. And this is what I tell my clients, when you know you want to go on a date with somebody, say, I'd love to take this at IRL, what do you say? A mussely version of that where you are doing all of the work, which will not lead to a good relationship, is when you ask them out, you plan the date, you confirm the date, you make the reservation, you text afterwards. That is doing everything and that is not a co-created relationship. That is you because of scarcity doing all the work. Is it possible to find that on the apps though? Do we really have to get out there in the real world to find love? I do think that dating apps are exhausting. I think we have to acknowledge that their marketing messages like Hinge's design to be deleted. Hinge wants you to meet someone great. Even if it kills us. Make users feel dumb, I think, for being on them all the time and not finding love, but they're publicly traded companies who are incentivized to keep users on the platform and de-incentivized to give you enough of the good stuff to get you off the platform for good. So I think so many people are settling from the moment they get on a dating app. They're settling for someone who doesn't ask them questions back. They're settling for someone who they're not attracted to at all. They're settling for somebody whose bio is not filled out because of this experience of scarcity and because of, we're not meant to see this many faces. Our brains are not meant to and so because of cognitive overload, our higher functioning shuts down at a certain point of seeing so many faces. That increases the likelihood that you're going to settle for the wrong kind of people for you on the dating app, which is why it's important to set basic time boundaries with yourself, why it's important to have standards of messaging for yourself in dating apps. Something that I would love to know more about. We're talking about dating and as we're talking about it, we're talking about this idea of, you know, finding your person, finding maybe your spouse, your life partner, like the person you do life with. But what about for those who aren't necessarily ready for the one or like, ah, it's a little scary, but I still want to be out here. I wonder, yeah, what about them? What do they do? If you want to date, but you're unsure if you're ready for like a relationship or the right relationship, then go around and can I curse on this question? Oh yeah, we're not the FCC can't stop us. Okay, great. Fuck around. Go fuck around and find out what can happen when you pursue your pleasure. Right? Like if you look at dating, I think this whether you're looking for a relationship or not, when you look at dating as an act of agency, as an act of aliveness, as an act of pleasure for yourself and
and as a practice setting boundaries, then like you can go have the most amazing time connecting with people, getting to know yourself and your preferences, getting to know what turns you on and what turns you off, right? All of these are really important life things that you get to do. Are we over complicating this? Does it really actually have to be that hard? Absolutely not. But it is as complicated as prioritizing and pursuing your desire after a lifetime of being told that your desires are too much. That's it for this week. Right now, we're working on an episode all about modern etiquette. We want to know, what are the rules you wished everyone followed? How should people talk on the phone, travel on an airplane, or keep it professional in the workplace? And what are your pet peeves? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8555, or shoot an email to
[email protected]. If you like listening to this podcast, consider becoming a vox member. Members get to listen to this podcast at free and get unlimited access to vox.com. Head over to vox.com/members to learn more. This episode was produced by Kelly Wessinger with help from Ariana Asguro. It was edited by Amna Al-Sadi. Fact checked by Melissa Hirsch, an engineer by Richard Jennerkin. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, John Colin Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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