Gen Z’s Tragic Intimacy Problem Won’t End the Way You Think

A man nearly kissed me or killed me in the elevator yesterday. Not sure which. It was so intense I expected any, or both.

Have you noticed how the elevator has become the most weirdly intimate place in the past couple of years? Let me explain.

Usually when I get in, the other person is already looking at their phone. I look at mine. We both know neither of us needs to. My lock screen is showing me the time I already know. His lock screen is showing him the same. We ride four floors in a silence so committed it's almost a performance, and when the doors open we exit like we've never met, which is true, and never will, which is also true.

Yesterday was different. Yesterday he looked at me. That's all.

He looked at me the whole way up, and I felt every option on the table, from kissing, to killing, to him bursting into song or pitching me on crypto. He didn't say anything for the whole eternity of that one minute going up. He just looked, like a maniac.

I looked back and I bet my eyes were the size of UFOs landing. And still, I remember nothing about this man. I don't know if he was young or old, handsome or ugly, lover or killer.

All I know was that it was the most awkward situation I've ever been in, and by floor three I understood something I hadn't before: the reason the elevator feels intimate now is that it's one of the last places two strangers are forced to acknowledge each other exists. Everywhere else, we've engineered the acknowledgment out.

As a consequence, every few months the discourse loops back around to the same frame: young people won't get close to each other, this is a defect, and the defect will be paid for later.

The tone hovers somewhere between concerned and scolding. Someone is always about to bring up loneliness statistics. Someone is always about to mention birth rates.

I want to make a different argument: the avoidance is real, the numbers are real, but calling it a problem in the people doing it is like calling a fever the disease.

Rent, roommates, third places

Intimacy is not a personality trait. It's a resource-intensive activity. It needs time, privacy, and enough repetition at low stakes that two people can accidentally become important to each other. Look at what young adults actually have.

The share of Americans aged 18 to 29 living with a romantic partner dropped from 42% to 32% between 2014 and 2024, and average weekly social time fell alongside it.

That's a huge drop and we can't blame Gen Z for it. You can't build slow closeness in a studio you share with two other people who work opposite shifts.

The bars closed. The malls closed. The cafés turned into laptop offices where sitting for two hours without buying a second drink gets you a passive-aggressive glance from the barista.

44% of Gen Z say financial readiness is the top barrier to marriage, more than any other generation surveyed.

The barrier isn't fear of commitment. It's money. The generation being scolded for not getting close enough is the same generation that can't afford the physical space in which closeness happens.

Boundaries, buzzwords, bailouts

Once the material conditions make closeness hard, the culture provides a vocabulary that reframes the difficulty as wisdom.

This is where therapy-speak comes in, and it's the part I find most interesting, because I used to be one of those therapy-speak people, until I figured out it helped me understand everything and solve nothing.

Avoidant attachment. Protecting my peace. Trauma response. Boundaries as a kind of pre-emptive withdrawal you announce before anyone has actually asked anything of you.

It's very hard to argue with someone who's using clinical terms to describe not texting back for six days. The vocabulary of self-knowledge has become the vocabulary of self-isolation.

A 2024 systematic review of digital-addiction studies found that both anxious and avoidant attachment predict social media addiction, as people use online platforms to compensate for unmet needs for affection.

Meanwhile avoidant attachers are statistically more likely to ghost than to be ghosted, because they prefer indirect methods of ending relationships, like distancing, avoiding, or withdrawing.

But the apps didn't invent avoidance. They just industrialized it and gave it a user interface.

And the language went along for the ride. Once you can say "I'm just avoidant" the way you'd say "I'm just lactose intolerant," the whole thing stops being a choice and becomes a diagnosis.

Which is convenient, because a diagnosis doesn't require you to change.

Why We Obey: The Great Ugly Surrender Three weeks ago a friend of mine got fired and it was the best thing that ever happened to him. For about eleven days.

The models were never real

The generation being scolded grew up with parasocial romance as the default template — streamers, characters, fandoms.

The person on the other side of the feed who never interrupts you, never smells wrong, never has a bad day at your expense. You could turn them off and scroll past them.

Real people are worse than parasocial ones by design. Real people are late. Real people chew loudly. Real people smell. Those are my top three. Add yours. The longer the list gets, the less sex anyone's having.

The Institute for Family Studies analysis of 2024 GSS data found Gen Z adults aged 18 to 25 had sex an average of 38 times per year in 2024, about half the rate of the same age group in 1990. Half. In one generation.

In case you thought hook-up culture resulted in everyone hooking up… it didn't. It resulted in everyone talking about hooking up.

That's not a mood shift though. The desire for physical and emotional connection didn't evaporate. It got rerouted into a medium that gives you the dopamine hit of intimacy without any of the friction that makes intimacy actually stick. And now the friction feels like malfunction. Like something's wrong with the other person for being a person.

Maybe it's fine

I notice we all talk about Gen Z as if they're doomed and everything they do is wrong. Myself included. Because it's easy to look around and find fault with everything. But what if this panic is actually just our misguided assumptions?

The panic assumes what came before was working. But just look at what came before. Look at the marriages the sex recession is replacing and the poor kids born into those marriages — unwanted, unloved, unclaimed.

Look at the decades women spent married to men who wouldn't have made it past a third date if a third date had been optional.

Some of what's being called avoidance is just selectivity that used to be economically impossible. 64% of Gen Z women in Bumble's 2025 survey said they refuse to settle for less than they want and need.

Is that a mental health crisis or is the labor market for love finally correcting after a hundred years of women having no exit and men no room to fail?

Fewer bad pairings, fewer decades lost to the wrong person, fewer households built on quiet resentment. Is that the catastrophe we're being sold?

Maybe some would call it catastrophe, but what if it's refinement? It takes a while to get there, but making mistakes doesn't mean it's not working, it means we're adjusting.

Two strangers not talking in an elevator is not the end of the world. The man who stared at me for four floors didn't kiss me, or kill me. He got off on his floor. I got off on mine. And that, apparently, is the crisis. Just two people who couldn't figure out how to say hi.

Though honestly, I think about him more than I think about half the men I've actually talked to. So maybe something happened after all.

Question is — what?