The Generation That Doesn’t Want Relationships

We want the façade of a relationship, but we don’t want the work of a relationship. We want the hand holding without the eye contact, the teasing without the serious conversations. We want the pretty promise without the actual commitment, the anniversaries to celebrate without the 365 days of work that leads up to them. We want the happily ever after, but we don’t want to put the effort in the here and now. We want the deep connection, while keeping things shallow.

We want to be swept off our feet, yet at the same time remaining safely, independently, standing on our own. We want to keep chasing the idea of love, but we don’t want to actually fall into it. 

We don’t want relationships – we want friends with benefits, Netflix and chill, nudes on Tinder. We want anything that will give us the illusion of a relationship, without being in an actual relationship. We want all the rewards and none of the risk, all of the payout and none of the cost. We want to connect – enough, but not too much. We want to commit – a little, but not a lot. We take it slow: we see where it goes, we don’t label things, we just hang out. We keep one foot out the door, we keep one eye open, and we keep people at arm’s length - toying with their emotions but most of all toying with our own.

We hope to swipe right into happiness. We want to download the perfect fit like a new app - that can be updated every time there’s a hitch, easily compartmentalized into a folder, deleted when we have no more use for it. We don’t want to unpack our baggage – or, worse, help someone unpack theirs. We want to keep the ugly behind the cover-up, hide the imperfections with an Instagram filter, and choose another episode on Netflix over a real conversation. We like the idea of loving someone despite their flaws; yet we keep our skeletons locked in the closet, happy to never let them see the light of day.

We want a placeholder, not a person. We want a warm body, not a partner. We want someone to sit on the couch next to us, as we aimlessly scroll through another newsfeed, open another app to distract us from our lives. We want to walk this middle line: pretending we don’t have emotions while wearing our heart on our sleeve, wanting to be needed by someone yet not wanting to need someone. We play hard to get just to test if someone will play hard enough – we don’t even fully understand it ourselves. We sit around with friends discussing the rules, but no one even knows the game we’re trying to play. Because the problem with our generation not wanting relationships is that, at the end of the day, we actually do.