From rosters to situationships, has Gen Z abandoned love?

Annabelle King says the Sydney dating scene “is not for the faint-hearted”. While some of her peers are coupling up, the 27-year-old fears she is falling behind.

“I feel like I finished school, went to university, got a professional job, and then it was just like, bam, everyone else has gotten ahead, and I’m sitting here, hold on. I’ve got no prospects,” she says.

“I look at this timeline, and I’m turning 28 this year. I’m like, ‘Well hold on, I also have a body clock to work with.’ It’s freaked me out so much that I’m freezing my eggs.”

King’s experience is not an isolated one. Ask any group of Gen Z men and women about their dating experiences and you’ll hear a litany of complaints, from the struggles of meeting someone genuine online to the expense of dating in a cost-of-living crisis. Others are still studying or too focused on building their careers to even consider a romantic relationship.

As a result, at a time when their parents would have been coupling up and contemplating starting a family, many in Gen Z are barely out of the dating starting gate.

Is this the end of love?

Relationships Australia NSW chief executive Elisabeth Shaw says the ground for Gen Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 – has shifted compared with previous generations.

“It’s certainly true that a preoccupation with having a partner is not as strong … taking your time and being a little bit more casual about a relationship is certainly more of a feature in this generation,” she says.

Indeed, young people worldwide are increasingly meeting their first boyfriends or girlfriends either much later in life or not at all. Research from the US found that only 56 per cent of Gen Z adults were in a relationship at any point during their teen years, compared with 69 per cent of Millennials, 76 per cent of Gen X, and 78 per cent of Baby Boomers.

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University of Melbourne sociologist Professor Dan Woodman says people are taking longer to establish themselves comfortably in their careers, which affects young people’s dating habits.

Gen Z women also have access to more work and education opportunities than earlier generations. This cohort is also taking up further education at a higher rate than their male counterparts.

“Young women are studying for longer, doing master’s [degrees], trying to get some return on that investment into education in a career,” Woodman says. “They could be well into their 30s before they feel it might be the right time to have kids, and then you’ve got to find the right partner.

“You don’t necessarily, if you’re a young woman, have a lot of men who have got their act together in their 20s to do it.”

Yasmina Lin, 22, has never been in a relationship and isn’t keen on pursuing one anytime soon.

On top of juggling various responsibilities during her time at high school and university, her job as a radiologist means her days are hectic, so romance has been put on the backburner.

“I’ve always been someone who’s been chasing after a goal. In my life, it’s always been about getting into a good course, finishing uni and getting a good, stable job,” Lin says.

“I’ve just been going to uni, coming back home, or going to work. I don’t really actively put myself in situations to socialise with new people,” she says. “Right now I’m just really not ready for a relationship. I know I shouldn’t be thinking this, but it feels like it’s a lot of work, it feels like something that I have to commit to, on top of what I’m doing right now.”

Some describe dating as an onslaught of bad luck. King says Sydney’s dating scene is “transactional”, with one man repeatedly trying to sleep with her on the first date.

“I was like, I barely know you,” she says.

King doesn’t want to rush into a relationship for the sake of fulfilling her dream of starting a family. Because it is more important to her that she finds the right person, she has accepted this means her life might look different to the people around her for a while.

“Finding the right person and someone who will be a good father and a loyal partner to me is a massive priority, and I don’t want to rush into that, and I don’t want to feel pressure around that, but I also don’t want to feel like I’ve missed the boat, because I feel like I was put on this earth to be a mum.”

The UberEats of romantic relationships

University student Rodger Liang is swimming against the tide when it comes to online dating and says he is “very, very set on the organic stuff”. That is, meeting people in the real, as opposed to the virtual, world.

“I think it’s almost easier,” Liang, 24, says. “I feel like, if the timing is right, I’m more comfortable with the idea of meeting somebody organically as well. I don’t need to force anything at the moment.

“There’s also no level of trust [on dating apps], and I already hear enough horror stories from my friends about dating apps – really bad conversations, and just the usual where people don’t show up to dates.

“Finding somebody that you like is kind of exhausting, and then for them to like you back is also a process – it’s a lot.”

Dr Lisa Portolan wrote her PhD on dating apps and intimacy and says that while the platforms have created the illusion of infinite choices, they are slowly chipping away at young people’s ability to form real connections.

“People constantly think that love is disposable, that the grass is going to be greener, there’s always going to be someone at the next swipe or online,” Portolan says.

“It creates this sense of almost like an UberEats of romantic relationships, where many people tend to tie their bonds loosely because they’re prepared to have to unravel them quickly so they can move onto the next person.”

More and more people are opting out. Match Group, the online dating behemoth that owns Tinder, Hinge and Bumble, saw revenue almost halve from $US3.75 billion in 2015 to $2.08 billion in 2024.

For participants, Portolan says being ghosted or unmatched online, or being stood up on dates, is akin to “death by a thousand paper cuts”.

“There were multiple different paper cuts – or microaggressions – that would happen in the online space that would add up and give them a sense of ‘Well, why should I behave well in the dating app domain when I have been treated this way?’”

Are Gen Z just afraid of commitment?

New data from Hinge found 46 per cent of Gen Z Hinge users had avoided defining a relationship because they weren’t sure how to discuss it with the person they were seeing. They were also 50 per cent more likely than Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) to delay responding to a match to avoid seeming over eager, even when they were interested.

Demographer Mark McCrindle says this goes to the heart of a broader problem for Gen Z – the normalisation of casual, noncommittal and often short-term relationships, as young people increasingly view dating versus finding a life partner as two separate endeavours.

“If we go back a couple of generations, people dated or courted to find a life partner, and more often than not, marriage was the social institution to start a family – dating was not separated from coupling and family. Now it is.”

He says language can be a powerful influence on how people view dating, too. Terms like “situationship” and “talking stage” reinforce a culture of casualness around relationships that did not exist for older generations.

“Almost all of those words highlight the casualisation of relationships, and sometimes the lack of respect or zealousness in a relationship,” McCrindle says.

“Language not only validates an attitude or approach, it valorises that approach. People will use those words, and it almost becomes a bragging rights term – the words in themselves are cool, witty and current, and they’re used in a sense of ‘Hey, this is how it is for our generation’.”

Lin is wary of the casualisation trend. “Obviously, you want to make it work. I don’t want to go into a relationship half-heartedly – I want to make it last. Maybe that’s another reason why I’m hesitant about getting into relationships, because I’ll kind of look at a guy and think, ‘is he going to be the one?’,” Lin says.

Online dating and abuse

For some, the fear of abuse is pause for thought. Some of the ways violence occurs on dating apps includes making repeated and unwanted requests for contact or sex; sending unwanted sexually explicit texts, pictures or videos; or accessing and then distributing sexually explicit images of another without consent.

But this is not always contained to the digital realm.

Stephanie Zhu, a 25-year-old student from Melbourne, says she has met “multiple disrespectful men on dating apps”, including someone she met in person.

“I started talking to him when I was in China, and he was in Korea.

“I flew back to Melbourne in December, and he was like: ‘Oh, I’ll fly to Melbourne as well.’ I thought he was joking, but he actually landed, and he made me feel like he flew all the way here just for me, so I kind of felt obligated to meet him,” Zhu said.

The pair went out for dinner and drinks, but Zhu said there was no indication from their prior conversations that he expected anything more from the date. In his car, before driving her home, he touched and kissed her without her consent.

“I couldn’t sense from how he was communicating that he wanted something physical from the meet-up,” she said. “I thought it would just be dinner and that was it.”

There is relatively little data available on the prevalence of assault related to dating apps in Australia, but experts and policy-makers say it is on the rise.

A survey of 10,000 Australians in 2022 found almost three in four users had experienced technology-facilitated sexual abuse, while 27 per cent had experienced in-person sexual violence by somebody they met online, including incidents of sexual assault, coercion and drink spiking.

Hannah Petocz, from Monash University, wrote her thesis on young women’s experiences of online dating and technology-facilitated violence.

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She found that online platforms such as dating apps “aren’t designed with victim-survivor safety in mind”.

“Rather than designing these apps for safety, they take a patchwork governance approach and use Band-Aid solutions,” Petocz says.

“This is because they’re businesses, and they prioritise profit and amount of users and retaining engagement over the safety of users.”

Zhu has used both Hinge and Bumble to meet and date people, and everyone in her close circle of friends is actively using dating apps too, but she still has conflicting feelings about meeting people online.

“I wasn’t really thinking about meeting people online, and I was also worried about safety as well, especially for women. So I was more inclined to meet someone at uni, or through work or mutual friends,” she says.

Is there hope?

While Liang is still in the anti-dating app camp, he believes young people are just taking diverging approaches to dating now – and he has hope that the future of love for Gen Z is bright.

“I don’t like the idea that we’re not committed at all as a generation, I think it’s just going two very distinct, polarised ways,” he says.

“The irony is that it’s not really that casual. I think there are two ends of the spectrum now: some people are really into the idea of being married early, and some people just really want to explore.”

Next month: Millennials

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