The prevailing American beliefs about sex, love, and commitment were, for many years, encapsulated by the 1977 Meat Loaf song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” The epic Wagnerian rock duet plays out in three acts: First, a young couple hooks up in a parked car, and the guy pushes the girl for sex. Then the girl declares that, before they go further, she needs to know that the guy will love her until the end of time, which, under duress, he promises to do. Finally, from some point in the future, miserably tied together, the two sing that the end of time can’t come soon enough.
The song stretches for about eight minutes, an absurd length for a single, but it managed to become such a staple of classic rock that, two decades after its release, as teenagers, my friends and I had learned the words without trying. It also contained the metaphor that we used to talk about our early sexual experiences, via an interlude in which the shortstop turned sports announcer Phil Rizzuto calls out a batter’s progress as he rounds the bases: “First base,” any listener would have understood, was a kiss; a “home run” represented intercourse. Although my peers and I hardly required a lifetime commitment from a partner to have sex, I did take for granted that sexual encounters and relationships typically unfolded in a certain order, with clear steps.
Today, though, many young people consider the bases (and the tidy progression they offer) a relic. Sophia Choukas-Bradley, a University of Pittsburgh psychology professor who researches teens and young adults, told me that the only times she’d heard Gen Zers—also known as Zoomers, the people born from 1997 to 2012—use the base system was ironically, with first base referring to, say, oral sex. The way Gen Z talks about sex and dating instead involves an explosion of new language, if that’s even the right way to put it. The linguistic acrobatics suggest that they haven’t just come up with new slang but have also evolved a novel form of communication.
In my reporting, including in conversations with about a dozen Zoomers across the country, I learned about the terms sneaky links (people you hook up with in secret), zombies (people who come back after ghosting you), and simps (guys, usually, who try too hard to get a partner). Zoomers spoke of the dangers of “catching feelings” and the imperative to keep liaisons chill at all costs, or “nonchalant,” as they put it. They discussed the numerous expressions that have arisen to describe the work that goes into maintaining simultaneous relationships, such as breadcrumbing (offering little bits of attention to keep someone interested) and cushioning (flirtations you keep on the side). I learned about so many different types of casual entanglements—not just the “talking stage” and situationships, but also flirtationships, explorationships, and the scenario that I struggled most to understand: a situationship that is exclusive but between two people who would not, under any circumstance, describe themselves as dating.
My exchanges with Zoomers—as well as with sex educators, psychologists, researchers, and parents—made clear that anything so simple as the base system had essentially become moot. Few of those I spoke with described a typical order to the way physical intimacy or relationships evolve. “From what I know about previous generations, in past times, you could just ask a girl to be your girlfriend, and she’d say yes or no, and that was it,” Miles Greene, an 18-year-old student at a liberal-arts college in Massachusetts whose mom I’ve known for years, told me in a tone of voice that I might use to discuss the baffling customs of the Pilgrims. “It’s so much more complicated than that now.”
As many Zoomers see sex and dating, it is fine to stay a virgin into your 20s or explore your kinks as a teen. You might have an intense online entanglement with a partner you’ve never met in real life or a serious, in-person relationship. A situationship can be an end in and of itself—it isn’t always perceived as an unsteady state. And although none of these possibilities is new, Gen Zers seem to be more likely than people from previous generations to have metabolized the idea that everybody moves through such matters in their own way, at their own pace. Claudia Giolitti-Wright, a psychotherapist in New York whose clients are mostly young women, told me that, unlike her Millennial clients, her Gen-Z clients never talk about the pressure to hit certain sexual or relationship milestones.
The various options open to Gen Zers, many told me, left more space for them to forge paths shaped by their specific desires and inclinations, rather than external expectations. But I also heard that trying to wade through so many possibilities and timelines could be stressful. And despite how much information Zoomers have access to online, they aren’t given much advice about how to figure out what they actually like, sexually or romantically, much less how to handle intimacy. Whereas there used to be a “prepackaged menu,” Andrew Smiler, a psychologist in North Carolina who predominantly treats teen boys and men, told me, Zoomers “have a buffet.” The challenge, he continued, was that “they don’t really get any guidance, to stay with the food metaphor, for how to compose a plate.”
Much of the reporting on Gen Z’s sex and dating habits has focused on the fact that members of the cohort are having less sex and fewer committed relationships than previous generations did at similar ages. What these findings can obscure is that a large number of Zoomers are still getting into relationships and having sex. One 2024 survey found that about 60 percent of college students reported having had vaginal intercourse; a 2022 Pew Research survey reported that more than half of all adults under 30 were in a relationship at the time. Trying to learn how Gen Z navigates sex and romance, though, turns up a bundle of reports that seem to contradict one another. Zoomers have been framed, in various media, as the generation of incels and tradwives, “puriteens” and porn enthusiasts. The data are all over the place too. One recent survey found that almost 40 percent of young singles are happy being on their own. Another concluded that Gen Z is the loneliest generation: 80 percent of respondents said they had felt lonely in the past year. Some surveys suggest that Gen Z is kinkier than older people, and particularly open to polyamory. It has also been described, broadly, as sex negative, and the most likely to fantasize about monogamy.
To a certain extent, this simply reflects that any large group of same-age Americans has enormous variation. But Gen Z can seem especially heterogeneous; the internet has enabled Gen Zers, since they were old enough to forge friendships, to find like-minded communities through which to solidify their identity. When it comes to sex and dating, I realized, part of why making general observations about how they approach these realms is so difficult is that they’re following so many different scripts.
From some of the Zoomers I spoke with, I heard that they and their peers tend to eschew even the most flexible relationship labels. Garrett Bemiller, a 28-year-old New York–based publicist, told me that although he knows a number of people in “ethically nonmonogamous” relationships, they wouldn’t necessarily call them that. “I feel like that’s kind of its government name?” he said. “It’s just like, ‘We’re open.’” But a number of other young people told me that they and others they know were in clearly defined relationships. And some intentionally seek out conventional labels. The filmmaker Rachel Fleit, who directed the 2023 documentary Bama Rush, about young sorority hopefuls at the University of Alabama, told me that her film’s subjects talked openly about their sorority sisters as their future bridesmaids, and considered having an engagement by senior year to be totally normal; they referred to it as having a “ring by spring.”
Gen Zers’ approach to sex was similarly hard to pin down. From various experts, I heard that, compared with older generations, Gen Z puts more value on “enthusiastic consent,” the idea that it’s not enough to just listen when someone says no—you need to receive a fervent yes. Some said young people have an increased awareness of female pleasure as well, and are more likely than older generations to recognize that many women enjoy oral sex.
Yet I also heard that certain Gen-Z men, particularly those who spend a lot of time in the manosphere, are apt to believe that giving a woman oral sex demeans their masculinity. And slang used to denigrate women—such as bop or for the streets—has proliferated. One 20-year-old in Iowa, who asked to be identified only by the name she uses online, Melody Votoire, told me that among her female friends and co-workers, “there is almost no slut shaming in that sense of women towards other women, which is wonderful.” When men talk about women, though, it’s very different, she said. The phrase she has heard a lot is ran through, which initially was used to refer to someone who’d had a lot of sexual partners, but has become “kind of the go-to term for anyone they want to bring down,” she said, “even a girl doing a dance on TikTok in a skimpier outfit or posting bikini pictures.”
That so much of Gen Zers’ early education about sex came from porn and sites such as OnlyFans has brought additional paradoxes. (Only 29 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia mandate sex ed, and of those, 19 stress abstinence. According to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, however, 73 percent of 13-to-17-year-olds had viewed porn online, and 54 percent had encountered it by age 13.) Some of my sources—both Zoomers and adults who work with them—told me that, thanks to the wide range of possibilities on display in porn, sex doesn’t carry as much shame as it did for older generations. Many are also comfortable using anatomical terms such as vulva and discussing their kinks or recent sexual experiences with even casual acquaintances. (By contrast, Donna Oriowo, a sex-and-relationship therapist in the Washington, D.C., metro area, told me that some of her Millennial clients still sometimes refer to sex euphemistically as their “special time.”)
But one Gen Zer also told me the breadth of options porn presents could be overwhelming. And the way it familiarizes young people with fairly extreme scenarios before they have much experience could introduce complications—and sometimes distress. A sexual encounter might start with an earnest request for consent to kiss, another told me, and then abruptly segue into choking and rough sex. “There’s a saying in the sex-ed world,” said Steph Zapata, a sex educator, “that learning sex from porn is like learning to drive from watching The Fast and the Furious.”
Amid this new landscape, multiple Zoomers told me, they sensed that some members of older generations struggled to grasp the particularities of how they navigate sex and dating. Elle Liemandt, a 17-year-old high-school senior in Austin who dispenses teen-dating advice on TikTok and has created an AI-powered dating-coach app, told me that adults seem unable to offer helpful guidance for romantic relationships. “There’s a huge disconnect,” she said. “Parents can’t help, because they don’t understand what’s going on.”
When it comes to sex and relationships, many of the Zoomers I spoke with did agree on one thing: Vulnerability is agonizing. To everyone I asked about this, the idea that a person might engage in an act that they see as indicating emotional investment—such as hand-holding—before engaging in sex upended the natural order of life. Among Gen Zers “it’s almost reversed,” Greene, the 18-year-old college student, told me. “If you had sex with somebody on a first date, you’d say to your friends, ‘Yeah, my date was good; we had sex; it was great.’ But if you went on a first date and held hands with somebody? There would be outrage. There would be uproar.” Or as Elle put it: “Sex is easy, and emotional connection is hard.”
Sexual conversations might be easy for Zoomers to have in the abstract, Choukas-Bradley, the psychology professor, told me, but actually telling a partner one’s preferences could be tough. “Talking openly with someone in a hookup context is not part of the script,” she said of many Gen Zers, explaining that they feel that they “need to perform not caring,” and being frank about their preferences wouldn’t be in line with that. The desire to seem disengaged, Musa Hakim Jr., a 26-year-old entrepreneur in Ohio, told me, is why two people who like each other might refer to each other only with an endearment that was originally (and typically) used between buddies: “You’re my slime.” It’s a way of referring to someone as just a friend, he said, even if that isn’t an entirely accurate description of the relationship.
Giolitti-Wright, the therapist, described all of this as indicative of a profound shift: Older generations tended to believe that security could be found in sticking to certain sexual norms and reaching milestones at certain times, which motivated people to push new relationships toward commitment or some sort of label. Many Gen Zers think it’s safer to stay autonomous and unattached. The majority of her work with Gen-Z clients, she said, involves helping people recognize and tolerate the experience of being emotionally invested.
Some of the Zoomers I spoke with suggested that this fear of being vulnerable was inevitable. Their generation came of age amid COVID, protest movements, and political polarization. And so many of them were online as kids, watching events unfold through a steady stream of videos, photos, and outraged posts. They have seen innumerable friends, strangers, and influencers get flamed on social media for what in a different time would have been minor, private missteps. It could make the world seem like a fragile, scary place—and prompt an almost paralyzing self-consciousness. Instead of caring about the person they are pursuing, “we care almost more about what everybody else around us is thinking,” Bemiller told me. As a result, if you did something from one of the old rom-coms, like hold a boom box outside somebody’s window, “even if it made the person swoon,” he said, “everybody else would be like, That’s so crazy. He’s such a simp.” Better to be as cautious as possible, lest a relationship fall apart, publicly, in an explosion of cringe.
Of course, Gen Zers are, at the oldest, in their late 20s—an age when many people are still figuring out who they are. In my chats with Zoomers, it was impossible to know how much of what they were saying reflected definitive elements of their generation, and how much was just a regular part of finding one’s footing in the world. Some who spoke most frankly about their generation’s fears of vulnerability had already managed to overcome their own anxieties to pursue something more serious. “I have a girlfriend; it’s labeled,” Greene told me. “I just ended up deciding: I like this person. I might as well just figure out what happens.” In such moments—contradictions, confusion, and new language aside—I was struck by how much seems the same as it ever was. Young people, by and large, desire to connect with others. They fear that pursuing closeness might get them hurt. And despite the odds, some are still willing to try.
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