I’m A Gender Researcher & This Is The Real Reason Women Are Stepping Away From Dating & Relationships

Ava, 27, seemed unbothered by her partner’s inability to communicate his emotions. “We have enough to think about,” she told me as she slid her laptop out of her tote bag, still dressed in her tweed blazer from work. It wasn’t serious, anyway.

She’d been dating Max for a few months when it struck her — mid-conversation with a friend — that she had no idea what he felt about her or their future.

There was a time, she said, when she would’ve tried harder.

Sara, 21, recalled sitting on her bed while her boyfriend begged her to hear him out. He wasn’t remorseful for cheating, he just no longer wanted to sit with his shame.

“I was done,” she said. And yet, he expected her to comfort him. “I had to help him find the words for his feelings, not his actions,” — long silences, teasing through shame and self-hatred. “He didn’t know what he wanted to say,” she said. “And then I made him feel OK about it”.

These stories reflect a shift among young women in which more and more of them are “quiet-quitting” these relationships. Women are now 23% less likely to want to date than men, not because they don’t care, but because they feel they’ve invested too much emotional labor without support in return.

In intimate relationships, young women are taking on a disproportionate load of invisible emotional labor, often supporting men through intense feelings of failure and isolation from friends. Many men described feeling “weird or like a waste of time” when opening up to male friends, instead reserving vulnerability for their relationships with women.

While men consider this unburdening to women a “natural part” of their relationships, those same women describe it as work— what researchers at Stanford University call “mankeeping.”

Over the past two years, I’ve interviewed dozens of young men and women about their relationships. What’s emerged is a sense that women are absorbing the emotional fallout of a crisis they didn’t create. The anxieties surrounding what it means to be a man in 2025 should matter to everyone. They’re reshaping not just our politics, but the very fabric of how women and men interact — shaping how we love, how we vote, and whether we can build a future together at all. Telling the other side of the “masculinity crisis” is key to solving it.

The crisis is especially acute for younger men — with two-thirds reporting that “no one really knows them.” Christopher Pepper, co-author of Talk To Your Boys, notes that Gen Z is the first generation to rely mostly on their phones to communicate.

“There’s no responsibility for what’s on the receiving end [of online communication],” he said, with online spaces often devolving into slurs and death threats “that wouldn’t be acceptable in other situations.”

For the 60% of men who engage with masculinity influencers, friendship itself is evolving: ambition, wealth and popularity are prioritized over trust. In individualist countries like the U.K. and U.S., this shift is more pronounced — perhaps owed to the glamorization of lone-wolf masculinity, in which vulnerability is discouraged.

Meanwhile, young women are rejecting patriarchal expectations that previous generations internalized. Once expected to shoulder emotional labor as a normal part of relationships, they are now more aware of the “costs of caring,” including suppressing their own needs. They’re less inclined to date, with 56% saying “it’s hard to find someone who meets their expectations,” compared to 35% of men.

From “I’m Not Your Therapist” to “I’m literally Joan Baez,” Gen Z women are resisting the notion of offering up too much to men. While some women told me that men without emotional fluency are unattractive, others hesitate to expect it, fearing they’ll be labelled “controlling”.

Several women I spoke with expressed concern over how dating men affects their economic futures. The role of women as invisible drivers of men’s success isn’t new, but with young people struggling to find jobs at unprecedented rates, it’s taken a new form. From job hunting to burnout, “women tend to provide increased emotional support to men who do not have it elsewhere.”

Mankeeping is typically tied to thinner social networks, but for Gen Z, it’s more about men’s inability to share their struggles with other men. All men I spoke with felt they couldn’t be as honest about their jobs with their male friends.

In contrast, most young women I interviewed described how stepping in during “unsettled times” negatively impacted their work and well-being. This labor has become an invisible workplace obstacle, as instant communication has erased the natural boundaries that once separated work and emotional caregiving. COVID-19 only exacerbated these dynamics, with many surprised by how quickly they “played house” during lockdown — over-focusing on their partner’s needs instead of their own. A default response learned in their teens and early 20s, it’s been challenging to unlearn.

Some have gone further: writing partner’s college essays, preparing scholarship presentations, coaching them on job interviews. In some cases, their partners actively diminished their career success.

“When he heard where I worked, he looked at me predatorily,” one woman said. He later pressured her to refer him to her company, convincing her it would be best for their relationship. Some men seek proximity to success without realizing the toll it takes on their self-esteem.

Broader beliefs about gender equity are shaping how much support partners expect — and feel entitled to — from each other. Women feel as though men aren’t doing enough to support gender equality, whereas 60% of men believe they’re expected to do too much.

The stereotype suggests that women require more support in relationships, but Gen Z’s “emotion work” — the labor required to bridge the gap between expectations and reality — is especially stark in a generation that expects so much of young men while providing them limited support. Across hundreds of hours of interviews, distinct forms of emotional labor have emerged — confirming what researchers have long observed: Women are more often expected to carry this emotional load in relationships.

Like Ava, many women are stepping back from this distinct form of work, from dating, and from committed relationships. They report that dating is harder than 10 years ago, and are twice as likely as men to cite physical and emotional risk as reasons why dating has become more challenging — 62% of single women report they’re not looking to date at all, compared to 37% of men.

Even before entering relationships, a young woman is likely to have experienced emotional and physical abuse. Among teenage girls, 80% report that sexual assault is “normal and common” in their friendship groups — before they even finish high school. About half of Gen Z women report feeling disrespected by men, compared to 18% of men; 42% of women report being pressured into sex on a date, and intimate partner abuse has now been cited as an indicator of attitudes that underpin extreme violence.

Both these realities might partially explain why young men are dating less than previous generations. Gen Z men are more than twice as likely as Boomers to report that they didn’t have a significant other as teenagers, and women are increasingly opting to date older men to avoid having to “mother” their significant other.

“Unless you’re really in love,” one Gen Z woman told me, “then it’s not your problem if they’re not emotionally available.”

Millennials have a different lens: “It’s a feminism thing,” Becca, 31, told me. “But also a way of processing the outsized support we gave them” — a kind of paying it forward to another woman’s future boyfriend.

The more women are left to shoulder the burden of the masculinity crisis, the more likely they are to withdraw. But the more they do, the more boys feel rejected. Loneliness leaves boys vulnerable to voices that reframe their abandonment. One in six boys aged 6-15 have a positive impression of Andrew Tate, and across 30 countries, Gen Z men are 30% more conservative than women. No other generation has a gender divergence — social and political — at this scale.

If we want to interrupt this spiral, we must stop asking women to keep absorbing the damage. We need to offer boys a healthier model of masculinity that speaks to their needs — but doesn’t come at girls’ expense. That means listening to why women are pulling away and creating pathways for boys to grow without leaning on women.

A recent survey exploring young men’s health in a digital world, 55% of the young men who watch masculinity influencers believe that women don’t care about men. My research shows that women do care. They just want relationships that don’t lean on traditional gender roles. Meanwhile, boys deserve better than a culture that mocks their confusion without showing them a path through it.

That path begins with both sides recognizing what the other is carrying — and letting go of narratives that cast boys as aggressors before they even reach adolescence. Instead, as Pepper puts it, it’s “fine to give boys and men some homework.” This homework begins with fostering self-awareness, emotional literacy and responsibility for your actions.

Men often lack these emotional skills precisely because they’ve rarely been expected — or permitted — to develop them. Instead, young women have been tasked with practicing and perfecting emotional labor. Traditional masculine norms like pride often keep men from extending their expressions of vulnerability beyond the comfort of romantic relationships. Many fear that admitting they’re overwhelmed will diminish their self-worth. Emotional fluency will take practice. And because expectations of manhood haven’t evolved as quickly as those for women, that practice must be met with patience.

Our understanding of masculinity must also shift to make space for emotional connection between men. Vulnerability is often taught by women and associated with intimacy — leaving little room to express it in male friendships. But men need friendships grounded in trust, mutual honesty and shared vulnerability.

Nearly every man I spoke to said his male friendships left him feeling worse about himself. This not only deprives men of the full range of support they need in tough times, but limits nuance in emotionally complex situations. As several male interviewees pointed out, their friends were often quick to “hate” or “blame” women after breakups. Instead of emotional language that deepens the gender divide, it can instead be used to bridge it, helping men move through hurt with reflection and toward growth.

Finally, we need to redefine what it means for men to be a “provider.” Caring for others should be central to what masculinity can mean. We must also rethink what it means to “protect,” as many men I spoke to believed withholding their emotions was a form of care.

Dating teaches us many things: how to take emotional risks, how to fail, how to communicate. Above all, relationships teach us how to be vulnerable. But with 29% more men than women in Gen Z currently single, a gender skills gap will only continue to widen. As more women step back from relationships, many men may never get the chance to learn.

Those who took on this homework — who shared their burdens with friends, practiced self-awareness and showed up with emotional fluency — weren’t just more attractive to the women they dated. They also became better partners. If we are to love each other, masculinity has to evolve to hold that vulnerability, for everyone’s sake.