This isn't a feeling. It's not "kids these days." There's actual, measurable data showing that young men today are less confident approaching someone they like than any generation researchers have surveyed. Let's look at the numbers, understand why this happened, and talk honestly about what actually helps.
If you feel like approaching someone you're into is harder now than it seems to have been for your dad's generation, or even for millennials a decade ago you're not imagining it, and you're not weak for feeling it. Multiple independent studies over the last few years have quantified exactly this shift, and the picture they paint is remarkably consistent.
A study from Brigham Young University's Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies found only about 1 in 3 young men and 1 in 5 young women between 22 and 35 reported confidence in their ability to approach a romantic interest. That's not a small dip from previous generations — researchers treat it as a genuinely new and distinct phenomenon, not just normal generational awkwardness repeating itself.
- The Data — This Is Bigger Than a Feeling
- Cause 1: A Generation That Grew Up Practicing Less
- Cause 2: Lockdowns Hit During the Exact Years That Mattered Most
- Cause 3: Dating Apps Removed the Public Risk Entirely
- Cause 4: The Fear of Being Filmed and Mocked
- The Loneliness Paradox — More Connected, More Alone
- What This Actually Means for You
- What Genuinely Helps
- FAQs
The Data — This Is Bigger Than a Feeling
Let's establish the scale of this before getting into why it's happening, because the numbers on their own make the case better than any anecdote could.
The American Time Use Survey found that people aged 15 to 24 now spend roughly 70% less time with friends in person than the same age group did in 2003. That's not a small cultural shift — that's an entire generation getting dramatically fewer real-world reps at exactly the kind of casual, low-stakes social interaction that builds comfort with approaching someone.
Separate research from NORC's General Social Survey found that 30% of Gen Z men aged 18–24 reported no sexual activity in the past year, up from just 14% in 2008. Other researchers tracking the same trend found the share of adults 18–29 reporting no sex in the past year roughly doubled from 12% in 2010 to 24% in 2024 — the steepest increase of any age group measured.
These aren't isolated data points. They're consistent across multiple independent studies, which is exactly what makes this worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as generational stereotype.
Cause 1: A Generation That Grew Up Practicing Less
Confidence approaching someone isn't a personality trait you're born with — it's closer to a skill built through repeated exposure, the same way any other social skill develops. The problem is that an entire generation had dramatically fewer opportunities to build it.
According to Hinge's social impact director, Gen Z's social skills lag behind previous generations for three compounding reasons: the COVID-19 pandemic, smartphone use, and the decline of "third spaces" — the informal places people used to naturally socialize outside home and work. He described it directly as a muscle that's atrophied from lack of use, not a permanent deficiency.
Where millennials and older generations spent teenage years hanging out at malls, parks, and each other's houses with no adult supervision and no screen mediating the interaction, much of Gen Z's equivalent social time moved onto phones — technically "social," but missing the specific kind of unstructured, face-to-face practice that in-person approach confidence is built on.
Cause 2: Lockdowns Hit During the Exact Years That Mattered Most
Timing made this worse in a very specific way. Researchers point out that pandemic lockdowns cut years of normal socializing for people who were in their late teens and early twenties at the time — and many never fully rebuilt the in-person habits that dating and approaching depend on.
If you were 14 to 20 years old during 2020 and 2021, you lost exactly the developmental window where most people historically built their baseline comfort with talking to strangers, flirting, being rejected in low-stakes ways, and recovering from it. That's not a minor disruption — it's the specific years the skill is normally built in, removed almost entirely for an age group that then had to enter adult dating with a genuine gap in practice.
Cause 3: Dating Apps Removed the Public Risk Entirely
Here's a genuinely interesting mechanism researchers have identified: dating apps allow users to approach someone without taking any real risk — since matching usually requires both people to show interest first, the public act of one person approaching another gets cut out of the equation entirely.
That sounds like it should make dating easier, and in one narrow sense it does — less immediate rejection. But it also means an entire generation got far less practice with the specific skill of walking up to someone in person and risking a visible "no." A researcher interviewed on this pattern noted that men often show more boldness messaging on apps than they do in person, because with dating apps, the public act of approaching someone is removed from the equation. When the app training wheels come off — at a bar, at a party, in a coffee shop — the in-person skill was never actually built, just the app-based version of it.
Cause 4: The Fear of Being Filmed and Mocked
This is the cause that's genuinely new — not a rehash of older generational anxieties, but something specific to growing up with a camera in every pocket and a platform for every awkward moment. Reporting has described a growing "fear of being filmed" among Gen Z men — the concern that an awkward approach, a rejection, or any embarrassing moment could be recorded and mocked publicly on social media, making normal interactions feel genuinely risky in a way they never did before.
One young man interviewed on the topic described how the threat of public shaming changed how young men conduct themselves in real life, noting that the constant possibility of embarrassment being documented can leave people too hesitant to take the social risks dating requires.
Previous generations risked embarrassment in front of the people physically present in the room. This generation risks embarrassment in front of anyone with a phone and an internet connection — a categorically different scale of exposure that earlier approach-anxiety research never had to account for.
The Loneliness Paradox — More Connected, More Alone
Here's the part that makes this whole picture stranger than a simple "kids don't want relationships anymore" story: a Meta-Gallup survey of adults across 142 countries found that young adults between 19 and 29 felt lonelier than older adults — only 43% of 19–29 year olds said they weren't lonely at all, compared to 57% of adults over 65.
This isn't a generation that's opted out of wanting connection. It's a generation that's more digitally "connected" than any before it, while simultaneously reporting more loneliness than older adults who grew up with far less technology. The desire hasn't disappeared — the practical skill and comfort required to act on it has eroded, largely for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone's individual choices.
What This Actually Means for You
If you've felt like approaching someone is uniquely hard for you specifically, the data above should be at least a little reassuring: it's not you. It's a structural, generational shift driven by forces — a pandemic, a shift in how childhood socializing works, the architecture of dating apps, and the genuine novelty of public online shaming — that were mostly outside anyone's individual control.
That doesn't mean the fear isn't real or that it doesn't need addressing. It just means the right response isn't self-blame. It's the same response you'd have to any other skill you didn't get enough practice building: start small, build reps, and expect it to feel awkward at first, because it's supposed to.
What Genuinely Helps
We've written a full breakdown of this elsewhere, so we won't repeat everything here — but the short version: small, low-stakes practice reps matter more than any single tactic, reframing rejection as noise rather than a verdict changes how much it actually costs you emotionally, and removing some of the pressure to generate a perfect opener from nothing genuinely helps.
On that last point — this is where we're honest about our own small role in this. A shirt with a funny, low-pressure line on it doesn't fix approach anxiety, and it definitely doesn't replace the actual practice this article just spent several sections explaining you need. What it can do is give someone else an easy, obvious reason to talk to you first, which removes exactly the "cold start" problem that's hardest for a generation that got less practice initiating.
FAQs
Research points to several compounding factors: fewer real-world social reps growing up due to smartphones and social media displacing in-person hangouts, COVID lockdowns removing years of normal socializing during a critical developmental window, dating apps removing the "public" act of approaching entirely, and a newer fear of being filmed and mocked on social media. None of these are individual failures — they're structural changes to how an entire generation grew up socializing.
Yes. Research from the Institute for Family Studies and BYU's Wheatley Institute found roughly 64% of unmarried young men reported not dating or dating only a few times in the past year, and only about 1 in 3 young men expressed confidence in their ability to approach a romantic interest. The General Social Survey found the share of young men reporting no sexual activity in the past year roughly doubled since 2008.
Significantly. Anyone who was a teenager during pandemic lockdowns lost one to two years of the normal, low-stakes social practice that typically builds comfort with approaching people. Researchers have described this as a "muscle that has atrophied," since social confidence requires repeated real-world practice to develop.
Many researchers believe so. Dating apps remove the public act of approaching someone entirely, cutting out the vulnerability and risk that in-person approaching requires. This can create a feedback loop: less real-world practice leads to more anxiety about future in-person interactions.
Yes, this has been reported as a growing and specific concern. Young men have described normal social interactions feeling riskier because of the possibility an awkward moment could be filmed and shared publicly, turning a private moment into potential public embarrassment at a scale previous generations never had to consider.
The Bottom Line
This isn't a story about a generation that's lazy, broken, or uninterested in connection. It's a story about a generation that grew up with dramatically less practice at exactly the skill approaching someone requires — through no individual fault — and is now having to build that skill later and more deliberately than any generation before it had to.
The data is clear that the problem is real and widely shared. The good news, equally clear from the same research, is that this is a skills gap, not a permanent condition — and skills gaps close with practice, not shame.