Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage | Fewer young people are getting into relationships.

I think there's a few factors at play here

Yes, depression is a big one

There's also a lack of places to go and things to do for young people. Some parents are weird about their kids going anywhere these days, and no one really wants to bring their boyfriend/girlfriend over to hang out with their parents.

And even if you don't have obnoxious helicopter parents, where do you go? Malls are dying, restaurants and movies are expensive, and if you go hang out in a park some Karen will call the police on you.

Neighborhoods aren't walkable, public transit is broken, and cars are unaffordable so even if you find somewhere to go on a date, how do you get there?

And at least in heterosexual dating, we've also had a bit of a cultural shift that might throw things off. A lot of things that used to be accepted we now rightly understand are problematic, I think a lot of men and boys are hesitant to make the first move now because we don't want to be seen as creeps, but at the same time I think most girls still kind of expect the guys to make the first move, and while a lot of us are a bit more enlightened and could be cool with that (my wife of 5 years made the first move, she'd probably still be waiting if she left it to me) there's still plenty of guys with toxic fragile masculinity out there who could react poorly to a girl making the first move and I don't blame girls for not wanting to take on that risk (for the record, I also choose the bear)

So the dynamics have shifted a bit, and I don't think we've really figured out how things are supposed to work yet, and honestly things probably need to shift a whole hell of a lot more before things can normalize there and people can just feel comfortable asking other people out on dates without worrying about it being weird.

And in a similar vein, it's also I think become a lot more normal to just have platonic friends of the opposite gender. Personally some of my best friends are women who have no desire to date or fuck.

And people are also a lot more willing to have some sort of casual sex, friends with benefits, hookup culture, etc.

So there's probably a lot of physical and emotional needs that are now being met outside of the context of a romantic relationship when in the past that was pretty much the only way to meet them.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. Anyone over the age of 25 or so didn't have everything so blatantly out in the open with the internet as much as they do. When I was a kid we'd look up to adults as people that actually knew what the fuck was going on. Of course, later on in life you realize that nobody knows what the fuck is going on. But people that are growing up now see it for what it is when they're still in middle-school and highschool. They're seeing how fucked everything is before they even have a chance to be optimistic. The illusion of stability isn't just broken, it's missing entirely.