Are teens afraid of dating?

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Do you like me? Check yes or no.” Say goodbye to the childhood love note — teens aren’t dating anymore. Faith Hill, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the demise of teenage dating, what kids are missing out on when they don’t practice being in adult-like relationships, and how a new idea of adolescence is being formed — for better or worse. Her article is “Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2020, a group of young woman found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
0:06.9	Someone was posting photos.
0:09.2	It was just me naked.
0:10.6	Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts.
0:14.3	This is Levitown, a new podcast from IHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Collidercope,
0:19.3	about the rise of deep fate pornography and the battle to
0:22.2	stop it. Listen to Levitown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the IHeartRadio app,
0:28.2	Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If there's one thing most of us remember from our teenage years, it is how very, very
0:45.7	interested we were in the peers we found attractive. It could take many forms, crushes,
0:51.1	dating, hookups, but for a long time, it seemed evident that all of this madness
0:55.8	around our dawning interest in romance was driven by new surges of hormones that essentially
1:00.6	could not be ignored. So what exactly has changed between then and the young adult lives of
1:06.9	Gen Z? From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. When different generations were
1:13.4	polled in 2023, 78% of baby boomers and 76% of Gen X adults recalled having been
1:20.2	an aromantic relationship at some point in their teens. But only 56% of Gen Z respondents
1:26.4	said the same.
1:40.7	And my guest has followed that thread to discover that the people born between roughly 1997 and 2012 really do seem to have collectively less experience with relationships than their parents and grandparents at the same ages.
1:42.6	One big question is why.
1:45.6	The other is whether this is good or bad or just different from the experiences of older Americans. Faith Hill is a staff writer at The Atlantic
1:50.8	and author of the article there, teens are foregoing a classic rite of passage. Faith, welcome back
1:56.9	to think. Hi, thanks so much for having me. You talked with a journalist who Moonlights as a college professor and apparently has also taken on like an unofficial role as an advocate for dating.
2:09.7	Why are her students so down on the idea of romance?
	...

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