Do straight people exist?

What the decline of marriage, sex, and dating really says about straight love.

Lately I’ve been asking myself a question that sounds unserious, maybe even stupid, but has begun to feel urgent: do straight people really exist?

It’s not that I don’t see evidence everywhere. I see it on television, I see it in movies. My parents are even shockingly against all odds still married. Hell even Scooter Braun and Sydney Sweeney appear to have found love in a hopeless place (Jeff Bezos’ wedding). So straight love is out there. But increasingly, I can’t tell if it’s real, or just a spectacle we’ve been trained to keep believing in, like santa or the stock market.

I wrote an entire book arguing that men and women are not natural enemies and that the “gender war” is fake. I still believe that. But now, watching more and more men retreat into a world of men talking to men about men on podcasts, and women describe female friendship with the rapture of a new lover, I’ve started to wonder if I’ve been too devoted to the idea that heterosexuality is inevitable.

On the first episode of my new show Hopecore, my newly gay roommate Daniela inspired Heather Graham to confess she’s begun fantasizing about joining the swelling ranks of later-in-life lesbians. And honestly, why wouldn’t she? Every time another woman announces she’s gay now, it feels less like a shocking revelation and more like a smart career pivot. No wonder women like Sophia Bush and Glennon Doyle are so beloved by straight women. Part of them doesn’t just like them, they want to be them. If you talk to heterosexual women, it sounds like being straight is less of an identity, and more of curse.

And all this heteropessism on the part of women makes sense. Straight women are the only group who experience an orgasm gap in their relationships. When I interviewed straight women about dating men for my book For the Love of Men, many of them told me they didn’t feel like they were dating men. Instead many of the women felt like they had become personal rehab centers for their male partners. And then you add the political backdrop of evil chauvinistic clowns recklessly destroying democracy and it makes sense that women are less patience with men than they used to. So it’s not surprising that even women who are still attracted to men are quiet quitting them. Some of the most influential cool girls like Emily Ratajkowski say they no longer assemble with men at all. In Ratajkowski’s case, she claims she has “zero straight men” in her life unless she is sleeping with them. She says she exclusively hangs out with women and queer people and is much happier when she does not “centre men.”

And while women being annoyed with men and men being annoyed with women is a tale as old as time, our love for each other no longer seems strong enough to motivate us to even put on a pair of pants and avoid dying alone. Hell we’re not even putting in the effort to have meaningless sex anymore. A 2025 survey found only 37% of Americans engage in weekly sexual activity, down from 55% in 1990. Nearly one in three young men aged 18–24 reported no sex at all in the past year, a historically high rate.

And while decentering men feels like a personal attack, decentering women is what men have been doing for centuries. Men didn’t just informally put themselves at the center of society, they used laws and the federal government to do it, excluding women from schools, sports, and workplaces. And instead of fighting for more rights within these institutions, women seem to be opting out of them altogether. Marriage is the clearest example: for the first time in U.S. history, a higher share of men than women at age 40 have never been married. Men now report wanting marriage more than women, even though nearly half of marriages still end in divorce.

So it’s worth asking, are women attracted to men as people, or are they attracted to men as a concept? Women have long worried that men’s attraction was conditional, stay skinny, stay blonde, stay young. But now the tables are turning: women expect men to show upkeep of their own, not just at the gym but in therapy, in emotional labor, in growth. And it’s fair to ask: do straight women actually like men, or just tolerate them when they improve enough?

And I will probably get a lot of flack for saying this but I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the women opting out of men aren’t as happy as they say they are. Quiet quitting men might feel like a flex, but it can also turn into a performance, a way of feeling superior instead of vulnerable. Disengagement protects women from bad relationships, yes, but it also keeps them from good ones. If men need to step up, women need to resist the temptation to disengage entirely. Straight love can’t survive if one side is sulking and the other is smug.

But my hopeful take on this is that maybe this isn’t the death of straight love but the beginning of something better. A world where women no longer organize their lives around earning men’s attention, but choose them freely for pleasure, joy, and companionship. Straight people may not ‘exist’ in quite the same way, but love isn’t disappearing. It’s being redistributed, away from duty and toward possibility. It might just mean that the straight couples who do make it really love each other, not because they have to, but because they want to. I don’t think straight love is going extinct, but it is asking us to evolve, and time will tell if both genders can learn to do that.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

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x

Liz