The Nonchalance Epidemic

Why no one dates, texts first, or admits they care anymore.

Last night I watched Love Island with my roomate to distract ourselves from the fact that the government built a concentration camp in eight days but somehow couldn’t find money to feed hungry children. Whether you’re watching or not, it almost doesn’t matter, because this season, it doesn’t feel like a reality show. It’s a soft-lit documentary about the death of effort.

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The show is technically about falling in love, but no one’s falling. No one’s even tripping. The men aren’t writing poems, planning dates, or embarrassing themselves in the charming, deeply watchable ways we used to count on in a show like this. Instead, they’re standing around like damp furniture, shirtless, expressionless, vaguely hovering near a woman as if proximity counts as pursuit. The women are still showing up, still trying, still romantic. The men are just… there.

I actually talked about this fear of vulnerability with the infinitely soulful Suleika Jaouad on the latest episode of my new podcast, Boy Problems.

We’re living in a moment of emotional underfunctioning. A vibe shift where dating has become something closer to performance art, an endless exchange of glances and memes and left swipes, calibrated to avoid the horror of being the one who cares more. According to a Pew study, 63% of single Americans aren’t even looking for a relationship. Bumble just laid off a third of its staff. Even casual hookups are in decline. We’re not falling in love. We’re not even trying.

Some people online have started calling this The Nonchalance Epidemic.

It’s an ambient fear of vulnerability so culturally omnipresent that it’s started to feel natural. Like love should be chill and casual and entirely unspoken. Like the only way to be safe is to never say what you want out loud. The entire romantic landscape has become one long standoff: don’t text first, don’t double text, don’t get too excited, don’t ask too many questions, don’t let anyone know you care, at least not before they do. We're not dating each other so much as running parallel simulations of desire, carefully curated to look effortless.

But the more we avoid risk, the more hollow everything becomes. Romance becomes strategy. Affection becomes currency. When you strip love of vulnerability, you strip it of everything that makes it love. What’s left is the choreography of connection without any of the feeling, a cycle of almosts, maybes, and situationships that never resolves because no one wants to say the one thing that would: “I really like you.”

Wanting something earnestly has become its own kind of taboo. Trying has become cringe. And caring visibly, without irony, feels radical in a culture that rewards detachment.

But maybe cringe is holy. Maybe being the one who says how they feel first, who texts back fast, who tries the hardest, is the only way to break the cycle. Maybe the only way out of the nonchalance epidemic is through the exact vulnerability we’ve been taught to fear.

And I think you can feel our collective thirst for romance in the way the entire internet has already crowned Amaya the hero of this Love Island season—not because she played it cool, but precisely because she didn’t. Because she actually cared. She didn’t hover, she felt. She wasn’t above it all. She was all in. While everyone else was strategizing, she was showing up. Earnestness, it turns out, might be what we’re all hungry for.

What do you think about the nonchalance epidemic? How has it showed up in your life? And please keep sending your boy problems. I love reading them. Especially the ones where you dared to care.