Why Dating Is So Exhausting for Women in 2025

Trying to find intimacy in a country that keeps failing you.

There’s a feeling in the air, subtle but relentless. A low hum of exhaustion that’s become so normal, so expected, that many women have stopped mentioning it out loud. But it’s there. You see it in the hesitation before agreeing to a date. You hear it in the post-dinner decompression: “He was nice, but…” And you feel it, deeply, in the collective shift happening right now, a shift in what women are willing to tolerate, in dating and beyond.

It’s getting harder to date. Not because people are flaky, or rude, or emotionally unavailable, though sometimes, they are. It’s harder because of the cumulative weight women are carrying just to exist. The emotional math we’re doing before the first drink even arrives. The micro-disappointments that land like macro-betrayals, not because they’re dramatic, but because they’re familiar. Because they echo everything else.

Women are dating in a culture that gaslights them every single day. That tells them their freedoms are being restricted for their own good. That wants them to have more babies while cutting the very programs that allow them to give birth safely. That slashes funding for reproductive health and lets mothers die bleeding in parking lots, then insists this is “pro-life.” That lets powerful men laugh while voting to take away rights they will never need to defend.

And then we’re expected to show up to dinner, be charming, and keep the vibe light.

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As Mary Beth Barone said on the latest episode of Boy Problems, “Any person that has sex with a woman… you’re having sex with someone who has been traumatized.” That’s not hyperbole. It’s reality. And it’s why, even when the man across the table is good and kind and well-meaning, a blank stare or an offhand comment can feel like too much. Our window of tolerance has changed. Our patience for being talked over, ignored, dismissed, or disbelieved has narrowed. Not because we’ve become less generous, but because we’ve been forced to become more protective.

This isn’t about blaming men. It’s about asking them to meet the moment. After the 2016 election, videos circulated of men holding their wives and girlfriends as they sobbed, stoic and grounded. Those men were devastated too. But they didn’t retreat. They stayed. They held space. That is the kind of strength women are asking for now.

Not perfection. Not fixing. Just presence. Tenderness. A willingness to hold what’s heavy.

Dating in 2025 is exhausting not because women are too much, but because the world has asked too much of us, for too long. And still, we show up. Still, we hope. Still, we try. All we ask now is for someone who won’t flinch when we stop pretending everything’s fine.

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