The news came suddenly, shattering an otherwise peaceful bank holiday weekend. “Today is London’s last 8pm sunset until 2025”, read a headline in this newspaper. Perhaps because of the awful weather we endured for almost all of July, it felt like a particularly potent punch in the gut. “I actually can’t talk about this,” came the response from one of my friends after I sent her the article. “Why would you send that to me?”
It happens every year, and yet each time the end of summer without fail feels so catastrophic and apocalyptic. And particularly so if you are braving the cold months alone, single in a world that seems, as soon as the leaves begin to turn, suddenly to be full of couples. London, which swells with life during the warmer months, can feel uniquely isolating when winter draws in. And so, as night follows day, hot girl summer is followed by its ominous doppelganger — cuffing season.
Suddenly, the desire to get smashed and kiss a stranger in the smoking area — or perhaps non-smoking area, thanks to our new Labour overlords — is replaced by an almost primal longing to cosplay Cameron Diaz in The Holiday and cuddle up with someone under a warm blanket with a cup of tea. None of us are impervious to cuffing season’s knitted woollen tentacles — it’s biology after all. But this year, something feels markedly more pessimistic.
Yes, dating as a heterosexual woman has never been a cakewalk, but the sheer number of conversations I’ve had with female friends who have decided to give up on the concept altogether in the last year is unprecedented. Friends who — not that it particularly matters — are smart, attractive, wonderful people, and yet who are still coming up against the brick wall that is the current dating landscape.
The apps, as ubiquitous as they are, only tell a fraction of the story
According to a February 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 38 per cent of single women are looking to date or pursue a relationship, compared to 61 per cent of single men. The voluntary celibacy movement among women has also taken off on social media — female celebrities including Khloé Kardashian, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson and Tiffany Haddish have recently touted its benefits.
Earlier this year, an ad campaign by dating app Bumble, which chose to poke fun at those who have opted for celibacy in lieu of using dating apps, with slogans like “you know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer”, and “thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun”, saw swift backlash from women online. Fox herself weighed in on TikTok, saying: “Two and a half years of celibacy and never been better tbh.”
Yes, some of this can be put down to the dreaded apps. By now, the paradox of dating apps being universally hated and yet universally used is no secret. The endless options, the interminable messaging, the ghosting, the “how many siblings do you have” small talk —and then doing it again, and again. It is a time, energy and optimism killer.
But the apps, as ubiquitous as they are, only tell a fraction of the story. They are hardly a novel phenomenon, whereas the roots of much of the contemporary dating malaise feel sui generis. Earlier this year, analysis conducted by the Financial Times found that “a new global gender divide” is emerging among Gen Z. It showed that the developed world’s young women have rapidly become more liberal, while young men have either become more conservative, or been much slower to become more progressive. Gen Z, the report concluded, is “two generations, not one.”
Could this divergence be part of the reason romance feels so uniquely out of reach for my generation? Where once men were from Mars and women from Venus, the divide now resembles Mercury and Neptune.
Indeed, many TikTok celibates explicitly cite politics as their rationale. Several of them draw inspiration from the radical feminist South Korean 4B movement — as a form of resistance against the country’s outdated gender politics, women involved in 4B pledge not to date men, engage in sexual activity with men, marry, or have children, with the hashtag gaining traction outside of the country.
Not unrelated, is the fact that women now undoubtedly have higher standards for male partners. As feminism has become mainstream in the last decade or so, we have increasingly deigned relationships with men as incidental, rather than necessary, or — god forbid — a goal in their own right. There is, after all, no more cardinal sin amongst Gen Z than that of the “pick me girl”.
Whatever is causing the heterosexual dating rot, it’s clear that we won’t be able to remedy it in time for the coming winter. So get the blankets in, ladies, it’s going to be a long one.
