Building a More Romantic, Genuinely Sexy Future: Why We Need to Rethink Intimacy in America
As a matchmaker, I’m witnessing something deeply concerning: we’re living through a romantic recession in an era that claims to champion sexual liberation.
The Rosensexual Flag
The Paradox We’re Living In
We’re supposed to be living in the age of sex positivity. An era where exploration is celebrated, where vanilla is passé, where dating apps have democratized access to potential partners. Yet intimacy rates are plummeting. Sex is dwindling. And a third of Americans now report having romantic relationships with AI instead of other humans.
Let me say that again: one in three Americans have had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, dating app profiles increasingly read like corporate job listings; exhaustive checklists of requirements, disclaimers, and dealbreakers that would make any HR department proud. We have hyper-labeled every aspect of human sexual connection to the point where it creates more barriers than bridges. We’re more sexually frustrated and repressed than generations who lived under far more conservative social values.
The goal of intimacy has always been to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to feel seen. Yet what I observe daily as a matchmaker is a population that feels none of these things. Dating apps haven’t increased connection, they’ve increased apprehension about physically connecting with another person.
This isn’t just disappointing. It’s a crisis.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
The data paints a sobering picture. A record number of 40-year-olds have never been married. Four in ten young college men report having neither hooked up nor dated during their undergraduate years. Most people hate using dating apps, and an increasing number believe they’re actively unsafe.
I recently spoke with “Sarah” (not her real name, used here for privacy), a 38-year-old woman in my network who works in finance and has built a rich, multifaceted life. She’s passionate about literature, practices yoga regularly, and has an impressive collection of vintage vinyl records. She travels solo, maintains close friendships, and volunteers with a local literacy program. By all accounts, she’s exactly the kind of person who “should have no problem” finding a partner, as people constantly tell her.
Yet she’s struggled to find lasting romantic connection. Not for lack of trying. Not because her standards are unreasonable; she simply wanted someone who felt like home, someone to cook with on weeknights, someone whose presence brought comfort. Basic human connection.
The most striking thing she shared with me? Despite her active social life, she’s had only a handful of intimate or sexual opportunities in recent years; moments of genuine physical connection that felt safe and mutual.
Her story isn’t unique. It’s increasingly common among people in my network and the broader dating landscape. And it represents the fundamental failure of how we’ve approached dating in the digital age.
Where the Sex Positivity Movement Lost Its Way
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’ve intellectualized intimacy to death.
The push for sexual exploration and kink positivity came with good intentions, to liberate people from shame, to celebrate diverse desires, to dismantle oppressive norms. But somewhere along the way, we replaced one rigid framework with another equally exhausting one.
Now, instead of being told what not to do, we’re overwhelmed by endless categorizations of what we could be doing. Every preference gets a label. Every dynamic requires negotiation. Every encounter demands that you’ve done the emotional labor of knowing exactly what you want, how you want it, and how to communicate it in the precise terminology of the moment.
It’s exhausting. And for many people, it’s the opposite of sexy.
The irony is palpable: in an age where we’re told to “step out of vanilla sex,” most people are having less sex than ever. In a time of supposed liberation, we’re more sexually frustrated than our grandparents’ generation. The barriers to intimacy haven’t disappeared, they’ve just shape-shifted into new forms.
The Corporate-ization of Romance
Dating apps have accelerated this transformation by turning romance into a marketplace and people into products.
When you open a dating app, you’re not encountering humans; you’re encountering either hollow shells or overwhelming manifestos. Some profiles are barely filled out: a few photos, maybe “ask me” in the bio section, offering nothing to spark curiosity or conversation. Others are densely packed with paragraphs so extensive they read like cover letters; earnest declarations of values, exhaustive lists of hobbies, detailed relationship requirements, and pre-emptive disclaimers that bore you before you even match.
Neither approach invites genuine connection. The sparse profiles suggest disengagement or treat matching as purely visual assessment. The verbose ones create a sense of interview pressure, as if you need to study someone’s dissertation before daring to say hello. Both turn what should be an organic process of discovery into something transactional and weirdly formal.
And when people do list requirements, whether in dense bios or terse bullet points, they often mirror job qualifications. Women list height requirements, income thresholds, emotional availability standards, political alignments, and lifestyle compatibility markers. Men reduce potential partners to physical measurements, youth indicators, and conventional attractiveness metrics while demanding low-maintenance personalities and “no drama.”
We’ve all become simultaneously the interviewer and the applicant, judging while being judged, either disengaging entirely or over-explaining ourselves into oblivion.
Everyone is frustrated. No one is winning.
The Comfort Crisis
As a matchmaker, I see this truth daily: people cannot be intimate when they don’t feel comfortable.
And right now? People are profoundly uncomfortable.
They’re uncomfortable being vulnerable. Uncomfortable expressing desire. Uncomfortable taking initiative. Uncomfortable with ambiguity. Uncomfortable with the possibility of rejection or awkwardness or saying the wrong thing.
This discomfort isn’t irrational, it’s the predictable outcome of a dating culture that feels adversarial rather than collaborative. Where every interaction is a potential cancelable offense. Where authenticity is risky. Where showing interest too early makes you desperate, but waiting too long makes you disinterested. Where physical touch without explicit verbal consent is assault, but asking for consent kills the mood.
The rules are impossible, contradictory, and constantly shifting. So people opt out. They swipe mindlessly without meeting anyone. They have “situationships” that never progress to actual relationships. They invest emotional energy into AI companions who can’t hurt them but also can’t truly hold them.
They choose safety over intimacy. And in doing so, they lose both.
What Rosensexuality Offers: A Different Path Forward
This is where I believe we need a fundamental reorientation — not just in how we date, but in how we understand attraction itself.
If you’re going to choose a label, I suggest identifying as Rosensexual. It’s a term that describes an orientation toward people based on kindness, curiosity, empathy, and the stories they carry. It’s attraction built on how someone makes you feel, how they listen, how they engage with the world, and how they treat others.
It’s not attraction in spite of physical appearance; it’s attraction where appearance is only one dimension of a much richer, more textured experience of another person. It’s the understanding that genuine sexiness emerges from depth, not from checking boxes.
The Rosensexual flag: coral red for warmth and passion, beige for openness and vulnerability, gold for authentic connection, and navy blue for depth and curiosity, represents this philosophy visually. That golden line? It’s the thread of empathy that runs through all meaningful human connection.
Here’s what Rosensexuality offers in practical terms:
1. It recenters attraction on what actually creates intimacy: emotional safety, genuine curiosity, and mutual respect.
2. It resists the checklist mentality by acknowledging that compatibility emerges from interaction, not from matching specifications on paper.
3. It values the journey of getting to know someone as intrinsically worthwhile, rather than as an audition for a predetermined role.
4. It recognizes that sexiness is dynamic and relational — something that develops between people, not something that exists in isolation.
5. It makes space for slowness, for awkwardness, for discovery — all the messy human elements that the corporate-dating complex tries to eliminate.
Building a Genuinely Sexy Future
So what would a more romantic, genuinely sexy future actually look like?
It would value presence over performance. Instead of approaching dates as interviews where you present your best self, we’d create space to simply be ourselves; uncertainties, contradictions, and all. Sexiness would come from authenticity, not from perfect curation.
It would prioritize emotional availability over credential checking. Rather than screening for height, income, and education before meeting, we’d give people the chance to surprise us with their kindness, their humor, their way of seeing the world. We’d recognize that the best partners often don’t come in the packaging we expected.
It would embrace gradual unfolding rather than instant chemistry. We’d acknowledge that attraction often grows slowly, through repeated interactions, shared experiences, and witnessing how someone navigates life. We’d give relationships time to develop rather than swiping left at the first sign of imperfection.
It would make room for physical touch without paranoia. We’d rebuild cultural norms that allow for flirtation, for testing mutual interest, for escalating intimacy through body language and responsiveness rather than only through explicit verbal negotiation. We’d trust people to communicate boundaries while also trusting ourselves to read social cues.
It would celebrate simplicity. Sometimes intimacy is just sharing a meal and talking about your day. It’s a hand on the small of your back. It’s laughter over something ridiculous. It’s the comfort of silence with another person. We’ve overcomplicated connection when what most people want is remarkably straightforward.
It would resist hyper-labeling. Not because labels are inherently bad, but because they can become prisons. When every variation of human desire requires a new category, when every dynamic must be named and negotiated, we lose the organic flow that makes intimacy feel natural. Sometimes, you don’t need to define what you are; you just need to enjoy being together.
It would address loneliness as a public health crisis. We need third spaces; places where people can gather without the pressure of dating, where connections can form organically, where community replaces the isolation that drives people to AI companions. Churches, community centers, hobby groups, volunteer organizations. Places where you’re a person first, not a potential match.
The Work Ahead
Building this future requires systemic change and personal courage.
For dating platforms: Stop treating people as products. Create features that encourage thoughtful engagement over mindless swiping. Reward users who write substantive messages, who show up for actual dates, who treat others with respect. Make the experience less transactional and more human.
For culture-makers: Tell stories about messy, imperfect relationships that work. Show characters who don’t have everything figured out but who care for each other anyway. Celebrate ordinary intimacy, the kind that doesn’t require performance or perfection.
For individuals: Take the risk of being vulnerable. Show interest without apology. Suggest plans rather than endlessly texting. Give people a chance to surprise you. Be willing to go on a second date even when the first wasn’t magical. Touch someone’s arm during conversation. Make eye contact. Laugh at their jokes. Be kind.
For all of us: Question the narratives we’ve inherited. Ask why the frameworks we’re using; sex positivity, radical autonomy, consent culture, dating optimization are not improving the rates of romantic connection.
Why This Matters
The romantic recession isn’t just about marriage rates or birth rates or economic productivity. It’s about fundamental human flourishing.
Touch is a biological need. Connection is a psychological necessity. Intimacy, the experience of being truly known and accepted, is what makes us feel alive. When a society fails to provide pathways to these experiences, people suffer. They become depressed, anxious, isolated. They seek connection with AI because human connection has become too difficult, too risky, too exhausting.
This is not the future we should accept.
As a matchmaker, I refuse to witness this crisis passively. I’ve built my work around the belief that genuine connection is still possible; that people still want to find each other, despite all the barriers we’ve erected.
But we need to change course. We need to stop treating dating as optimization and start treating it as exploration. We need to stop pathologizing normal human awkwardness and start creating space for people to stumble toward each other. We need to stop demanding perfection and start celebrating the beautiful, messy reality of two imperfect people choosing each other anyway.
We need to build a culture that makes people excited about dating again.
Not because they might find someone who checks all their boxes. Not because they’re following a roadmap to marriage and kids. But because the process of getting to know another human being, with all their quirks and stories and ways of moving through the world, is one of life’s greatest adventures.
That’s the future worth building. That’s the kind of sexiness worth cultivating.
And it starts with each of us deciding that we want something different and being brave enough to reach for it.
Nick Rosen is the founder of Met By Nick and co-founder of QUALITY.
Sources
Cox, Daniel A. “How Bad is America’s Romantic Recession?” American Survey Center, February 6, 2025. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/how-bad-is-americas-romantic-recession/
“Romantic Recession: How Politics, Pessimism, and Anxiety Shape American Courtship.” American Survey Center. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-romance-how-politics-and-pessimism-influence-dating-experiences/
“Third of Americans have had a romantic relationship with AI.” Newsweek, October 2025. https://www.newsweek.com/third-americans-have-had-romantic-relationship-ai-10814798
Chambers, Clara, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann. “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates.” https://aibm.org/research/will-college-educated-women-find-someone-to-marry/
“A record high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married.” Pew Research Center, June 28, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/28/a-record-high-share-of-40-year-olds-in-the-us-have-never-been-married/
