The gap between what people want and what they’re actually able to find is widening, and it’s not abstract to me. I see it in every consultation.

So when I sat down to watch Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere on Netflix, I wasn’t watching as a detached observer. I was watching as someone who deals with the wreckage of these gender dynamics in real time, someone who hears both sides of this fracture every single week.

Nobody talks about it directly. We skirt around it with statistics about declining birth rates, rising rates of depression, the collapse of civic participation, the housing crisis. We publish think pieces about loneliness and policy papers about social capital. But we rarely ask the most fundamental question underneath all of it:

Why do we actually care if people are single?

There’s a conversation I keep having, over and over, in intake after intake. Smart, accomplished, genuinely good people sitting across from me, or on a call telling me some version of the same story. They’re exhausted. Not just tired. Hollowed out. And when I ask them what’s getting in the way of their dating life, the answer almost never starts with “I haven’t met the right person.” It starts with work.