Young Women Choosing Celibacy Due to Dating Exhaustion
There’s a new kind of dry spell moving through dating culture, and it has nothing to do with moral beliefs; it’s a quiet, personal revolution born from sheer exhaustion. Mandana Zarghami, a 29-year-old whose story echoes that of countless others, recently told The New York Post about her four-year journey through the trenches of modern dating—a period that ended not with a fairytale romance but with a conscious, weary decision to step away from sex entirely.This isn't about saving oneself for marriage in a traditional sense; it's a strategic retreat, a reclaiming of mental and emotional real estate in a landscape that feels increasingly hostile and transactional. I've spoken with dozens of women in their late twenties and early thirties who describe a similar fatigue, a feeling of being emotionally drained by the constant performance required on apps where connections are as disposable as the swipe of a finger.They talk about the cognitive load of decoding mixed signals, the low-grade anxiety of waiting for a text back, and the profound disappointment of encounters that feel more like interviews or auditions than genuine human connection. This phenomenon isn't occurring in a vacuum; it’s a direct response to a dating ecosystem reshaped by technology, where an illusion of infinite choice paradoxically leads to a deeper sense of isolation and commodification.The psychological toll is significant, with many reporting that the pursuit of intimacy began to feel like a second, unpaid job—one with terrible benefits and no paid time off. Stepping into celibacy, for them, isn't an act of deprivation but one of profound self-preservation, a way to silence the noise and recenter their own needs and well-being.It’s a quiet rebellion against a culture that often values the quantity of connections over their quality, a deliberate choice to opt out of a system that no longer serves them. This trend invites a broader sociological question: what does it say about our current social fabric when a growing cohort of young women find more peace in solitude than in the pursuit of partnership? The answer likely lies in a complex interplay of burnout, heightened awareness of personal boundaries, and a redefinition of what constitutes a fulfilling life—one where romantic and sexual fulfillment is no longer the default centerpiece. It’s a movement less about giving something up and more about taking something back: their time, their energy, and their peace of mind.
JA
Jamie Larson123k2 days ago
this reminds me of the whole quiet quitting thing at work, it's like people are just opting out of systems that drain them tbh
0