The Latest Dating Dilemma: Wellness Gap Relationships

A little less than a year ago, TikTok gave us a new name for a relationship dynamic that’s existed since the dawn of time: the swag gap. The premise was simple. One person is, objectively, cooler than the other—yet somehow they’re together. The internet had other thoughts, most of them along the lines of “opposites attract.” Fair enough.But lately, I’ve started noticing a different kind of mismatch: not a gap in coolness, but a gap in lifestyle. More specifically, a growing divide between couples who have very different ideas about what it means to have a good time. Call it the wellness gap.As more people get hardcore about their health—filling free time with Pilates classes, marathon training, cold plunges, and 0% beers—the number of wellness gap relationships is multiplying. Can a Hyrox enthusiast really love someone whose main hobbies include drinking wine and smoking cigs? Someone who wouldn’t dare miss a Friday night appointment at the pub, even (or especially) when it means cancelling 7a.m. hot yoga? And, more importantly, what happens when one person’s idea of self-care starts to look like the other person’s idea of hell?Louis*, 39, found out the hard way earlier this year when he noticed his then-girlfriend was spending more and more time at the gym. At first, they worked out together. “But the gulf started opening up more and more as time went on and she got really into it, and it became a core part of her identity,” he says, explaining that it was a factor in their eventual break-up. “I was never that into it.”Because of their work schedules, the couple only had one day off per week together, and she developed a habit of using that time to go to the gym solo. “She could go to the gym on Sundays by herself, but as an example, there was a Surrealist art exhibition that I really wanted to go to, and trying to get her to do it on her day off… we couldn’t do that together.” Most of us have a finite amount of free time and money, so it’s problematic if you and your partner have wildly different versions of what the ideal weekend looks like.Relationships where one person works out a bit more than the other aren’t new. But wellness today feels less like a hobby and more like a religion—one with its own rituals, vocabulary and, increasingly, a very healthy price tag. Between 2013 and 2024, the global industry doubled in size and hit a new peak of $6.8 trillion, according to the Global Wellness Institute. You can spend serious amounts of time and money optimizing yourself: booking holidays around their wellness offerings, stocking up on longevity supplements, and installing an infrared sauna at home.It can all end up as a moral issue, with one person getting judgmental about their partner’s wellness habits (or lack thereof). Just as there are challenges to marrying outside your faith, there’s a certain amount of friction involved in dating someone who doesn’t really believe in the healing powers of wellness. Louis, for his part, felt like his ex-girlfriend compared him to one of her friends, who spent more time working on himself at the gym. “You could tell—this might sound like paranoid ex-boyfriend things—but seeing this guy do it of his own volition, I think it made him more attractive to her.”Esme Gordon-Craig, a 24-year-old journalist, recently ended a new relationship when she felt like her partner was overly obsessed with Strava, the running stats app. “It made me feel more inadequate, or at least guilty that I wasn’t matching his efforts,” she says. “Most of my friends found it baffling that his Strava was the rationale behind dumping him. Running in particular has become such a social trend, it's hard to frame it to anyone these days as a negative.”On social media, you’ll find plenty of evidence of wellness gaps—girls complaining about their gym-rat boyfriends (“POV: your boyfriend loves the gym more than you”); guys doing a double take at their red-light-masking girlfriends. TikTokers coined a term last year, “almond boyfriend”, to describe a guy who’s overly extreme about his fitness routine and clean eating habits (pulling out a scale to weigh his protein portions or hunting down all the microplastics in the household).It’s all quite lighthearted, the assumption being that it's better to date something inhaling steamed chicken breasts than pot from a giant bong. And with the proliferation of singles-only run clubs in the UK and the launch of apps like Ateam (“the first invite-only dating app for those who prioritise their health”), it’s becoming easier for these types to find each other and start relationships, no wellness gaps involved.But is the growing influence of wellness culture contributing to the dire state of dating? Data scientists, broadsheet hacks and TikTok scholars all over the world are in agreement: finding love is hard at the moment. China, for instance, is banning AI boyfriends in an effort to get people to couple up, while politicians in Britain and America are fretting over the plunging population rates.“Alcohol, I think, is one of the most divisive things at the moment,” says Olivia Rigg, a matchmaker based in London who works exclusively with male clients. “I hate to gender things, but I would say I’ve probably heard more from young women, ‘It would be nice to have a glass of wine every once in a while.’”There’s a clear line between the growing number of young men who are getting extreme about health and the looksmaxxing movement. Last year, Ipsos polled men between the ages of 16 and 24 and found that 50% believed women prioritize attractiveness over other qualities when considering a partner, and 39% felt that “women are only attracted to a small subset of men.” If this is your version of reality, it makes sense to ditch the pints for push-ups.Still, the wellness gap may be less about what’s happening in the gym than what it says about your relationship outside of it. “I do see this,” says Jeff Guenther, a licensed therapist who works with couples, on the ‘wellness gap’ dynamic. “But nobody’s actually fighting about the wellness thing. I mean, at the surface level, sure, but there’s something happening underneath it.”He continues with some advice: “If you’re the wellness-crazy one, then you have to make sure to keep your thing from landing like a judgmental statement on your partner. Whatever hours are left over after the training, put them on the calendar and make sure that you spend quality time together. Most of these couples aren’t mismatched, they’ve just sort of stopped having any time where they’re both doing things that they really enjoy together.”Rigg doesn’t think intense dedication to wellness is an issue if your partner is equally hardcore about their own interests. “You want to be having the same level of dedication to whatever it is you’re doing in your free time,” she says.But nine times out of ten, a true addiction to wellness is probably going to get in the way of a happy coupling. “It sounds absurd to compare it to drinking or smoking but if someone’s dependent on something, if they care more about that thing or activity than anything else in the world, then that’s inevitably going to be a tricky person to be in a relationship with,” says Gordon-Craig. “Fitness apps make it easier for people to fall into that trap. I think future red flags include guys who post their Strava runs on Instagram. I’ll allow one every so often… but certainly not every day.”This story originally appeared in British GQ.