The Rise of Loneliness Influencers

You don’t have to get married or be in a relationship to make a life for yourself. In a post-sexual revolution, feminist-inflected, if not feminist-winning, world, is that women —— Definitely not feminist-winning. - That’s agreed. - Yeah. I mean, I don’t think the White House would identify as particularly feminist. No. I think the rise of loneliness influencers speaks to another trend about Gen Z and millennial dating, where women have jobs, where women are going to college and graduate school at higher rates than men, where in a lot of major cities, women are earning more than their male counterparts. You don’t have to get married or be in a relationship to make a life for yourself. And it’s felt as a liberating thing, at least for younger women, millennials and Gen Z, and perhaps also for these older married women who maybe didn’t feel like they had as much choice in the matter and so ended up with a husband and kids and a house and all this stuff to deal with as a way to feel like they were part of and accepted by society. So the sort of romanticization of loneliness, I think, also speaks to a kind of romanticization of the idea that women can do it by themselves, that they don’t have to be in a relationship to be happy. They don’t have to have a boyfriend to be able to afford their frankly kind of alarmingly clean apartments. You and I are seeing the same woman, Christine —— Yes, it’s a little, it’s a little bit “American Psycho,” frankly.