Slow Times at Ridgemont High

My wife and I attended the same high school. I had a crush on her back then, but it was unrequited. We didn’t see each other for a decade after high school, until one new year’s eve when we both ended up at the same IHop. Something about the cut of my jib as I consumed my French Toast must have triggered a change, because she started to finally come around. Long story short, it took me 14 years to get laid in high school. It turns out that my lack of romantic prowess may have been ahead of its time. According to Faith Hill in The Atlantic (Gift Article), fewer young people are getting into relationships. Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage. “In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they’d been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a ‘steady’ partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same.” (We’ve ruined young people’s attention span for everything else, so maybe we’ve ruined it for relationships, too. Or maybe the modern difficulty everyone seems to have forging meaningful real-life connections has spilled over into romance. Or maybe teens just use different lingo to describe relationships. I try to avoid the topic altogether with my own Gen Z teen children, aside from my one non-negotiable rule: No eating at IHop until college.)