DII: Preface — Why Dating Feels So Hard Now

If dating feels exhausting, confusing, or strangely hollow, you’re not imagining it.

This book is an exercise in diagnostic sociology. It does not offer advice, prescriptions, or moral instruction. It attempts to describe a structural condition clearly enough that readers can recognize it and decide, for themselves, whether to continue participating under its terms.

What’s changed isn’t that people became worse, colder, or more selfish. What’s changed is the structure around dating.

To understand why, it helps to use a word sociologists have relied on for over a century: anomie.