Have we become averse to romance?

Everyone agrees that the most recent season of Love Is Blind was the blandest in the show’s history. Some blame the fact that it was filmed in Minnesota, a simpler, quieter, more conservative (whiter) state than the coastal, chaotic cities of seasons past. There weren’t any fiery meltdowns or chaotic villain arcs. No “I choose myself” speeches. No one threw a drink or ghosted someone at the altar. It was, by most accounts, deeply, aggressively mid.

And yet, I watched it. Of course I did. I watch every season of every dating show ever. This one felt different, not just because it was tamer, but because of how it was tame. It wasn’t the kind of boring where the producers failed to find good storylines. It was the kind of boring where most of the people actually seemed… normal. Slightly awkward. Sincerely interested in connection. There was still cringe, like there always is where it concerns millennials nowadays, but it wasn’t performative. It wasn’t trying to go viral. It was the kind of cringe that comes from people who don’t know they’re being cringe.

And being a cringe millennial myself, I enjoyed it. Not because it was good television, but because I didn’t mind the softness of the season. There were post-season accusations and reveals, sure, but for the most part, it resembled real couples trying to make it work more than any other season has.

But nowadays, softness doesn’t really sell.

We all know the old adage: nothing moves like sex and violence. And over the last two decades, sensationalism has become the dominant language of culture. It’s seeped into everything: from dating shows to TikTok, influencer drama to political discourse. We’ve been trained to expect spectacle. Anything short of explosive feels like a failure.

So maybe the reason people didn’t like the new season of Love is Blind is that the energy was giving “normal.” And we don’t know how to watch that anymore.

The crisis of cringe

Romance, in the classic, more ordinary sense, is officially cringe. Sincere vulnerability is cringe. Caring too much is cringe. Grand romantic gestures? Unhinged. In 2025, to love publicly and wholeheartedly is to risk being meme’d, quote-tweeted, or turned into content.

Even intimacy now feels like a performance. We post crying selfies and breakup TikTok, not necessarily for catharsis, but for validation. The need for control over the narrative is so pervasive that no one experiences anything unless it serves theirs. In that process, something is lost: the quiet, messy, unfiltered part of love that can’t be aestheticized. The part that happens when no one’s watching.

This is not just a Millennial issue. Gen Z has responded with their own weird contradictions: a mix of radical vulnerability and puritanical boundary-setting, sexual liberation and moral panic. Their version of romance is deeply self-aware and often built around soft rules, therapy-speak, and a certain moral cleanliness that leaves very little room for actual intimacy.

Another reason is that reality TV star is an actual profession now. Back in the early 2000s, the drama wasn’t always real, but the emotional stakes felt higher than they do now that every reality TV star is also an influencer. It feels… flat. Everyone is media trained. It's so manufactured; there is no reality left in it.

Gen Z was born disillusioned

If you're a millennial, you remember a time when there was always a romantic comedy in theatres, sometimes multiple. Now, that's not the case anymore. As our content becomes more and more diverse, we’re leaving romance out of the mix, especially the kind that's not sensational in some way. Gen Z, the new consumers of media and setters of trends, look at romance as an ick.

The stats speak for themselves. The share of movies tagged as Romance on IMDb fell from 34.8% in 2000 to about 8.6% by 2024–25. Even when romance is present, its prominence is waning across genres; only action films have seen relatively stable levels. An analysis of the top 250 U.S. grossing films shows nearly 40% fewer sex scenes since 2000. In 2023, around 46% of top films had no sexual content, up from less than 20% in 2000.

A UCLA study (Oct 2023) of 1,500+ individuals aged 10–24 found that 63–64% want more focus on platonic relationships, up from ~51% the year before. 62–63% say sexual content isn’t needed for plots, an increase from ~47–48% the previous year. A 2024 study reaffirmed that ~44% felt romance is overused, and 47.5% saw sex as unnecessary in storylines.

This could be a cultural pushback from the hook up culture that millennials, a famously extreme and self-destructive generation, made into a norm, which informed the impossible and often toxic dating culture that exists across the world.

That doesn't mean that Gen Z doesn't have its perversions. Despite their outward pearl-clutching disgust towards sexual content, there's been an increase in disparity between the expectations of different and extremely polarized young people entering the dating scene.

Young men find themselves more and more exposed to porn, easily accessible online, and interacting with fewer women, creating a misogynistic incel culture that's driven forward by influencers like Andrew Tate, who unapologetically degrades and objectifies women. A great depiction of this slowly growing epidemic is in the Netflix show Adolescence, which has received widespread acclaim for its raw and often uncomfortable depiction.

The polarization outside this has only increased since the #MeToo movement, which, despite its influence and positive impact, has become a joke to some. Many have used this movement to blame their lack of social interactions, which we all know isn't that simple, claiming that political correctness is the reason for the minefield they feel like they’re navigating.

Art imitates life and life imitates art

We grew up in a generation obsessed with sex. Not because we were more depraved, but because it had just been made visible. Sex was no longer confined to innuendo or metaphor; it was everywhere. Music videos, HBO dramas, and pop culture at large. Everything leaned in. Films like American Pie, Cruel Intentions, Y Tu Mamá También, and Eyes Wide Shut, and even shows like The OC or Gossip Girl didn't just include sex; they revolved around it. It was raw, reckless, and everywhere. To be young was to be horny, dramatic, and misunderstood, and that was the point.

We saw sex being commercialized and commodified, normalizing it until it started to lose its edge. The shock wore off. The appeal dulled. And eventually, it became cringe. Not just to watch, but to perform. Passion onscreen feels like an overshare. Yearning feels naïve. We watch through squinted eyes and ironic detachment, like most other things. We mock sex scenes on Twitter. We fast-forward through them on streaming platforms. We say, "This could’ve been a montage."

As a result, screens have adjusted to our discomfort. We’re in a new era of aestheticized distance—where desire is coded, abstracted, or stripped down entirely. Romance is implied through glances or text messages, not declarations. Sex is offscreen or happens only once—often awkwardly—before the plot moves on. Even when it's portrayed, it’s often sanitized or stylized beyond recognition, a performance of intimacy rather than an experience of it.

This isn’t just about what we want to watch—it's about who we’ve become. We are living in a time of hyper-curation, where everything—from meals to outfits to feelings—must be publicly digestible. It’s not that people stopped falling in love. It’s that we stopped knowing how to show it without looking stupid. And film and TV—once the mirror to our desires—now reflect our discomfort with those desires back at us.

Even prestige TV, once the last bastion of messy, grown-up love, has shifted. The sex in shows like The Idol or Euphoria doesn’t signal connection anymore; it signals nihilism, trauma, and alienation. The love stories are bleak, fractured, and doomed from the start. If Gen X taught us that love is complicated, and millennials believed it could be salvaged through communication and therapy, Gen Z has taken it a step further—suggesting maybe love, as we knew it, was a lie all along.

And so, in this cultural vacuum, we crave something else—something cleaner, safer, and more manageable. Romance becomes wellness. Intimacy becomes content. Love becomes a soft aesthetic you can sell. Think #couplegoals on TikTok, engagement shoots in neutral palettes, or dating apps filtered through compatibility quizzes and brand alignment. We’re not chasing butterflies anymore—we're chasing balance.

But art doesn’t just reflect us—it shapes us. And as we collectively deprioritize mess and desire in our narratives, we slowly lose the muscle memory for it in real life. The pendulum has swung from raw to repressed, and we’re stuck somewhere in between—too burned by the past to romanticize it, too anxious about the future to desire anything real.

So when a show like Love Is Blind dares to depict something as uncool as sincerity—even clumsily—it startles us. Not because it’s revolutionary, but because it feels unfamiliar. The bar is low, and still, the attempt feels strangely moving. It reminds us that maybe romance isn’t dead—it's just dormant. Waiting for someone brave enough to look stupid.

So what are we left with?

If romance is cringe, and passion is problematic, and drama is manipulative, then what is love supposed to look like now?

That’s the question Love is Blind accidentally stumbled into this season. And maybe that’s why I found it oddly moving. Not because it was good—it wasn’t—but because it revealed how lost we are when it comes to love. How allergic we’ve become to sincerity. How confused we are about whether to chase chemistry or compatibility, chaos or comfort.

And is it any wonder? The modern dating landscape (on and off screen) encourages us to minimize risk at all costs. We ghost instead of confront. We swipe instead of pursue. We curate instead of confess. Romance, stripped of its messiness, becomes transactional—or worse, content.

We want to be loved, but only in the right way. With the right language. By the right kind of person. And definitely not in a way that could compromise their identity, their space, or their brand. Is it any wonder that romance feels like a distant dream?

We are a generation raised on rom-coms, traumatized by dating apps, and fed a steady diet of hot takes about emotional labour and attachment styles. We are simultaneously overexposed and under connected. We know how to talk about love—we just don’t know how to do it anymore.

So yes, this season was bland. But maybe that’s what made it radical. It showed us what happens when people come into an experiment with no real agenda other than trying—awkwardly, earnestly—to love someone. And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the future of romance doesn’t lie in the fireworks or the fame. Maybe it’s just two average people having a conversation, trying to be brave enough to care.

Love isn’t dead. But maybe we’ve made it impossible.