Perhaps you’ve heard: Young people aren’t dating anymore. News media and social media are awash in commentary about the decline in youth romance. It’s visible in the corporate data, with dating-app engagement taking a hit. And it’s visible in the survey data, where the share of 12th graders who say they’ve dated has fallen from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s, with the decline particularly steep in the past few years.

Naturally, young people’s habits are catnip to news commentators. But although I consider the story of declining youth romance important, I don’t find it particularly mysterious. In my essay on the anti-social century, I reported that young people have retreated from all manner of physical-world relationships, whether because of smartphones, over-parenting, or a combination of factors. Compared with previous generations of teens, they have fewer friends, spend significantly less time with the friends they do have, attend fewer parties, and spend much more time alone. Romantic relationships theoretically imply a certain physicality; so it’s easy to imagine that the collapse of physical-world socializing for young people would involve the decline of romance.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.

People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.

A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things: friendship, love, sex, someone to gossip with, someone to remind you to take out the trash. But, practically speaking, Stone told me, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” Stone said. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.

In January, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published an analysis of the “relationship recession” that lent strong support to Stone’s theory. Contrary to the idea that declining fertility in the U.S. is mostly about happily childless DINKs (dual-income, no-kid couples), “the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest,” he observed. I asked Burn-Murdoch to share his analysis of Current Population Survey data so that I could take a closer look. What I found is that, in the past 40 years, coupling has declined more than twice as fast among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. This represents a dramatic historic inversion. In 1980, Americans ages 25 to 34 without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than college graduates to get married; today, it’s flipped, and the education gap in coupling is widening every year. Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage.

Contraception technology might also play a role. Before cheap birth control became widespread in the 1970s, sexual activity was generally yoked to commitment: It was a cultural norm for a man to marry a girl if he’d gotten her pregnant, and single parenthood was uncommon. But as the (married!) economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen observed in a famous 1996 paper, contraception helped disentangle sex and marriage. Couples could sleep together without any implicit promise to stay together. Ultimately, Akerlof and Yellen posit, the availability of contraception, which gave women the tools to control the number and the timing of their kids, decimated the tradition of shotgun marriages, and therefore contributed to an increase in children born to low-income single parents.

The theory that the relationship recession is driven by young men falling behind seems to hold up in the U.S. But what about around the world? Rates of coupling are declining throughout Europe, as well. In England and Wales, the marriage rate for people under 30 has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990.

And it’s not just Europe. The gender researcher Alice Evans has shown that coupling is down just about everywhere. In Iran, annual marriages plummeted by 40 percent in 10 years. Some Islamic authorities blame Western values and social media for the shift. They might have a point. When women are exposed to more Western media, Evans argues, their life expectations expand. Fitted with TikTok and Instagram and other windows into Western culture, young women around the world can seek the independence of a career over the codependency (or, worse, the outright loss of freedom) that might come with marriage in their own country. Social media, a woman veterinarian in Tehran told the Financial Times, also glamorizes the single life “by showing how unmarried people lead carefree and successful lives … People keep comparing their partners to mostly fake idols on social platforms.”

[Read: The happiness trinity]

According to Evans, several trends are driving this global decline in coupling. Smartphones and social media may have narrowed many young people’s lives, pinning them to their couches and bedrooms. But they’ve also opened women’s minds to the possibility of professional and personal development. When men fail to support their dreams, relationships fail to flourish, and the sexes drift apart.

If I had to sum up this big messy story in a sentence, it would be this: Coupling is declining around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall; this combination is subverting the traditional role of straight marriage, in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.

So why does all this matter? Two of the more urgent sociological narratives of this moment are declining fertility and rising unhappiness. The relationship recession makes contact with both. First, marriage and fertility are tightly interconnected. Unsurprisingly, one of the strongest predictors of declining fertility around the world is declining coupling rates, as Burn-Murdoch has written. Second, marriage is strongly associated with happiness. According to General Social Survey data, Americans’ self-described life satisfaction has been decreasing for decades. In a 2023 analysis of the GSS data, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman concluded that marriage was more correlated with this measure of happiness than any other variable he considered, including income. (As Stone would rush to point out here, marriage itself is correlated with income.)

The social crisis of our time is not just that Americans are more socially isolated than ever, but also that social isolation is rising alongside romantic isolation, as the economic and cultural trajectories of men and women move in opposite directions. And, perhaps most troubling, the Americans with the least financial wealth also seem to have the least “social wealth,” so to speak. It is the poor, who might especially need the support of friends and partners, who have the fewest close friends and the fewest long-term partners. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy the things that buy happiness.

To judge by the shelves of America’s vice merchants, the nation is in the grips of a whipped-cream frenzy. Walk into any vape store or sex shop, and you’ll find canisters of nitrous oxide showcased in window displays—ostensibly to catch the eye of bakers and baristas, who use the gas to aerate creams and foams. At the bodega near my apartment, boxes of up to 100 mini-canisters are piled up to eye level, next to Baby Yoda bongs.

In fact, culinary professionals generally don’t shop for equipment at stores with names like Puff N Stuff or Condom Sense. The true clientele inhales the gas to get high. A dangerous and technically illegal drug, nitrous oxide is widely available as long as everyone pretends it’s destined for use as a food product. Indeed, a whole industry appears to have built its business model around exploiting this loophole. Large distributors brand and flavor nitrous in ways that attract young inhalers, stock it with retailers catering to other vices, and sell it in quantities that are implausible for culinary use but ideal for huffing. The gas can even be ordered from Walmart, Amazon, and eBay. Without meaningful regulation, getting high on nitrous will remain as convenient as picking up a bag of chips.

Nitrous oxide has been recreationally inhaled since the 1800s. It induces a euphoric head rush and tingling in the user’s fingers and toes, often followed by giddy laughter. Almost as soon as it starts, it’s over. The effects of a single hit typically last for less than a minute.

The modern version of the drug, known colloquially as a “whippet” or “whip-it,” has recently climbed the youth-popularity ranks. (These products are distinct from the Reddi-Wip cans found at the supermarket, which contain cream and nitrous oxide together. The canisters proliferating now contain the gas alone.) Although pandemic-era lockdown protocols hampered illicit drugs’ supply chains, nitrous oxide remained broadly available by comparison. In 2018, about 12.5 million Americans over age 12 reported having ever used it, a number that rose to nearly 14 million in 2022. Social media is full of clips of young people ripping hits before falling on their faces (so much so that TikTok eventually banned nitrous-related search terms). Fans of the drug have created gas-tank accessories in the video game Roblox; one rapper’s song “Whippet” features him and his entourage ripping hits of nitrous from tanks tucked in their waistbands between verses. A recent Columbia graduate told me that, back in college, one friend’s birthday party featured a salad bowl “full to the brim” with used nitrous canisters. (He spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss illegal drug use.)

[Malcolm Ferguson: Marijuana is too strong now]

As you might imagine, depriving your brain of oxygen in favor of laughing gas is not wise. Heavy nitrous users can suffer severe health consequences, including, occasionally, death. Varun Vohra, an emergency-medicine professor at Wayne State University, in Detroit, told me that heavy users experience symptoms including irregular walking, bodily weakness, and severe limb pain. (Nitrous-oxide-related emergency-room visits in Michigan more than doubled from 2022 to 2023.) Inhaling the gas deactivates vitamin B12, which harms nerves in the brain and the spinal cord. Among chronic users, this can eventually induce paralysis. Users also report depression, anxiety, mood swings, and even hallucination. A senior at Tulane University, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that he’d quit the drug after one night when he took a deep inhale and blacked out. He awoke on the floor a few seconds later, unable to remember what had happened; his friends told him he’d had a seizure.

Perhaps the greatest danger arises from what people do while huffing the drug. Ed Scott, a city-council member in Rialto, California, told me that his son, Myles, died in a car accident after his friend inhaled the gas while driving and passed out at the wheel. This inspired Scott to investigate the drug’s use in California. He told me that he found many other fatal car accidents in which nitrous-oxide products were discovered at crash sites but police—who thought they were helium cannisters—did not register the crashes as DUIs.

Given the health and safety risks, the sale and use of nitrous oxide for recreational purposes is technically illegal. The key word here is technically. Businesses can generally get away with selling nitrous oxide over the counter as long as they say it’s for culinary use—and pretend not to know what customers are really doing with it. (Some states prohibit sales to anyone under 21 or 18.) If, that is, they even bother pretending. The Tulane senior told me that the clerks at his local smoke shop greeted him with shouts of “whip-it boy!” when he visited to restock.

A major industry has grown out of the regulatory vacuum. In 2020, Marissa Politte’s family sued United Brands, the Silicon Valley–based company that distributes the brand Whip-It!, after she was killed by an unconscious nitrous-huffing driver. Documents revealed by the lawsuit suggest that the players involved know they’re benefiting from a legal loophole. A former warehouse employee estimated that three-quarters of United Brands’ customers were smoke shops, not bakeries or cafés. The client list named retailers including Mary Jane’z Novelties, Herban Legend Smoke Shop, Smoke 420, and Precious Slut 1. In a seven-year span, documents show, the company sold about 52,000 “chargers,” or miniature nitrous capsules, to Kaldi’s Coffee—and more than 1 million to the It’s A Dream smoke shop.

Internal emails between United Brands and retailers, uncovered by the lawsuit, suggest a certain cynicism around legal compliance. One United Brands employee emailed a retailer requesting that the Whip-It! chargers “are used properly and legally.” The retailer responded: “yah man we know the deal we put a disclaimer… you know we all got to cover our asses, better safe than sorry.” (United Brands did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Meanwhile, many other companies market nitrous in ways that seem conspicuously ill-tailored to professional pastry chefs. A variety of gas tanks are sold with names that evoke marijuana strains, not whipped cream—Monster Gas (slogan: “Become easy, Become happy!”), Hippie Whippy, Baking Bad, Cosmic Gas—and in flavors such as mango smoothie and tropical punch. Colorful labels feature fruits, unicorns, women in bathing suits, or sports cars. (Hervé Malivert, the director of culinary affairs at the Institute of Culinary Education, told me that many food professionals are loyal to iSi chargers, which they order from the company’s website—not at a gas station. Malivert said he has never heard of a chef using flavored gas or gas tanks.)

One of the most prominent nitrous companies is Galaxy Gas, which was founded in 2021 by three brothers who ran Cloud 9, an Atlanta-based smoke-shop chain. A Cloud 9 executive told New York magazine that Galaxy Gas at one time made up nearly 30 percent of all nitrous sales nationwide. Asked by CBS to explain why anyone would need to buy a tank with enough nitrous oxide to make thousands of servings of whipped cream, a Galaxy Gas spokesperson claimed that the product was for customers seeking an “erotic culinary lubricant.” (The company’s rising profile in the world of whip-its has brought legal scrutiny. According to New York, its trademark was recently sold for $1 to a newly registered corporate owner, and it has paused direct sales. Galaxy Gas did not respond to requests for comment.)

[Mike Riggs: Congress accidentally legalized weed six years ago]

In response to the spread of nitrous-oxide use, states and the federal government have begun taking steps toward more effective regulation. The most notable example is Louisiana, where the drug used to be outlawed only if sold for the purpose of being inhaled. Legislation enacted last May made its sale presumptively illegal, with carveouts for genuine industrial and culinary use. Jeanette Brick, the president of iSi North America, told me that her company does not oppose the Louisiana law. “These laws are intended to prevent misuse, and they have not negatively impacted our ability to serve the culinary community in the state,” she said in an email. She also noted that “iSi does not sell large tanks of nitrous oxide, as they have no culinary application and are increasingly associated with misuse. We strongly advocate for additional restrictions on these large tanks to help curb their growing misuse among teenagers.”   

Outside Louisiana, however, legislative efforts have yet to deliver significant change. In 2017, for example, then–California State Senator Jim Nielsen proposed a bill to ban nitrous-oxide sales in stores selling tobacco or tobacco-related products. Industry lobbyists opposed the bill, and it eventually failed to pass.

In the absence of effective regulation, litigation has emerged as the best tool to achieve accountability. In 2023, a Missouri jury found United Brands liable for conspiring to sell nitrous oxide as a drug. The company was ordered to pay $720 million to Marissa Politte’s family for her wrongful death. The novel jury verdict and the large court-mandated payout might set a lasting precedent. “You have companies whose full-time scheme it is to pour this stuff onto our streets,” Johnny Simon, the Politte family’s attorney, told me. “That’s who we need to go after.”

Still, case-by-case litigation can push only so hard against countervailing market forces. Nor should it have to, when the blueprint for lifesaving regulation exists. Had something like Nielsen’s California bill been federal law in 2020, Politte might still be alive. The driver who killed her bought his nitrous oxide from a smoke shop.