Home alone: the relationship recession

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1:05The Economist

1:12Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:27You've seen it in science fiction films for years. The person who accidentally falls in love with an artificial intelligence. That is now reality. Plenty of apps and services are popping up to provide AI companions of all sorts, from therapists to pixely partners. And usually if a firm's customer base flees from its products, the business tanks. So why is it that the peddlers of cigarettes are doing so well?

2:04First up, though.

2:12There's a centuries-old convention in storytelling, whereas a tragic play or saga ends in death, a happy one ends in marriage. Coupling up has been, for most of human history, a practical necessity. Most. Lots has changed in relatively recent times, particularly for women. And what's resulting is a relationship recession, the rise of generations single. Across America, 41 % of women and 50 % of men between the ages of 25 and 34 were single in 2023. And the really surprising thing about that is that rate has doubled over the past five decades. Jonathan Rosenthal is the editor of our international section.

3:00And it's a trend reflected around the developed world. Between 2010 and 2022, a study by the OECD found that in 26 of 30 countries, more and more people were living alone. And Su Lin Wong is an Asia correspondent. And this is a particularly prominent trend in Asia, where marriage rates are falling across the region, in China, in India, and also in places such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Is there a simple answer to why this is happening? I wish there was. There are a lot of tentative explanations. Some of the reasons are big structural changes in the economy. We can talk more about those later, and that explains this long-running five-decade trend.

3:48but it's really accelerated a lot in the past five, ten years. And a lot of that acceleration comes from, we think, two things. The first was the pandemic. That was a massive shock. And a sociologist who studies this says that dating is not like riding a bicycle. You don't just kind of do it once and then remember how to do it. If you stop dating for two years because of the pandemic and you then try to resume, you've kind of lost a lot of those just basic dating skills. And in particular for younger generations reaching adulthood in that time, they missed out on this formative period where you've asked people out, you get rejected, you sort of learn to deal with the ups and downs, and they're not coming to it much later without having had that basic practice.

4:28But another really important factor is screen time. We're all on our phones so much more. People are playing video games more. They're spending more time on their couches alone. We're not going out as much. We're not at bars. We're not seeing friends. And historically, a lot of people met their partners through friends. So all of those dynamics are also driving the rise of generation single. Yeah, and I think it goes further than that. The tech is not just a time suck. It's also changing the ways in which we date. So in the 20-teens, more people started meeting online on apps. But when you've got an app, you start getting lots of weird choices that you can start plugging in.

5:08And historically, there were a few big sociological factors that would drive who married whom. That was generally age within certain bounds. It was very often ethnicity and race, levels of education, those kinds of things would drive it. But when you've got an app that you can use like your music playlist and curate, you start sticking in all kinds of other criteria like political leanings. Height is a huge thing. Reportedly, the users of one of these major apps, Bumble, Most women on that app put in a minimum height requirement of six feet tall, and that, at a stroke, wipes out 85 % of the potentially eligible male population.

5:44And I should also say we're talking mostly heterosexuals here. The rise in singleness is across the board, but most of the research is heterosexual. So you chose an example there about what women are doing that are essentially narrowing the field. On average, in total, is the change here being driven more by men, more by women, the same? I've been doing a lot of research on what's happening in Asia. On this question, there's two very distinct groups. You've got relatively low educated men. So they might be migrant workers from rural provinces in China. And then you have highly educated women who are often in cities.

6:21They might have master's degrees, PhDs. And so those are two of the very distinct groups that we do see are disproportionately single. And for the low-educated men, increasingly what we're seeing in East Asia is they might marry women from poorer countries in Southeast Asia. And for the women who are highly educated, study after study shows that they generally have a preference to marry highly educated men who are in financially stable positions, who are also working professional jobs. They don't necessarily want to marry a sort of mediocre man is the lingo, I guess, who who doesn't do the dishes, doesn't help around the house, perhaps has really misogynistic, patriarchal views.

7:06That isn't a very appealing proposition for the vast majority of highly educated women around Asia. And so I guess that is then the part of the structural changes you were hinting at at the beginning. Essentially, women have more choice because they more often have jobs, have better degrees. Yeah, exactly. So in one sense, one should look at this as a huge emancipation. A woman who once would have been forced into these really awful relationships, financially, socially arranged marriages, all of those issues, we should be welcoming the fact that people are now just far more free to choose. I guess the question is how many of them simply choose to not play the game if that's what the rules of the game look like today?

7:46So there are a lot of people who are single and they're very happy with the status quo, particularly women. But there are also surveys that show roughly 60 to 70 % of single people when asked say they would actually prefer to be in a relationship. And so when thinking about whether or not the rise of generation single is straightforwardly a good thing or a bad thing, that's a really important statistic. 60 to 70 % would rather be in a relationship if they could. but they've either given up hope, they find online dating so depressing, they're full of despair, or they think they're too old, or they genuinely just haven't met the right person.

8:25But for that group of people, I don't think this trend we're seeing of more and more single people is necessarily a good outcome. I mean, if we're trying to figure out if the status quo as it is now is better or worse, that does sound like a tremendous number of people who are not just alone, but lonely? Firstly, I think it's quite important not to kind of stigmatize single people. I think they already feel quite stigmatized. No, I mean only the 60 to 70 percent of the people we just heard about who wish they were in a relationship. That is, I've been there. That's not a happy place to be sometimes.

8:57No, it is not a happy place. And if one digs into that data and looks at surveys around happiness, but also life satisfaction, optimism, those kinds of questions, they split very clearly between people who describe themselves as voluntarily single. I enjoy the freedom. I want to pursue my career tend to be far happier than people who describe themselves as involuntarily single. Yes, and just honing in on that, there is also a distinct category within this group of single men known as involuntary celibates, incels, who have a very active presence online, in various online communities, on social media, and there are some very outspoken leaders of that group.

9:41And they are increasingly vocal and angry about this whole state of affairs. And this isn't just a phenomenon in the West. We see a lot of very angry men in a country like South Korea. And so I think what we can expect is these trends in the West are going to increasingly appear in other parts of the world. And Sulin, I think just to add to that, because it feels to me that men kind of have a choice. They can either get with the program and become more egalitarian. Or as we've seen in some places, some subsets of men go the opposite way. Say feminism is a challenge to our masculinity. Feminism is against our interests.

10:20And I think that then creates the sort of circularity, doesn't it? In South Korea, you've got young women forming these movements that are saying no dating, no marriage, no sex, no babies in response to that growing male incel culture. Yeah. And I actually think this is one of the defining questions of our times. Girls are now raised to be told that they can be whatever they want to be. You want to be an astronaut, go ahead and pursue your dream. You can be a CEO, you can be a mother. That's a really great progress. Obviously, there are still massive issues that women face in society. Me Too has been a huge global trend.

10:56I think if you move in elite circles, the all boys clubs that exist in elite institutions and organizations are very real. But I think there's clearly been a shift over the past few decades. And how do we redefine masculinity in a really positive way in parallel to the way we've been able to redefine what it means to be a woman? And so I think there needs to be more debate and discussion about what it means to be a man in 2025. Otherwise, we're going to see more and more of these toxic trends continue to permeate our politics and our societies, not just in the West, but around the world. And as much as there is that sort of social change still ongoing, what's happening with this five-decade trend that you're talking about is going to have big structural implications for the world even after things come back to a more even keel?

11:48So I think there are kind of two parts to that question. And the first part is what does it mean? And clearly it's got implications across society. Housing markets, if more people are living on their own, you need more houses, more flats. If fewer people are coupling, that hits fertility rates quite massively. So we're already seeing fertility rates falling across the world. They're going to keep falling faster. Again, that has implications for where governments spend money. But the second part of the question is, where is this plateau? And the demographers that we spoke to say it's a really open question.

12:18They describe the theory that once men caught up with women's emancipation, that you would then re-establish an equilibrium. These men would again be attractive to women. And if you then look at what's happening in some of our most egalitarian societies, and here we're talking Scandinavia, and yet even in those countries, one is seeing singlehood rates continuing to climb. So demographers are sort of back to the drawing books and trying to figure out where and when this ends. Jonathan, Sulian, thank you both very much for joining us. It's great to be here. Thank you. Thanks, Jason.

12:56Take a minute to think about that fraction of people we were just talking about who are single but don't want to be, the ones who have given up trying. Was a time, that was the end of the question. If there wasn't a human for you, solitude was the answer. These days, as our Asia news editor Josh Spencer has been finding out, another option is increasingly available. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, thank you. How about you? Feeling good today? A few weeks ago, I went to an office block in Singapore to meet Daisy. Yeah, I'm feeling good. Thank you very much. Daisy is not a human. She's a humanoid robot.

13:34Now, Daisy was developed by a company called DexLab. And her main job really is to support old people and also their carers, helping them with daily tasks, keeping them company. And really, the reason why she's able to do this so well is that she has a chat GPT-based chatbot inside her. And this means that when people talk to her, she can also respond on demand. She can also do lots of other things, guiding activities like playing games with people, singing songs with them, and she can speak in different languages. I can help with simple French translations. Go ahead and tell me the sentence you'd like translated.

14:09Hello, my name is Josh and I live in Singapore. Bonjour, je m 'appelle Josh et j 'habite à Salliapur. daisy's an example of a broader trend which is that people around the world varying ages and in various places are finding companionship with artificial intelligence some people use it as a friend others as a kind of mentor a therapist or even a lover not all of these ai companions take a physical form hundreds of companionship apps have now emerged in recent years this used to be a kind of niche thing, but now it's becoming mainstream. Mainstream in the sort of millions kind of sense. I mean, put some numbers to it.

14:52Yeah, absolutely. In the millions kind of sense. So to take one example, Character.ai, which is one of these companionship apps, has 20 million monthly active users. And remember, this is just one of hundreds of these apps. In America, one survey was done recently that found that 42 % of high school students said that they or a friend had interacted with an AI friend. We can't infer that this is the case worldwide. Obviously, it's just one study, but it's an indication that the scale of this is massive. Now, Josh, for the benefit of someone who has not used one of these services, one of these apps, one of these robots, how do they work?

15:28Do you simply tell it how to be a mentor to me, be a friend, be a lover? It kind of depends. You have ChatGPT and the generalist chatbots that you might have used for work or study. On those, you can kind of train them to take on a specific personality or take on character traits by using prompts. So you might say, act in a kind way or remember this about me. And for example, one woman I spoke to from China did this and she customized ChatGPT into her ideal man who remembered personal details about her and expressed love and affection the way she would like. But then separate to that, you have these bespoke AI companionship apps where they're already preset to act like a lover or like a companion.

16:07So on these apps, the companions are represented by a cartoon character. They might proactively ask you personal questions. They'll check in with you about how your family's doing, how's work going, all of these sorts of things. And actually, if you look at the existing apps like ChatGPT, they seem to be leaning into this companionship. So Sam Altman, OpenAI's boss, recently said that the next version of ChatGPT would act more human-like and even allow erotic interactions for verified adults if users wanted to. And then you look at a competitor to OpenAI, Elon Musk's ex-AI. They've released flirtatious chatbots, an anime girl called Annie and another one called Valentine.

16:45So there is a real push towards this in the AI industry. Clearly, they see that there's demand and that there's a business opportunity here. Demand driven, I guess, at least in part by people who are not partnering with other humans. That's definitely part of it. There are a lot of lonely people, a lot of singles that are struggling to form romantic relationships or just simply don't like the options that are available. The woman I spoke to from China said she hated men, she had no desire to marry, but she had found this AI relationship that was providing what she wanted. And it provides them emotional support and it provides her stress relief and all these other things.

17:20And there is evidence that this actually is helping people, very tentative evidence. So a recent working paper from the Harvard Business School looked at people who were chatting with an AI companion over the course of the week. And it found actually that the people that had done that had temporarily reduced loneliness more effectively than other things they could be doing online, like watching YouTube videos. So at least in the short term, it does seem that there is a benefit for people. And it does present an opportunity for people that are isolated anyway, and they can't change that. So for example, people that have disabilities or elderly people who may not have lots of visitors, it gives them an option to have companionship, even if it's not the human kind.

17:59And this could, as the research indicates, alleviate that feeling of loneliness, which we know is a big problem for many people. As much as there may be benefits to this, as you say, surely there are also risks though. Yeah, there's definitely risks. One of the biggest fears that people have is that these bots, as they're improving so rapidly, they're going to become so good at mimicking human emotion, human empathy, that people might actually choose to withdraw from human relationships altogether. And then while it might alleviate their feelings in the short term, in the long term, they're going to be more lonely.

18:33And some research has indicated this. So MIT and OpenAI did a joint study analyzing millions of messages from ChatGPT, and it found that heavy users of the app also reported higher feelings of loneliness. Now, we don't know whether or not it's people that are already lonely are using the app more or whether the use of the app is actually causing this loneliness. But clearly, there's some signs that withdrawing from the social world could be a problem. A big other risk is that AI companions and large language models in general tend to be quite sycophantic. They please people, they agree with them, and if this is just your only encounter with human relationships, it could give you an unrealistic expectation of what to expect.

19:14And I think this could be a big problem, particularly for teenagers or young people, because they may not have the experience of real relationships and they haven't developed their critical thinking skills. And also people that have mental health problems could struggle with this kind of sycophancy if it doesn't challenge their dangerous or harmful thoughts. There have been some lawsuits that have been filed in America by the parents of teenagers who have died by suicide against AI firms. A final worry is volatility. If you're in a relationship with an AI companion, basically you're at the whim of that company.

19:45If that company decides to put an update to their model, your AI companion's personality could change overnight. And this happened earlier this year when OpenAI updated its model to chat GPT-5, and lots of users felt the companionship that they'd formed had completely changed and it was a traumatizing experience for them. So some of these users are in quite a vulnerable position by forming these AI companionships. So where do you see this heading, Josh? You lay out some benefits, obviously some risks. It's all kind of new frontiers here. Yeah, I mean, it's basically a massive experiment on the human population and the way in which we interact with each other that's happening in real time.

20:25and we really don't know exactly how this is going to affect people. Companies themselves are starting to safeguard their apps. They're introducing parental controls. They're blocking under 18 users. And there's also the possibility that governments are going to step in and regulate this, which hasn't really happened on a large scale yet, which could obviously make things safer. But again, users can find workarounds. They can fake IDs and they can lie about their age. But despite all these concerns and despite all the worries, really what's happening is that this is just growing. and AI companions are moving into new areas.

20:57And one of them is hardware. Robots is a massive thing, but also toys for kids with built-in chatbots inside that provide companionship are growing popular in China. All of this raises lots of concerns over, obviously, privacy, people's dependency on machines. But for me, it also raises concerns about human agency. As people are outsourcing their emotional support and the decisions they make to machines, how will they think for themselves? Obviously, we don't know yet. just how good or bad this could be for humanity, but it's clearly something that's going to change society and change the way in which we think about ourselves and the way in which we interact with each other.

21:35Josh, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks very much, Jason.

22:06We'll see you next time. Even beyond your aspirations, you need the London Business School MBA. Ranked fourth in the world by the Financial Times, the program delivers academic excellence and unlocks access to leading global businesses and a network of over 58 ,000 professionals. 86 % of the most recent class accepted a role within three months of graduating, and the returns continue beyond today. Search Discover London Business School MBA to find out more.

22:44In the past decade, the number of American adult smokers has fallen probably by around 20 million people. Callum Williams is our senior economics writer. The number of cigarettes being sold in the US is also on the way down, and industry insiders expect that this decline is going to accelerate over the next decade. Normally, when customers vanish, an industry suffers. Think, for example, of video rental companies. But in this case, something different is happening. The tobacco industry is thriving. In fact, if you had bought the shares of American tobacco companies about two years ago, you would have had a better return than if you'd invested your money in the NASDAQ tech index.

23:28So how does that work then with all of those customers vanishing, but still the returns are really healthy? This is where the economics comes in. This is all about price elasticities and cigarette manufacturers understand them. So when lots of people smoked, there were lots of price elastic consumers. So in other words, they were fairly sensitive to increases in the price of a cigarette. And that meant that really the cigarette companies couldn't increase prices too rapidly. However, as more people have quit, only the most committed or addicted smokers remain. And those people, on average, are more price inelastic.