So you’re looking for a change. You go online, start swiping. Good lighting, flattering angles — it’s hard to tell who’s sexed up their pictures. But you’ve been on the market for a while now — you can spy when they’re trying to sell you a dream. You ping off a few messages, putting your best foot forward: non-smoker, no children, secure job… you begin to build a faux rapport with some of them, signalling that while you’re keen to see what’s on offer, you’re not desperate. When you arrive in their flat, things go well; suddenly, you feel a rush of urgency, a compulsion to lock things down. After all, London’s a cesspit; you won’t find much better out there, and time is running out. You go a little further than you might have done — maybe it’ll convince them to go exclusive.
Welcome to renting in 2025. What did you think I was talking about?
The perils of modern dating are well documented, but the concurrent battle for housing — the uncanny tonal similarities, the vibe of existential uncertainty — is little discussed. For those between 25 and 34 — that Gen Z/Millennial crop now looking, in many ways, to settle down — the confluence of these twin concerns is not news. This group makes up a third of the UK rental pool; in the capital, the average age of the renter is rising. If the analogy of renting and dating is indulged a little, then marriage would be the logical equivalent of buying. The data here is what you’d expect, with the number of unmarried couples in Britain in the 25-35 age bracket doubling between 1991 and 2021.
The cost and uncertainty of the housing market is often cited as the keystone in the collapsing birth rate, a more sensible analysis, in my view, than blaming social vogues (or feminism) alone. It is understandable that couples looking to start a family would wait to first cobble together a deposit; it must be frightening to think of the site of your baby’s first few years being at the whim of a landlord, with creeping rents which threaten to outstrip pay rises. The marital custom of house then kids also makes financial sense: having children is expensive, so getting your ducks in a row by prioritising a mortgage seems prudent. In this sense, falling birth rates is a policy failure — an unchecked housing system which has doomed Millennials to the status of tenant is a direct cause. But what of dating?
The game of seduction, in both the rental and romantic sense, has become more miserably cynical in recent years. Both are subject to a scarcity mindset; both have moved almost exclusively online. This was intended to provide the “customer” with a bounty of choice and customisation — will I filter for a garden, or a dishwasher, or a brunette? — but the reality is a sense of fraught competitiveness. In London in particular, the restless urgency is exhausting.
I suspect Boomers forget, or have little sympathy for, how soul-destroying it is to queue up for viewings with your begging bowl, gazumping other young professionals with ever-higher security deposits, lugging your worldly possessions across the city to a borough you’ve never been to when your last landlord unexpectedly hikes the rent out of your price range. It is disconcerting, unnatural even, to form attachments to a street — even to get to know the shopkeepers, the barmaids, the postman — only to be booted into a different postcode a year on. Similarly, dating apps engender a dread of insecurity: it is peopled by the romantically homeless, sofa-surfing and subletting hearts in empty situationships. Settling down young is not, in a romantic sense at least, something my crowd has ever aspired to — but the alternative, the promised sexual freedom, takes its toll.
In both scenarios, the true villain is the timewaster; estate agents, like daters, have been known to ghost would-be tenants when a better offer comes along, while triggering the break clause is the instinctive get-out for bad Hingers (“we met on an app; you didn’t think it was serious, did you?”). Recently, my estate agent held a series of viewings in my flat; it occurred to me how similar that initial look-around really is to a first date. I watched as bashful viewers dutifully took their shoes off, gave the right compliments, asked tactical questions — do you get much noise?; do you get used to the stairs? — only to scurry off, as I have done after many a viewing and many a date, and debrief with a friend. Bit cramped, they say; definitely lied about his height. Needs doing up.
What does this grand theory amount to? The fate of daters and renters in modern Britain really boils down to one thing: casualisation. I don’t believe young people desire marriage any less than they desire home ownership; while there is less social pressure, and certainly less religious imperative for wedlock, the fact remains that my generation has been conditioned to expect uncertainty and insecurity by an array of economic factors which have shaped a lifestyle of casual impermanence. A buoyant, optimistic generation — like our parents’ — is one that comes of age both socially and financially confident, which knows ease and ambition, and for whom the trappings of adulthood (a spouse, a car, a home) are not just appealing but within reach. Can we say the same for young people today?
If those trappings are less fashionable among Gen Z, it is because we have been weaned on post-2008 bohemianism: the further into my twenties I get, the more I realise that the lifestyle we have been taught to accept as cool — bouncing around different living situations, gliding from mouldy flat to ketamine-dusted warehouse to freezing-cold houseboat, all the while jumping from lover to lover too — is in fact “cope”. Nobody wants this. Our generation was promised a lifestyle of choice; what it got was instability; our low-low expectations of dating are coloured by our expectations of how we have to live, the dire roommates we have to endure, the grim proximity to grimmer neighbours. We are used to being buffeted around, at the mercy of a hostile market, told to accept imperfection at great expense.
A perceptive joke flying about social media at the moment is that we are seeing the return of “recession indicators”. The theory goes that the return of Millennial pop culture — its fashion, its TV, its heavily filtered selfies — heralds an impending economic collapse. This month Trump’s tariffs threatened to plunge America and its trading partners into recession; the return of 2008’s economic headwinds seems less and less a joke. But I predict a stranger consequence of the return of Credit Crunch mores: a doubling down on its depressing romantic values, the injection of even more uncertainty, casualness and insecurity into the dating world, an even darker cloud of pessimism sailing over pub tables as Hinge voyagers steel themselves for summer. The consequence of miserable economics is miserable daters: romantic paralysis is the result of a culture in which commitment is framed as a luxury. Having the means to settle down, the confidence and security, seems almost quaint now — an echo of a different time. Nothing, and nobody, belongs to us. We are the recession-era precariat, and our sex lives suck.
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