Why isn't the most liberated generation having sex?

I’m a 27-year-old on all the apps. To be safe, I go into every bookstore, slide books off the shelves, and peek through the opening between Normal People and Americanah ready to lock eyes with my forever beau. But it seems all the would-be husbands have been left functionally castrated by porn addictions, or slaving away at a 9-to-5 trying to pay for a tiny apartment, or too distracted by bio-hacking and Reddit boards to go on a date.

By the time my parents were my age, so the meme goes, they had a house and two kids. A lot of men in my generation aren’t even having sex.

One of those men is Shane. Shane, 20, is a junior at Penn State studying economics. He comes from a happy family and says he’s never had trouble making friends. And yet he can’t seem to bring himself to create profiles on the dating apps he downloaded months ago. That’s because he’s never had sex.

“I want a relationship, I don’t want to be a loner anymore,” he told me. But Shane is convinced that he’s not good enough. Specifically, he’s not good enough on the measures that dating apps cull for. He’s short, for one. So Shane’s been calorie counting, protein tracking, and lifting compulsively for about two years in the hopes of achieving the ideal body type: lean and fit. He reads Reddit’s relationship boards to get a sense of what women complain about—bad sex, manners, politics, hygiene, and overbearing in-laws, to name a few—to see how he can be the best date when he finally works up the courage.

“A lot of my anxiety ties back to the openness and honesty that people have on the internet,” he says. “It shows me that there is a lot to be worried about. People aren’t so forgiving all the time.”