Who Makes the First Move Now?

Confidence is down, fear is up and making the first move has become rare

I can’t even blame men. I cannot even recall a time when I walked up to someone I liked. I’ve never thought in much detail about why I’ve not approached anyone, until I started my second term of this academic year. Sitting at the kitchen table after a night out with my friends, I found myself doing something uncharacteristic of myself and I decided to create a Hinge profile.

Why? I think for the first time, I was struck by the realisation that the belief “If it’s meant to happen, it will happen naturally and on its own,” was simply not true. As a 20 year old student, halfway through her second year of university, I had seldom experienced an interaction that could point to a potential relationship.

Even as I move closer to the age of 21, I realise that I am still young with a lot of life yet to live if my life turns out as it should. Yet, I still think that your late teens and early twenties are the years where you are meant to experience the disarray of youthful relationships. And that’s the problem: relationships aren’t messy anymore. They’re risk-free, rigid and reluctant instead of active, animated and amusing. People have the potential to meet in person but they choose to speak online because its easier. An internet-orientated generation makes for an incredibly shy one. As a result, the only way to make relationships happen is to either boldly step out into the open or play the game that everyone else is playing. I think a lot of people would find the ease of the latter far more appealing than the difficulty of the former. Avoiding vulnerability has made making the first move harder than ever.

Youth, Mental Health, and the Emptiness of Ambition

Moving away from romantic relationships for a moment, I’ve come to consider why young people nowadays suffer with such poor mental health. If you really observe the social interactions among the young adults of our day, you’ll realise that it does not need much consideration at all. Hashing out the idea in a single phone call with my friend, I was able to get to the root of the problem at hand.

I was talking about a poem that I wrote at the start of the year called Sad, and my friend asked me what the poem was about. One of the final lines in my poem was “It’s sad that you are unhappy when you have everything” and to me that encapsulates the poem’s meaning very well.

The poem reflects on the choice of young people to chase high-earning careers, often at the cost of personal meaning. This is mirrored in real life, where earning power dictates which subjects young people choose to study at university and online presence enables young people to understand and participate in the the ‘brain-rot’ culture of TikTok.

I am no advocate for doom-scrolling but I do recognise that social media platforms like TikTok are an embedded and, in some ways, valued part of our culture that should be managed rather than eradicated completely. However, I do believe that whether it’s career, education or social-media orientated, material success has the capacity to enable people to work towards self-serving ambitions.

Yes, you may have the best career but if you have no one around you to enjoy it with, you can be “unhappy” even “when you have everything.” A high-earning degree won’t matter if you don’t enjoy or truly believe in what you’re studying. I was telling my friend that it’s the emptiness in the shell of grand ambition that causes us to feel loneliness, as well as the absence of small risks, like making the first move toward another person. Couple that with the rise of the internet, where no one has to interact with each other anymore, we become a generation of introverts.

The Feminist Dilemma: Freedom Without Fulfilment?

Material success alone leaves so many of us feeling empty and alone. If this material success is seen as empowering, what does true empowerment look like for women? Is it simply achieving what is seen as traditionally masculine like careers and autonomy, or is it having the freedom to define success on our own terms, including love and family?

I think people who have been affected the most by material culture are women. What are women told today? They’re told to go to university, get a job and find success on their own terms. As someone who believes in granting women the same freedoms as men, I couldn’t agree more with encouraging women to better their education and career prospects.

Women who are educated, with thriving careers, are able to forge lives for themselves independently from the men around them. The agency that this gives women, is a freedom that is valuable and worth fighting for. Yet, recently, I think many people have come to realise that what the feminists of the past were fighting for was not education or careers for women in its strictest sense, but the ability for women to make their own decisions.

Yes, I think many women aspire to have good careers now that they have the freedom to be educated. However, I also think many women aspire to have healthy successful relationships and families that they can take care of. I would also say that even for the women who do aspire to have successful careers, meaningful relationships are also important to them.

In the past, women were socialised to be purely romantic and emotional beings but now, many women are being socialised to be purely hard workers. Whilst a diversity of beliefs and desires exist among women, I would say most reside in the middle of these two poles encasing the spectrum of ambition.

Women want to work hard and earn money but they also want to enter romantic relationships. Some still hope to see a man make the first move, while others wrestle with whether they should make it themselves. Yet, as women focus on their careers, they feel less inclined to initiate these romantic relationships and as men no longer initiate either, there’s a loneliness that develops. Women have the money and the success but not the relationships and the potential families that could come from it.

While feminism had evolved to empower women with more choices, I believe the next step is not to abandon those gains, but to seek a more balanced model. It is a difficult but necessary thing to do. Only when strength and vulnerability, ambition and intimacy coexist, can women find personal happiness in a material world.

Masculinity in Limbo

As the script is being rewritten for women, men are being stripped of old norms without being given new ones. The result is confusion over freedom. Men are told what not to be, but rarely shown what they can be instead. Without a model for healthy assertion, even making the the first move now feels uncertain.

Masculinity, too, is undergoing a quiet identity crisis. In terms the rise of technology and the internet, I think that the group that has been most significantly impacted is men.

Traditionally, men have expected to be assertive, emotionally reserved and the initiators in romantic interests. These traditions have been rightly challenged in the past since men who were assertive could often fall into the trap of being dominant men. Men who were emotionally reserved could often fall into the trap of being men with poor mental health, unable to communicate their troubles. Men who were the initiators of romantic interests could often fall into the trap of being predatory men.

All these traditional gendered expectations for men, could transform into traits of toxic masculinity, significantly impacting the lives of women. However, with nothing equally compelling taking the place of these traditional views, a void is being created that desires to be filled like water in osmosis.

Of course, a society where patriarchal control is dominant, is the last society I would want to live in. Nevertheless, I do believe that the fear of overstepping the fine line of emotional boundaries, has caused men to question all their actions, including those that could be considered socially acceptable.

The problem is, we now live in a world where the internet has the power to satiate all of your darkest desires and this is particularly concerning for men. My explanation for the rise of Andrew Tate on the internet, is very much related to this. Men who think that they now have to question all of their actions, can find a lot of solace in a figure like Tate, who believes patriarchal dominance acts as a net positive for society. More men will do the same if we don’t start teaching young boys what healthy, confident masculinity now looks like. Men will avoid the emotional risk of the first move, if they have no guidance on how not to develop a controlled and measured masculinity.

When both men and women hesitate to step forward, connections stall before they even begin.

The TikTok Generation and Performed Identity

So far, I’ve discussed the culture of hesitation in terms of heterosexual relationships but there is room to discuss it for relationships that exist outside this heteronormative experience.

Of course, I cannot personally account for homosexual relationships but I do see a dynamic evolving, especially in relationship to TikTok. I don’t wish to degrade the platform because I can see how progressive it is in many ways. It’s so easy to build communities on TikTok and the algorithm enables creators to reach audiences they would have not been able to reach otherwise.

This can prove to be beneficial for LGBTQ+ expression, by reaching like-minded audiences and encouraging openness and pride in diverse identities. However, whilst they may appear to be tools in the development of a more open society, TikTok and the majority of social media platforms often work as stages where identity is constantly performed, refined and consumed. Influencers putting pronouns or the relevant flags on their profiles may foster a sense of recognition but it could also encourage people to perform identity rather than inhabit it. To me, this makes me question whether social media is making a more open society or a more open virtual space.

Bios, usernames and captions can all be used to signal inclusivity but in day-to-day life, none of us walk around with signs above our heads saying what our pronouns are. When you apply online rules to the offline world, interactions can get reduced to a level of formality that inhibits genuine connection.

Whilst I would hate for anyone to maliciously misgender someone, I know that in order to be authentic, we need to embrace imperfection. Although dating apps like Hinge enable greater connection amongst members of the LGBTQ+ community, I think the internet has created the same level of reluctance to make the first move for heterosexual and non-heterosexual relationships alike.

Concluding on the Culture of Hesitation

So what does making the first move look like today? The more digitally fluent we become, the more emotionally tongue-tied we seem to grow. It’s not the case that we are short on tools to connect with one another. In fact, we know that we are drowning in them. The problem lies in our fear of vulnerability in this new world of ample opportunity. Creating that Hinge profile wasn’t just about meeting someone. For the first time, I realised that waiting passively, hoping things would “happen naturally,” wasn’t working anymore. And maybe that hesitation isn’t just mine. Women are taught to be independent but not always to initiate, whilst men are told to lead but now fear overstepping. Both genders are stepping away from outdated scripts with women following new ones and men following none at all. The LGBTQ+ community has found representation in social media, but remains equally introverted in the real world. So in the age of progressivism and the internet, we stall, waiting for each other to act first. Until we confront this cultural standstill, we’ll keep mistaking curated confidence for real connection, and self-preservation for strength. Maybe the issue doesn’t lie in who makes the first move. Maybe the real question is whether we’re brave enough to make the first move towards anything: connection, conversation, or vulnerability. Change starts with small acts of bravery: a message sent, a conversation started, a willingness to be seen.