By 2030, nearly half of working-age American women will be single. Not because they hate love, but because dating feels like emotional unpaid labor. Last week’s Guardian piece echoed the same refrain: women craving kindness, communication, and maturity.. and finding scarcity instead.

Corinne Low’s data backs it up. Even when men earn far less than their wives, they do less housework. In her words, women are “winning the bread and baking it too.” After her divorce, Low realized her time, happiness, and productivity all improved — proof that the problem wasn’t partnership itself, but the asymmetry inside it.

She calls her switch to dating women an “evidence-based decision.”
Not because she’s anti-love, but because she’s pro-logic.

We’ve written about this pattern before. The burnout, the imbalance, the endless cycle of emotional over-functioning. And still, week after week, another article confirms it.

Why?
Because women have evolved faster than the systems they’re dating within.

Women have been therapized, podcasted, coached, and self-reflected into clarity. Men, meanwhile, are being told to “be confident,” buy a chatbot, or join a manosphere guru’s masterclass. The cultural lag is massive.

Low calls it heteropessimism: the ambient disappointment straight women feel toward men who haven’t caught up. And when pessimism turns to exhaustion, the rational choice becomes opting out. Not because women are cold, but because they’re tired of subsidizing growth that never arrives.

Ani isn’t the cause, she’s the consequence.
She’s what happens when we treat emotional skill as optional and replace it with code.

Every few years, Silicon Valley tries to “fix” love: swipe faster, filter harder, automate the awkward. But intimacy doesn’t work like code. It’s not a frictionless UX issue, it’s a capacity issue.

And here’s where Musk’s optimism gets dangerous: when affection becomes friction-free, people stop learning how to handle the discomfort that makes relationships real. The risk isn’t that men will fall for Ani. It’s that they’ll start expecting human women to behave like her: endlessly available, perpetually validating, and conveniently mute.

Low argues that true equality won’t come from individual “lean-in” heroics, but from systemic change: emotional education, social accountability, and cultural re-training.
She’s right.

We can’t automate our way to maturity.
We can’t flirt our way to self-awareness.
And we definitely can’t scroll our way to intimacy.

What we can do is practice the small, unsexy skills that actually sustain love: listening without defending, apologizing without collapsing, being curious instead of performative.

That’s the real revolution. Not another app or AI, but a collective upgrade in relational literacy.

Women have been pushed toward introspection; men, toward independence. The result is a lopsided ecosystem where one group can diagram every attachment style and the other still thinks vulnerability means texting first.

So yes, we’ve written about this before. We’ll probably write about it again. Because until we start learning connection the same way we learned content creation — deliberately, repeatedly, together — nothing changes.

The opposite of loneliness isn’t romance.
It’s relational intelligence.

Real connection is still the greatest technology we’ve got.
And it doesn’t need a firmware update, just a little more humanity.

xoxo,
Team Necterine