So what happened back home? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
A Western man born in 1965 entered adulthood in a very different social world from the one he inhabits today. That doesn't mean the 1980s were some lost golden age of happy marriages, obedient children and perfectly ironed shirts. They weren't. But the rules around work, family, sex, marriage and gender were different — and over the course of one adult lifetime, many of them changed dramatically.
For most of history, marriage was never only about romance. It was also an economic arrangement, a family structure, a way of raising children, dividing labour, securing property and surviving old age. That mattered particularly for women. As they gained greater access to education, careers, their own income, contraception and legal rights, the practical necessity of finding and remaining with a male provider declined. In much of the West, this was one of the great social transformations of the twentieth century — and overwhelmingly, an expansion of freedom.
A woman who can support herself has more freedom to leave a bad marriage. A woman who controls her own fertility has more freedom to decide whether and when to have children. A woman with her own career, bank account and legal protection doesn't need to choose a husband because the alternative is economic insecurity. Those are achievements, not problems to be solved.
But major social changes rarely alter only one side of an equation. If women no longer need men in the same ways they once did, then men also have to work out what being a husband, partner or provider means in a society where provision alone is no longer enough. That sounds obvious now. It was not obvious while millions of people were living through the transition.
Marriage changed too. Across much of the developed world, people marry later than previous generations did. Cohabitation without marriage became ordinary. Divorce became more socially acceptable and, in many places, legally easier. Parenthood increasingly became something people could separate from marriage, and staying single into one's thirties, forties or beyond stopped raising many eyebrows. In other words, the old conveyor belt — school, job, marriage, children, mortgage, retirement — developed quite a few exits. That gave people choices their grandparents often didn't have. It also made relationships more voluntary. And voluntary relationships come with a rather demanding condition: both people have to keep wanting to be there.
A husband can no longer assume that earning the household income makes him automatically indispensable. A wife is no longer expected to tolerate almost anything because leaving would mean financial or social ruin. Both partners are increasingly expected to offer emotional support, communication, companionship, sexual compatibility, domestic cooperation, and some ability to remember where the dishwasher is. None of this is a complaint — in many ways it's a better deal. But it is a more complicated one.
The definition of a "good man" expanded. Being employed and responsible still matters, but so might emotional openness, communication, domestic competence, parenting, self-awareness, and the ability to navigate a relationship between two independent adults. At the same time, older expectations didn't simply disappear. A man may still feel pressure to be financially successful, confident, useful, protective and capable of providing — while also operating within a relationship where the provider role carries less automatic authority than it once did.
That's not necessarily unfair. It's simply a different social contract. And social contracts are especially confusing when nobody remembers signing them.
Women experienced their own version of the same transition. Greater freedom didn't remove expectations around appearance, motherhood, work, caregiving or relationships. In many households, two careers replaced one without every hour of unpaid work magically dividing itself in half. Modern equality didn't make relationships effortless. It changed the negotiation.
Then came another shift: individualisation. Western societies increasingly organised adult life around the individual — your career, your development, your happiness, your boundaries, your identity, your goals, your retirement, your right to leave something that no longer works for you. There is much to value in that. The ability to shape your own life rather than simply accepting the one assigned to you is an extraordinary privilege.
But individual freedom also changes what couples ask of each other. If two people are expected to arrive in a relationship as complete, autonomous individuals, then partnership becomes less about merging two lives into one fixed social unit and more about negotiating how two separate lives will coexist. For many people, that works beautifully. For others, it can feel strangely provisional — the relationship is important, but so are two careers, two sets of ambitions, two identities, two friendship networks and two ideas about what fulfilment should look like. Nobody has necessarily done anything wrong. There are simply more moving parts.
Feminism is obviously part of this story, though it's often discussed so badly that the word itself can derail the conversation before it starts. At its broadest, feminism fought for something remarkably straightforward: women should have the same fundamental rights, opportunities and autonomy as men. The fact that modern Western women can study, work, own property, control their own money, leave abusive relationships and make independent decisions about their lives is not something this article is going to treat as an unfortunate historical accident. Nor does explaining why some men struggle with modern relationships require turning women's freedom into the villain. That would be both lazy and inaccurate.
But there's another mistake on the opposite side. Supporting equality doesn't require believing that every man and every woman will personally prefer exactly the same relationship structure. Two adults can have equal legal rights and equal human value while dividing their lives in unequal-looking ways. One may earn most of the money. The other may spend more time caring for children. One may enjoy taking responsibility for finances. The other may prefer managing the home. Or they may split absolutely everything down the middle and maintain a spreadsheet impressive enough to frighten an accountant.
The important question isn't whether a relationship looks sufficiently modern from the outside. It's whether the two adults inside it chose it freely, can renegotiate it, and are treated with respect. That distinction tends to get lost. A man can believe completely in women's equality and still enjoy being a provider. A woman can be educated, financially capable and fiercely independent and still prefer a man who takes a traditionally masculine role in parts of the relationship. Neither preference automatically tells us much about their politics. Private relationships are not miniature parliaments.
Public debate around #MeToo also made consent, harassment and power more explicit in everyday discussion. For some men whose adult habits were formed decades earlier, courtship could feel more consciously negotiated than it once had. That did not make ordinary interaction impossible; it changed expectations and made some old assumptions less automatic.
And then technology arrived and put much of the dating market inside a phone. That deserves its own chapter.
For now, the important point is that the Western relationship landscape shifted on several fronts at once. Women gained greater independence. Marriage became less economically necessary. Divorce became a realistic option. People married later. Individual fulfilment mattered more. Gender roles grew more flexible. Expectations of men expanded. Expectations of women changed. Relationships became more voluntary, more negotiable — and, in some ways, more demanding.
None of this proves relationships in the past were better. Many were unquestionably worse. Nor does it prove modern Western relationships are broken — millions of people build loving, equal and deeply satisfying partnerships within this new landscape. But not everybody fits every social model equally well, and that's the point worth carrying forward.
Equality answers an essential question: what rights and opportunities should people have? It doesn't fully answer another: how do two particular people want to organise a life together? Those questions overlap. They are not identical. And for some Western men — and some women too — the distinction becomes important when they encounter a society where family, responsibility, gender and partnership may still be negotiated somewhat differently.
Before we get there, though, one more Western transformation deserves a closer look. Because while relationships were becoming more optional, more individual and more negotiable, the way people actually found each other was changing just as fast.
And then we started swiping.