I’ve written a lot about my generation and fear. Our fear of love, and fear of life. But I’ve been getting the sense lately that there’s some ultimate fear underlying all this, running through everything. And I’m becoming convinced that it’s fear of abandonment.
For a start, many of us grew up in broken homes. Our parents are strangers to one another; our childhood a series of exchanges from one house to the next. No real home, no place to belong. By age 14, nearly half of first-born children in the UK no longer live with both their mother and father.
Of course families have fallen apart in every generation. But even a few decades ago children from broken homes had communities, they had neighbourhoods. Now our families fall apart and there is nothing, nobody, to catch us. We live far from extended family. We are more estranged than ever. And I can’t get across how little familiarity Gen Z has with community. When some of us hear the word community we think of Instagram. We think of Reddit. Or abstract concepts like the LGBT community or mental health communities, nothing real or solid. Which is why whenever someone says something like online communities are a lifeline for young people! I feel like screaming because it’s just so bleak. What have we done?
Plus, total abandonment of any sense that we belong to something bigger. Loss of faith—not just in religion, but in all social bonds. No sense that there’s anything binding us, that we even share the same values. Forget loving our neighbour, we can’t even make eye contact with them. Nothing holds us together anymore. We are alone.
And add to all that, so little sympathy. Ours is a culture choking on its own compassion yet offering next to none for children of divorce. We are the first generation to grow up without stigma around family breakdown, but near total normalisation of it. And when you normalise something, you stigmatise the reaction. So many marriages end; what did you expect? Your friends’ families are the same; what’s wrong with you? It’s just a contract anyway. Kids are resilient. All this tells us that abandonment is trivial. That if you feel deeply affected by it you might be the problem. And anyone who does try to articulate the pain is treated with such suspicion, accused of having some political agenda, rather than just being overcome with this feeling. This feeling of absolute abandonment.
The feeling we’re left with, God. How to describe it? It’s the feeling that nobody has our back. That we can’t trust anyone. That this world is terrifying and we are powerless, but if we attach to anything for support, we will be abandoned. I see it everywhere; it cuts to the core of this generation. Difficulty trusting people, hypersensitivity to criticism, low self-esteem, constant need for external validation—all are abandonment symptoms. And I’m not saying this explains everything, or we all feel this way, but that we underestimate how many young people are carrying this around. This feeling of being abandoned and fear of it happening again. Beneath what looks like the age of entitlement, below the culture of narcissism, this is the age of abandonment.
For one, fear of abandonment explains much of Gen Z’s lack of resilience. We fear life because we feel alone. That’s the thing about attachment—you need to depend to be independent. You need a stable base to venture out. Something to rely on to take risks. Some stability to cope with chaos. Otherwise you can’t explore with confidence. If you fear abandonment, you won’t risk romance. Words will feel traumatic. You will stay stagnant, afraid to move. Maybe this generation is slow to grow up because we have no foundation to fall back on. How can we stand on our own two feet when the ground keeps crumbling beneath us?
Fear of abandonment can also explain much more culturally. I think the lesson many of us took from being left was to aim fire at marriage. Can’t blame our parents, we love them, so blame the institution. Burn it to the ground. Smile as it burns. Laugh at anyone who runs into the flames. It destroyed our family so we’ll destroy it. And I don’t mean those simply choosing not to marry or have children, but who talk about these commitments with utter contempt. I think the root of that is fear. Not feeling safe. When young women rage against marriage and motherhood so viscerally what I’m really hearing is it’s not safe to marry. It’s not safe to have kids. Why would you risk that? I see conservatives mock young women speaking like this, but listen, they’ve clearly got something to say. What if they’re trying to say this doesn’t work, and if it does work then why was I abandoned? This is the thing that broke me, why would I go near it? If it’s so easy how come my parents couldn’t hold it together? That’s what I hear in chemistry is a red flag. In marriage is a trap. And I think this is a major and often missing explanation for falling marriage and birth rates—maybe it’s not selfishness, maybe it’s not narcissism, maybe deep down at the heart of it, we are terrified someone will walk out. That they will decide, one day, to give up. That even if we gave it our all, it would never be good enough. We simply don’t believe anyone will stay.
Explains some of the extreme feminist sentiment, too. The first man I ever relied on walked out, so fuck men. Red Pill as well. Women give up so why bother. We decided the answer is resistance to love, to declare it unreachable. No need for families. Dismantle the ideals. Take down the traditions. Vilify all men. Mock fathers. No heroes allowed. Love isn’t real anyway. Hear about a good, healthy marriage and do all we can to debunk it. Our response is not to try, to take family less seriously, to put less of ourselves into relationships, do it all half-heartedly so it hurts less in the end.
Same goes with our attraction to therapy culture. This is why I find the obsession with self-love and self-reliance deeply sad. There are young women whose families fell apart and who their whole lives dreamed of nothing but a stable, lasting love to depend on, and are now being told that’s pathological, that’s needy, they should love themselves more. If you dream of depending on someone then damn, you’ve got issues. I see in so much of therapy culture young people desperate to be loved and trying to train themselves out of it. I see so much abandonment pain. We are reparenting ourselves. We are self-soothing. We are healing our inner child. Nobody is asking why. Please will somebody step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love, more belief in themselves, but something to belong to.
And so not only did our families fall apart, not only were we not able to talk about it, but we grew up and got it drilled into us that the problem is dependence. Don’t be needy. The worst thing that can happen to women is ending up with someone they need. What’s love then, if it isn’t that? Why be with someone you don’t need? Our identity, our meaning, our purpose, as humans, was always our ties and obligations to others, and now we are trying to do it all alone, trying to figure out who we are alone, and we’re nobody alone, no wonder we’re confused. And for many of us life has become about trying to heal or hide this thing, shoving it down, this basic human need to belong.
Which is why criticism from older generations can be hard to take. No wonder we are scared, dependent on you. Why don’t young people take family seriously! Why don’t they appreciate meaningful relationships! Maybe because the most meaningful relationships we had, our very first ones, fell to pieces. No wonder we are hooking up and settling for situationships. We haven’t lost sight of what’s important, we were never shown what was important. And no wonder we don’t want kids! We were kids when we got left. What I’m saying is calling Gen Z selfish and entitled won’t help, and maybe it’s time to try something more like wow, we get it, that was hard. Sorry about the ripping up of all roots, the breakdown of all support systems. Sorry you were let down as a little girl. And that you’re here, struggling to convince yourself that love even exists. Maybe if we let young people talk about it, if we listened, it wouldn’t come out in these weird ways, cloaked in therapy-speak, in anger against all men, or the refusal to grow up and get hurt.
But the real reasons? We don’t want to know. We stick with young adults aren’t settling down because they can’t get on the housing ladder, or because wokeness is brainwashing them, because if we go any further, past that, down below, we might get too close to the truth. The hard truth. Like the fact that, for many girls, the first man to break their hearts was their father. That some young women today haven’t had a single example of a marriage making it. And maybe the problem isn’t so much that young people can’t buy a home—it’s that they can’t build one; they don’t know what it’s like to belong to one. Get me on the housing ladder, great, but how does that help if I have no idea what healthy love looks like? If I don’t trust anyone will stay? Better to pretend that Gen Z just need new policies, to get on government schemes, to tax the rich, than accept that what many young people need, more than anything, is an apology. Recognition of what happened. Acknowledgement of the abandonment and how alone we feel.
I say this because no amount of material progress has helped this generation so far. The fear is still there. It does not matter what comfort and convenience we have if we think love is dead. Who cares what cool technologies we have, if the closest thing we’ve got to community is an online forum? It’s an insult to children to sever them from all ties and bonds, and then insist they have it better than any generation before, and if they falter there must be something wrong with them, or they just need more stuff. Yes, our world is better in many ways. Be nice if we could enjoy it. Little difficult to appreciate when we are busy avoiding and protecting ourselves from any more abandonment.
And I suppose what I wonder is, what did we expect? These things have consequences. Throughout history our ancestors built customs and institutions to bind us together and then, one by one, we kicked them down. We killed God, we mocked marriage, we attacked the family, we uprooted neighbourhoods, we debunked every last myth and story. And we kept going and going, until we got here, with our sad little divorce parties. Until we got here, with a generation huddled, heartbroken, fearful of love, fearful of life, kicking away at anything that reaches out to help. We lifted the burden from adults, told parents to do what makes them happy, forgetting that those structures weren’t just limits on adult freedom; they were foundations for children to stand on, to step off from, on which they depended. We shattered them and now we wonder why a generation is falling apart. Welcome to the age of abandonment.
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But the answer cannot be to retreat from relationships. It has to be to take them more seriously. To kill that urge to run and avoid. Because we’ve got two choices here—crumble under the weight of this thing or go all in, against the odds. Forget pretending that love and family aren’t important, that they are oppressive, that loving ourselves is enough. Forget torching the whole thing. We have to try even harder.
And become an example. Find someone and commit fully. Be a parent who teaches that loyalty isn’t too much to ask for, who shows it’s safe to stay. If I have a daughter someday I don’t want to model for her a strong independent woman who doesn’t need a man; I want to model a strong woman who shows it’s okay to depend on someone, I feel like culturally that’s a much more important message now. It’s okay to take a risk to be with someone! To give up some of yourself to belong to something bigger! And actually, that’s independence—feeling loved, feeling backed, and finding resilience from that, becoming a competent individual who can stand on their own. I’m just so sceptical of this belief that people can become emotionally enlightened or self-sufficient enough that they can handle life by themselves, and anyone barely hanging on these days is too dependent and needy. It’s not a weakness to want to feel at home. We weren’t designed to do this alone.
All this to say, being abandoned is not trivial. Not only having divorced parents, but being cut off from community, from culture, from all sources of support. Maybe it means more to you than you are letting on. Feel it, grieve it. Then turn that disappointment into determination. Nothing’s guaranteed, but we can take the pain and put every inch of it into our own family. Comes to down to us now; our opportunity to seize. We don’t have to pretend there’s no fear. But we can use it to forge ahead. And build something we can finally belong to.
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I think all of this is true.
I do want to add though, parental estrangement isn't new. Maybe legal divorce was lower back in the day, but people still left. Both my father's father, and my maternal grandmother's father left when they were small kids; in that era it nearly destroyed their families, they literally starved and froze.
I continue to come back to the fact that feminism - even in the 60s and 70s - wasn't about gaining money and power as much as it was gaining security that complete dependence on men couldn't provide. Women and children were just too vulnerable to the whims of men, to remain in traditional roles. It didn't matter that fewer men left back then, even if it was 1 in 10, it was still to high of a risk to take, especially when young children's lives were on the line.
Maybe community played a larger role back then. The catholic church certainly helped to raise my father, in the era before a government safety net, while at the same time berating his mother as responsible for the infidelity of her husband (he chose to leave and have another 7 kids with another woman) and calling my father a bastard, with literal nuns beating him. It sounds ancient but this was just in the 50s and 60s.
I don't like the extreme independence that feminism and self-help has wrought on our culture. At the same time, what are we supposed to do? Here you are, another woman, writing to primarily other women, about the issues. I see that both conservatives and progressives believe that some how, getting women on track with the right narrative is what is going to solve all this sadness. Instead, what I've come to realize is that women, as mothers or partners, can do damn all to control the worst instincts in men, either in a conservative or progressive framework.
None of this works unless men find an independent path forward to understand how to invest in families, relationships, and community. We can't do it for them.
‘If I have a daughter someday I don’t want to model for her a strong independent woman who doesn’t need a man; I want to model a strong woman who shows it’s okay to depend on someone, I feel like culturally that’s a much more important message now. It’s okay to take a risk to be with someone! To give up some of yourself to belong to something bigger!’
Absolutely wonderful article and fantastic sentiment. That is exactly what I am trying to do for my daughter.