Why Are So Many Relationships Falling Apart Right Now?

Someone on Reddit asked this recently. Simple question, posted in r/ThirtiesIndia, no grand framing. Just: why do we see so many breakups and separations?

The comments were what you would expect. Some people blamed early marriages. Some blamed dating apps. Some blamed feminism, some blamed patriarchy, some blamed phones. A few people wrote long, thoughtful answers. Most people scrolled past.

But the question stayed with me. Not because the answer is obvious but because I think most of the common answers are wrong. Or at least incomplete. They describe symptoms. They do not describe the thing that actually changed.

So let me try.

My parents met through family. There was a meeting. Chai was involved. Their parents talked. Then their parents' parents talked. Then someone consulted a calendar. Then they got married.

They have been together for thirty-two years.

I am not romanticizing this. They will be the first to tell you it was not always easy. There were years that were hard in the specific, unglamorous way that long marriages are hard. But they stayed. Most of their friends stayed. Most of their generation stayed.

Now look around you.

Everyone you know is either in a relationship they are not sure about, getting out of one they thought would work, or avoiding them entirely because the last one broke something they have not finished repairing. Your WhatsApp is full of people processing breakups at 2 AM. Your Instagram feed is a split screen of engagement announcements and cryptic "new chapter" posts that everyone knows means it ended.

Something changed between your parents' generation and yours. And I do not think it is that people got worse at love. I think the scaffolding that held relationships together got pulled out from underneath them, and nothing replaced it.

Here is what your parents had that you do not.

They had a small choice set. This sounds like a limitation. It was also a superpower. When you choose from five people who have been vetted by a community that knows you, the decision carries weight. You invest in it because there was no assumption that someone better was a swipe away. The choice was finite, so you treated it as meaningful.

You have five thousand options. This sounds like freedom. It is also a trap. Research on decision-making consistently finds that more options do not make people happier. They make people more anxious, more likely to second-guess, and less satisfied with whatever they eventually choose. One study on online dating found that as the number of available options increases, people reject more potential partners and report lower satisfaction with the ones they select. The authors called it the "rejection mindset." The more you see, the pickier you get, and the less content you are with anyone.

This is not abstract. This is your Tuesday night. You are lying in bed next to someone you genuinely care about, and a notification from a dating app you forgot to delete lights up, or you see someone attractive on Instagram, or a friend mentions someone you should meet, and for a half-second your brain does the thing: what if there is someone better?

That half-second did not exist for your parents. Not because they were morally superior. Because the infrastructure of their lives did not generate it. They were not swimming in alternatives. You are drowning in them.

Your parents also had external accountability.

Their families were invested in the relationship working. Not just emotionally. Structurally. A marriage was a merger between two families, two networks, two reputations. Walking away had social consequences. This is not always a good thing. Plenty of people stayed in terrible relationships because the cost of leaving was too high. I am not arguing for that.

But there is something between "you must stay no matter what" and "you can leave at any time for any reason with zero friction." And that something, that middle ground where there is just enough external investment to make you try harder before you quit, is gone.

Your relationship exists in a vacuum. It is just you and them. No family structure holding it together. No community watching. No shared network that would feel the impact if it fell apart. The only thing keeping you together is the internal decision to keep choosing each other, and that decision has to be made fresh every single day against a backdrop of infinite alternatives and zero external support.

That is an enormous amount of pressure to put on feelings alone.

But the thing that I think matters most, more than choice overload, more than the absence of external structure, is something nobody talks about.

You were never taught how to do this.

Your parents did not need to be taught how to navigate a relationship because the relationship came pre-loaded with a script. The script was not always fair, it was often gendered, sometimes oppressive, but it existed. Everyone knew their role. There were rules for how conflict was handled (often through elders). There were rituals for connection (festivals, family gatherings, religious practices). There were expectations that were understood without being spoken.

You have no script.

You are supposed to find a partner on your own, from a pool of strangers, using apps designed for casual engagement, and then build a lasting committed relationship from scratch, with no training, no coaching, no shared framework for how to fight, how to repair, how to grow, how to have the conversation about where this is going, how to survive the period between infatuation wearing off and real love setting in.

Think about how absurd this is. We train people for years to do jobs. We would never hand someone a scalpel and say "figure it out." We would never put someone in a cockpit and say "you seem smart, you will be fine." But we take two people who have never done this before, put them in the most emotionally complex situation a human being can be in, and say: good luck. Communicate well. Be vulnerable. Know your attachment style. Do not be toxic.

Where were they supposed to learn this? From their parents, who followed a completely different model? From Bollywood, which taught them that love is an uncontrollable force that strikes like lightning and requires no maintenance? From Instagram therapy accounts that give them a vocabulary ("boundaries," "gaslighting," "narcissist") without any practical skill for actually using it in a real conversation with a real person they are afraid of losing?

The skills gap is the real story. Not "people do not want to commit." Not "this generation is selfish." The story is that commitment is a skill, and nobody is teaching it.

There is another thing. It is uncomfortable to say but I think it is true.

Dating apps broke something in how we relate to people.

Not just in the obvious ways, the fake profiles, the ghosting, the superficiality. In a deeper way. In the way they taught an entire generation to evaluate and discard human beings at speed.

You spent years swiping. Left, left, left, right, left. Two seconds per person. Reduce a human being to a photo and a one-line bio, make a snap judgment, move on. Do this hundreds of times. Thousands of times. And then try to turn that off when you are in a relationship.

You cannot turn it off. The pattern follows you. The first time your partner bores you, the first time they disappoint you, the first time the relationship requires something difficult, there is a voice in the back of your head, trained by years of swiping, that says: you could just start over with someone new.

Previous generations did not have that voice. Not because they were more committed. Because the option was not constantly, visibly, algorithmically available. They could not open an app at 11 PM and remind themselves that other people exist. You can. And that knowledge, that ambient awareness that the exit is always right there, makes it harder to stay in a way that nobody fully accounts for.

I know someone who ended a two-year relationship, a genuinely good relationship by most measures, because she felt like she "should feel more." When I asked what she meant, she described a feeling from the early months, that electric, constant-thinking-about-them, can't-eat-can't-sleep intensity, and said it had faded. She thought the fading meant something was wrong. That she had settled. That the real thing would feel like that forever.

It does not. That initial intensity is infatuation, and it fades in every relationship on earth. What replaces it, if you stay long enough to find out, is something quieter and more durable. But she never got there. Because the apps had taught her that the feeling of novelty is the feeling of love, and when the novelty wore off, she mistook the transition for a dead end.

She is back on the apps now. Looking for the feeling again. She will find it. It will last a few months. Then it will fade, and she will leave again, and the cycle will repeat, and she will start to wonder if something is wrong with her when the truth is that something is wrong with the system she learned to date in.

So what do you do with all of this?

You cannot rebuild the old infrastructure. Nobody wants to go back to families choosing their partners. Nobody wants community surveillance as a relationship retention strategy. The old system solved the commitment problem but created others that were worse. There is no going back, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling nostalgia.

But you can be honest about what was lost. And you can start looking for what might replace it.

What was lost was structure. Not control. Structure. The scaffolding that helped two people stay connected when the initial spark naturally dimmed. The external support that kicked in during the hard stretches. The shared understanding of what a relationship requires and the practical tools for providing it.

What might replace it is something that does not exist yet at scale. A combination of intentional matching, so you are starting with someone who actually wants what you want, not someone who is swiping out of boredom at 11 PM. Verification, so you are not spending your limited emotional energy on people who are not real. And coaching. Real, practical, in-the-moment coaching that helps you navigate the stages of a relationship the way a mentor helps you navigate the stages of a career.

Not therapy. Therapy is for when things are broken. Coaching is for before things break. It is the difference between a fire department and fire prevention. Both are necessary. Only one of them saves the house.

I keep thinking about that Reddit post. "Why do we see a lot of breakups and separations."

The question was phrased in the third person, as if it is happening to other people. But the person asking it, and the hundreds of people who upvoted it, are not observing this from the outside. They are living it. They have been through breakups they still do not fully understand. They have watched friends go through them. They are in their thirties, wondering why the thing that was supposed to be the most natural part of being human feels so impossibly hard.

It feels hard because it is hard. Not because of you. Because the environment you are doing it in was not built to support it.

Your parents had a greenhouse. Controlled conditions. Curated inputs. External support systems keeping everything alive. You have an open field in a storm, and everyone is telling you to just grow.

The answer is not to be better at growing. The answer is to build a better greenhouse.

That is what we are trying to do.

I co-founded Pinnaya because I watched this pattern eat through my friend group one relationship at a time. Smart, kind, ambitious people, the exact people you would bet on to build something lasting, cycling through the same loop. Meet on an app. Feel the spark. Ride the infatuation. Hit the first real difficulty. Panic. Swipe again.

Pinnaya is designed to break that loop. Not with a better algorithm or a shinier interface. With structure. The kind of structure that helps a relationship survive the part between the spark and the real thing.

Every profile is verified with a government ID, so you are never wasting trust on someone who is not real. Matches are curated for compatibility, not for engagement metrics, so you start with someone who actually wants what you want. And there is coaching built into the experience, practical guidance for the conversations that matter, available before things go wrong rather than after.

This will not fix everything. Nothing will fix everything. But if even one relationship that would have ended in confused silence instead survives into something real, it was worth building.

It is not that we are bad at love. We are unsupported in it. And the first step toward doing it differently is admitting that the way we have been doing it was never going to work.

Not because of who we are.

Because of what was missing.

Pinnaya is a dating app for people who want relationships that last. Government ID verified. Curated matches. Relationship coaching from the first conversation. Built for serious people in a world that makes it very hard to be serious.