Gregory of Nyssa, contemplating the Christian horror of concupiscence, once theorized that had not Adam and Eve sinned, the two of them would have remained virgins and reproduced in whatever way angels did.

Alas, we have not sinless men and women today, but many more virgins and involuntary celibates, and none so far are reproducing themselves as angels.

Something has gone terribly wrong between young men and women. The proportion of the population that has ever married is shrinking. Over the last 20 years, the number of marriages made in the United States in a given year has been decreasing quickly. In 2000, there were nearly 2.3 million marriages made. By 2021, fewer than 2 million marriages were made in a population that had grown by more than 46 million people. Among Millennials, four in ten were unmarried in 2020, compared with three in ten for the previous generation at the same age.

This is not because people are extending a lifestyle of multiple partners and relationships through their twenties. Young people in that age group are enduring what sociologists call a “sex recession,” a decline in the amount of sexual contact from what previous generations had at their age. Fertility rates are falling along with marriage rates, previewing a future in which there is a dramatic divide between family haves and family have-nots, and a dramatic increase in the number of people who will enter retirement years with no immediate family members. The Institute for Family Studies finds that marriage is becoming a “luxury good” for those couples that are financially stable and increasingly is attached only to those young people who are highly religious.

There are other cultural indicators that men and women are being driven apart. Children’s movies no longer have romantic stories at their center. There is a strange and alarming partisan gap between the sexes among young people, with young women moving dramatically to the left and Gen Z men turning to the right and far right, a split that began in 2008 and has widened to a 20-point distance in recent years. One of the most popular dating podcasts is Whatever. Each episode features the everyman host, a luckless-in-love Brian Atlas, surrounded by a table of attractive young women. Most episodes proceed as an inquisition in which Atlas asks the ladies about their use of dating apps, their standards and expectations for men, and the reality of their dating life. He does this as a Socratic dialogue meant to demonstrate to his guests and the audience why feminism made marriage and commitment a losing proposition for men, and how these beautiful but imperfect women are likely doomed to be some alpha male’s side chick for a few years until they are discarded to become cat moms permanently. It’s scandalous, frequently funny, but bleak beyond words.

Much of the advice made available to men for how to navigate this dating world effectively worsens things. Some male influencers preach for “men going their own way” — leaving marriage and commitment behind. Another set preach a kind of will-to-power gospel of becoming the ultimate alpha male. Others try to turn dating and hooking up into a video game that you play by using self-conscious strategies, routine lines, practiced openers — they even sell you lists of text messages you can send that are “guaranteed” to drive her to respond.

I’m never going to compete with the male influencers, but my one humble suggestion is for young men to cut the smartphone out of their love life as much as possible, not just the dating apps but the porn, too. Many of the baleful trends listed above became markedly worse after the introduction of the smartphone. Its rise as intermediary in our relationships has many causes. It is a natural outgrowth of social networking. If there’s LinkedIn for finding a job match, why shouldn’t there be a Match.com? And I understand that the apps also seem more necessary for those who remain unmarried later in life, beyond the years when they were in coed schools or just starting their careers.

But for the vast majority of people in the dating market, the apps haven’t improved outcomes over those of the traditional coed institutions for which they are a substitute. According to a survey by the Institute for Family Studies, marriage satisfaction was highest among the tiny number of couples who met through church or a religious activity; similar though lower rates of satisfaction were found among those who met at parties and events, then school, then work, then through friends and family members. Meeting online produced marriages in which members scored their satisfaction second to last, though well above those who met at a bar or restaurant.

Couples that married in the first few years of the millennium, right before smartphones took off, sometimes talk to each other as though we managed to get out of Vietnam before the Tet Offensive was launched. “Thank God we found each other before the dating apps arrived.” We used to think of college as a time to avoid or indulge the Dionysian urges. Dance, drink, then make out. Or more. With a view, in the long run, to finding our one and only.

Now we marvel at these odd reports, from younger siblings and cousins, of how college-age people start to court each other. The accounts seem at first tedious and timid, and they often end with appalling anecdotes about how the purely textual encounter was wrecked by an unmentionably forward or foul suggestion from the man.

Young men and women now routinely exchange their Snapchat IDs first — actual phone numbers are just too intimate — and only after trust has been established on that app may they enter into each other’s iMessages. Or they engage in this anonymous and asynchronous speed dating offered by Tinder and Bumble and other dating apps.

According to the IFS survey, the most popular way to meet a romantic partner among members of Generation Z is online (30 percent), beating out school (24 percent) and through friends (24 percent). Just 5 percent of Generation Z reported meeting a romantic partner through church or a religious activity. These apps warp the social experience of pair-bonding, and the whole of society is losing out.

Dating apps create an illusion of endless choices and possibility but in fact preemptively poison or rule out matches that could happen in real life. Men and women use these apps differently and often to their own disadvantage. Women typically approve only the top 10 percent of males who speak to them. Men go for the opposite strategy of approving almost every female profile, hoping to filter them later. It’s here that the “meninist” influencer begins talking about “female hypergamy” — the theory that women have an evolutionary strategy that leads them to choose only the top males. Thereby he feeds the hopelessness of the majority of men who get passed over on these apps.

Young men too often foolishly use these apps as an extension of pornography — sometimes immediately propositioning the women who show even the slightest interest. Young women use these apps, or the extra qualifying layer of Snapchat, as an extension of the safety culture that they’ve been raised in. The dynamic feeds on itself. As women get hit on by anonymous creeps, their standards for approving men to talk to them go up further and their cynicism understandably increases. They take the risk of being grossly propositioned only by the most valuable males — and otherwise use the app as a way of disqualifying men without risking the difficulty of humiliating them in real life.

In the online world, where the competition is just one swipe away and seems to be infinite, male and female behavior tends toward caricature — the men, overly aggressive and too keen, and women in return too demurring or sniffy.

In a real-life encounter, the vast majority of men would never make the mistake of thinking the first flash of an eyelid granted them a license to proposition a woman. And because men, even today, usually make the first move to express interest, women who meet men in real life get not just the thumbnail visual but an immediate sense of the personality of the men they meet and a chance to appreciate the courage and good humor they demonstrate in submitting themselves for rejection and judgment in the flesh. Young men, particularly those who don’t indulge in pornography, will find that their libido works as an aid to their courage rather than a foil.

A healthy human sexuality is about the desire for another person, not for mere physical sensations. We know this intuitively because we know that if somehow the hand that gave us pleasure in a darkened room were discovered to belong to someone other than our lover, the very same sensation would be felt as a desecration. The same desecration is felt when a lover cheats on us — not because the sensation of lovemaking changed but because we feel we no longer know the lover. Healthy sexuality is pro-social, leading the lovers to become more tender, intimate, and trusting with each other and in turn building a suitable emotional life in which to raise their children.

Pornography tends to corrupt its users by reducing the sexual instinct to mere sensation. This practiced depersonalization leads porn addicts toward vandalizing and disfiguring social relations. It’s not a coincidence that the leading purveyors of online pornography such as MindGeek now routinely sell thinly disguised incest fantasies.

The problem for online dating is that our avatars are depersonalized ambassadors for the genuine human. It is this lack of personhood — this lack of reality — that invites the antisocial behavior of men and women on these apps. Hiding behind our thumbnail photos and curated profiles in an attempt to de-risk dating, we’ve actually made dating and pair-bonding more dangerous and likely to injure.

It’s only by recovering real-life encounters with unmistakably real human persons, by venturing the real hazards and risks of humiliation and rejection, that the sexes can be reconciled again. It’s either that, or figuring out how to reproduce like angels.