Welcome to The Bunker News Without the Nonsense. I'm Zoe Grunewald. So it turns out the biggest

force reshaping our love lives isn't romance or dating apps. It's the economy. Across the

rich world, the cost of housing, childcare and

commuting, and even the price of going on a date, is pushing more people into living alone for longer.

Coupledom, once the default setting, is starting to look like a luxury good. Lovely, if you can

afford it, deeply complicated if you can't. As more of us choose or drift into singlehood,

the knock on effects are rippling through everything from fertility rates to friendship groups

to the design of our cities. And what looks like freedom can feel very different in real life.

So is this a quiet revolution in how we build our happiness, or a sign that intimacy is

becoming something else we can

avoid by swiping no to. And what does a world built for couples do when the couples stop

showing up? Today, I'm joined by Jonathan Rosenthal, international editor for the economist,

to unpack the economic and social fallout of a world where fewer people are pairing off.

Jonathan, thanks for joining me today in the bunker.

It's great to be here. Thank you. Let's start with the big picture. So throughout the rich world,

singlehood is on the rise. Among Americans, age 25 to 34, the proportion living without a spouse

or partner has doubled in five decades to 50% for men and 41% for women. And since 2010, the share of

people living alone has risen in 26 out of 30 rich countries. You've described this as a relationship

procession. Just how big is this and why is it happening? Oh gosh, it is huge. And as to the why it's happening, I wish there were just

sort of one simple answer. There are a lot of factors. You put your finger on some of them,

the kind of economics, but there are all kinds of other sort of demographic shifts.

We can go into some of those, if you like. Demographic shifts, kind of behavioral shifts.

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