Move Toward What You Fear: Freya India on Gen Z's Search for Love and Community

Freya India is one of the clearest and most courageous voices in contemporary gender discourse. Her new book, Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, is the best account yet of what it actually feels like to grow up female in the digital age. In the conversation below, she traces the roots of Gen Z's fear and anxiety—Big Tech's commodification of the female body, family breakdown, widespread access to porn, and the loss of community that once made love and trust easier. She speaks with unusual candor about her own search for something solid: permanence, faith, the kind of love that lasts. What emerges is not a lament but a call to courage. The only answer, she insists, is to move toward what we fear.

Brad Wilcox: In Girls® you write about your own parents' divorce when you were three, describing it as something that "completely crushed" you. You also document how growing up amid near-universal family breakdown left your generation unable to believe that love is real or lasting—girls scrolling #divorcedparents who say they've "never seen what a healthy relationship looks like."

How much do you think family instability in childhood is the hidden driver of Gen Z's retreat from dating and commitment, and what would you say to a young woman who genuinely doesn't know what a healthy marriage looks like because she's never seen one?

Freya India: I think family instability is a huge driver of our retreat from dating and commitment, but it’s difficult to detect. Divorce has become so politically charged and has happened in so many families that we have lost the language, the permission, to talk about it. So it’s hard to know how young people really feel. 

One clue is to look at the culture; what is the culture obsessed with? Why do we talk so much about childhood trauma? Why are so many young women “healing their inner child”? Why do they describe themselves as “anxiously attached”? 

I think they are hinting at abandonment, at real wounds. After my parents’ divorce, I felt a lot of fear about love, and when I listen to the language other young women use, I hear the same thing. To me they sound scared. They might say they don’t want to get married because of a revolt against men or heteronormativity or patriarchy, but beneath that I hear terror, a belief that nobody could possibly stick around. I think we have a chronic, generational fear of abandonment, and it’s gotten so bad that we are not even willing to try, and won’t take the risk. 

To a young woman who hasn’t seen a healthy marriage, I would say look around and really pay attention. She may not have many examples in her life, but I guarantee she will come across at least one stable relationship. My parents split when I was very young, but my grandparents have been married for 60 years, and I pay very close attention to them. I surround myself with couples who have been together a long time, and I watch what they do, what they don’t do. I don’t trust people who speak badly about their spouses; I don’t take advice from them, romantic or otherwise. I try not to work with people like that if I can help it, and I try to treasure those who treasure their spouses. This has proved to be a very good measure of character. 

You don’t have to fully get over that fear but try to do the opposite of what it tells you, and hopefully find someone brave enough to do the same.

I would also say: treat anxiety around love like any other anxiety, and lean into it rather than away from it. The worst thing we can do is avoid what we fear. When people are anxious about love, we often encourage them to spend more time alone, to take more time to heal and work on themselves. I’m not sure that’s always the answer. Once you start seeing so many modern trends, from young men’s obsession with self-optimisation to young women’s hatred of men, as expressions of a fear of love, things start to make sense. And as terrifying as it is, the only answer is to move toward it. To allow yourself to be vulnerable. You don’t have to fully get over that fear but try to do the opposite of what it tells you, and hopefully find someone brave enough to do the same. 

Dating Apps as Commodification of Romance

Wilcox: You argue in the book that dating apps don't just change how we meet—they fundamentally rewire how we think about other people, training us to treat potential partners like Amazon recommendations and to "pick up and discard each other" with no accountability. Given that Gen Z is now actually deleting dating apps in what seems like record numbers, do you think there's a viable path back to courtship rooted in community and embodied life rather than algorithms—and what would that look like practically?

India: Strangely, after writing a pretty bleak book, I’m hopeful. Things have gotten so bad that a backlash is beginning. 

There is a viable path back to community, and I actually lived it while writing this book. I spent last summer living in a cabin in the garden of a Christian community (long story!), and I will never forget it. I had no idea this sort of thing was even possible. I saw how it works in practice: people coming over unannounced, the front door always unlocked, last-minute dinner parties where everyone helps with cooking and washing up. I’m quite introverted and like a lot of time alone, so part of me dreaded moving in—until I realized that this was a very different type of socializing than I’m used to. In modern life, meeting up with people is always so planned and scheduled. My generation has had so little experience with real community, and how spontaneous and chaotic and unstructured it is. Neighbors inviting themselves in; friends randomly rocking up. And this gives me hope, because community is actually easier to build than we think. You don’t need the perfect home or dinner plan, you only have to be open. 

Something else that has given me hope is the response to GIRLS® from young people, particularly from young men. This might sound hard to believe if you spend a lot of time on X, but I had an event for the book recently, and teenage boys were lining up, wanting to understand what girls are going through, and men in their twenties, worried about friends and sisters and girlfriends who aren’t doing well. I think we’ve become so divided that some are realizing the only thing left to do is be brave enough to come together, and do the most countercultural thing of all: care about one another. 

Porn and Relationships

Wilcox: You note that while there are many reasons for the decline in sex among young adults today, one is that they simply grew up watching other people have sex "By the time we were teenagers,” you write, “girls my age had already grown up seeing women strangled, spat on, and degraded. We learned all we knew about intimacy from what we had been raised on and become addicted to, often since we were preteens. Everything we knew about sex came from porn." How has porn distorted how young women today view themselves and sex, and in particular their ability to trust men? Do you think it has led to fear and anxiety related to committed relationships and getting married? 

India: I think porn has created so much fear, mistrust, and anxiety—for both sexes. Both seem to believe they have to become perfect objects to be loved. I notice online, too, that we have started talking about the opposite sex like caricatures from porn sites. Men insist that all young women are fake and promiscuous; women insist that all men are heartless predators. When I talk about the harms of porn, people often assume that I’m blaming men, but I feel for young men, too. My anger is toward the industries, the technologies, that have a financial incentive to pull us apart. To turn us into lonely and detached consumers, with pathetically low standards for ourselves. They want to normalize and “destigmatize” and gaslight us into thinking the things that hurt us are actually healthy.

We have started talking about the opposite sex [online] like caricatures from porn sites. Men insist that all young women are fake and promiscuous; women insist that all men are heartless predators.

And now I think we distrust each other much more than previous generations did. I bought my grandma a notepad recently called Grandma, Tell Me, full of questions she can write answers to and then give back to me. There were all sorts of questions like “What kind of toys did you play with as a child?” or “What was the best part about your family?” On one page there was a big blank space for: “Did you ever have your heart broken? How did you cope with that?” And she had just written one word, “No.” 

That got to me, because my generation seems to have such deep trust issues so young. Hearts already broken over and over from breakups and situationships and parents’ divorces, trust already betrayed by Instagram likes and Snapchat Scores and PornHub search histories. Progressives like to remind me that things were much worse before, that nothing has been lost, that there’s always been porn and adultery and deceit, that I’m just nostalgic and comforting myself with an idealized image of the past. But often it’s the opposite. We have lost a lot, and we comfort ourselves in the present by pretending that we haven’t, by insisting nothing has changed. I think Gen Z’s experience growing up is very different from previous generations, often for the worse. And I saw it in that No, and all the blank space after it. 

The Spiritual Void and the Return of Faith

Wilcox: The Empowered chapter traces how Gen Z women, stripped of traditional religion, turned to astrology, therapy culture, and activism as substitutes—all with "you" at the center, rather than a transcendent source of meaning. Yet you note faint signs of renewal: young adults attending church, signs of religious rebirth, a hunger for something deeper.

In your own journey toward religious faith, what did you find that secular substitutes couldn't provide—and do you think faith communities can play a practical role in helping young women forge a path toward marriage and family?

India: Faith communities can definitely play a role. I suppose my interest in them began because my family broke down; I felt as though I had nothing solid beneath my feet. Life felt chaotic, out of control. It’s strange for a teenager, but I can honestly say that growing up I craved one thing, only one thing, which was to stay in the same place, for things to stay the same. I was desperate for permanence, stability, to stop packing suitcases. 

Faith communities offer something secular substitutes can’t. They ask something of you. They model sacrifice, forgiveness, patience—things we need to learn for relationships to last.

And I think that sort of instability compounds—when your family fragments, there can be a temptation to withdraw from neighbours, from extended family, from opening up your home to anybody else. At least that’s what happened to me. My family became very close, but also very insular, almost as a defence mechanism, to protect ourselves against any more cracks.

So for me, it was never a case of being taught to want these things—marriage or faith or community. I just grew up feeling the absence of something, even if I couldn’t name what it was. Now, after years of research and becoming close with many Christians, I do think faith communities offer something secular substitutes can’t. They ask something of you. They model sacrifice, forgiveness, patience, the things we need to learn for relationships to last. Something I love about going to church is seeing all these little children getting used to helping other people, to thinking about the needs of others, to giving their time. There are so few places left in modern life that teach that. 

Love in the Ruins

Wilcox: You end the book with what girls should walk away from—filtered identities, hookup culture, dating apps, divorce glamorization—and with the harder question of what they should walk toward, suggesting that serving others and choosing vulnerability over detachment is where real freedom lies. For a young woman reading this who wants marriage and children but has been formed by every trend you describe—porn, situationships, cynical influencers, family breakdown—what are the most concrete first steps toward becoming the kind of person capable of the commitments she says she wants?

India: It’s a bit of a cliché, but it really is a relief to stop thinking about yourself so much. Some say young women today are just vain and self-obsessed, and I’d say they’re right, but it’s also a nightmare, it’s an awful way to live, exhausting. We are vain and insecure. It makes me think of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism; we retreat inward as the world gets more chaotic, as stable commitments feel more unlikely. 

Every industry I write about in GIRLS®—the beauty industry, mental health industry, porn industry—urges us to turn further inward, to take what we want and what we deserve more seriously. The first step is to resist that and turn toward other people. 

The second step is to stop being so suspicious, so guarded. This is hard to talk about, but I think young women have been taught—and this is definitely something I felt—that if they are selfless, if they are kind, they will get walked all over. People don’t always realize that the “strong independent woman” ideal is not just about becoming girlbosses, not just about our careers, but a cultural message about how we should treat people, the posture women should adopt in life. Do what you want and don’t apologize. Men are out to take advantage; never let your guard down. Women have become so defensive, so on edge. The most pressing problem for some women in the past may have been too much dependence on men, but I think far more relationships are ruined today by fear and suspicion than by too much trust. 

Ultimately, girls have been taught to protect themselves so much that they are protecting themselves from love, from life. I hope reading the book helps them to realize one thing: that they would rather take risks and be alive than become a perfect product, inanimate and alone.