Words by Maya Raphael PZ ’27, Graphic by Madeleine Farr PZ ’27

It’s not that deep.

Ah yes, Gen Z’s favorite incantation against intimacy. A year is shaved off my life each time this sentiment invades my eardrums, vibrating almost derogatorily against my canals.

It is as if I am supposed to say: “My apologies, my humanity began to ooze out — how dare I let my nonchalance dwindle! I’ll repress my vulnerability back into my psyche and shrink myself back to the emotional range of a preteen boy. Much hotter, thanks.”

Apparently, that is what passes for sex appeal these days — a cold, lifeless performance of indifference. 

We don’t even flirt anymore. Everything is calibrated to brush one heartstring while leaving the rest in calculated disinterest. A Hinge like here, a suggestive Instagram story like there — just enough to keep you wondering.

Never saying what we want out loud; hiding desire behind irony, sarcasm, and the safety of “just hooking up.” And then comes the perfectly-timed breadcrumb meant to keep your emotional attachment hanging by a thread while your dignity vanishes! 

We’re knee-deep in the Nonchalance Epidemic, an economy where nothing is ever allowed to matter too much. 

I was sitting in my PHIL048 Intimate Relationships class, amid a pathetically nasty text argument with my 6-month on-and-off situationship who never-sorta-kinda-almost-barely materialized into something more substantial, when I chose surrender and — finally, formally — declared pity upon myself. 

As my screen lit up again, my stomach deflated. The fluorescent lights buzzed above me; my leg bounced below me. I’d spent months trying to breathe life into something that was fundamentally lifeless: a proudly noncommittal situationship. How empowering to engage in emotional minimalism! I exhaled hard and sank into my seat. All I wanted was something more. 

I forced my eyes back onto my packet, the corners of the page slightly curling. I uncapped my pink highlighter and underlined “Love demands mutual vulnerability or it turns destructive.”

There I was: a disillusioned romantic idealist, scouring for romantic catharsis through elite academia while my search for rudimentary intimacy evaded me.

And, there we were, two dozen late teens and twenty-somethings intellectually wrestling with Shulamith Firestone’s 1970s radical feminist exposé on the tribulations of love and intimacy under patriarchy, while we actively inhabited — and mercilessly suffocated in — a dating culture without an ounce of life. 

The lump in my throat solidified as I read Firestone: conventional romance doesn’t liberate love — it traps it. It scripts our affections and codifies our charm, rewarding distance and punishing vulnerability. Feeling becomes secondary, the performance primary. It keeps intimacy at a distance.

My six-month tango into oblivion only deepened the irony: 50 years after Firestone, love may be less bound to hierarchy, but it now sits paralyzed in apathy. In trading intrigue for indifference, we’ve dropped the ball on connection — settling on detachment as if it were maturity. To be playfully flirtatious and curiously intimate would demand the smallest flicker of courage, the indulgence of dipping our toes into what could be.

Romance hasn’t been liberated; it’s been anesthetized. Under the dictatorship of detachment, romance knows no order — no rules, no rituals, no comfort or catharsis. We dignify not caring, breeding a deep generational disconnection. 

Meanwhile, we are all feral with desire. Everyone wants love; no one wants to want it. 

I seemed to  have missed the memo. If anything, I overcorrect. I am chalant. I, deeply and pathologically, give a fuck. Even a cursory scroll through my notes app reveals a metacognitive obsessiveness — a neurotic archive of being twenty and feeling everything at a full, catastrophic volume. Nothing is neutral to me; everything is data, ready to gnaw at my emotions. I can’t do emotional limbo or half-interest. My brain simply refuses. 

I’ve kept lists of my crushes in my diary since I could write; I know the precise date of every first kiss. I’m always the one to ask the dreaded what are we? question because the ambiguity makes my skin crawl. I’ve lingered in casual entanglements far past their expiration because I am embarrassingly susceptible to the morsels of affection. 

I notice everything: pacing, posture, pauses. My body catalogues intimacy like evidence; it all means something. 

I’m not necessarily saying this is some noble trait; in fact, some may say I’ve tipped into the opposite extreme. But that positions me as the perfect vanguard against the Epidemic. I’m constitutionally incapable of indifference. It goes against the grain of my being, and my body refuses to numb itself. I refuse to desensitize my heart. 

Maybe that is why the Nonchalance Epidemic enrages me so much: it takes something that should be felt deeply and makes it absurd. It disorients us, leaving us in a space of liminality —  where intimacy appears warped and elusive, yet we keep searching for it anyway.

Like the night I found myself within the cold walls of a bare, unrecognizable dorm room. And I think I’ve found it — disfigured and transient — but it is there. Almost tangibly present between the unassuming vibration of two bodies, finding warmth in spontaneous affection. Intimacy! Easy, organic, relational warmth, for exactly one night. But my feet were too jittery with bliss under those green flannel sheets. To want someone loudly, and to let the wanting show. This was my fatal mistake: I let it matter. Silly me. The replies slowed, then stopped, and my feet — now leaden — remained trapped in my own cotton florals.

Alas, intimacy is dead. Or faltering. But I refuse nonchalance. 

I’m not advocating for commitment or traditional romance; I am critiquing emotional unavailability, not casual intimacy. Casual can be good — necessary, even — as long as you show a shred of care.

To the chronic nonchalanters, I see through your facade. And despite the cowardice of your detachment, I don’t even blame you; the world we inhabit breeds apathy and punishes sincerity.

But appearing effortless is actually quite effortful. Nonchalance is just a sinister form of caring — not about another person, but about the fragile ego you are desperate to protect.

Go on a date. Have a crush. Flirt. Risk looking like you give a damn; that is the whole point.

To be human is to be tender, emotional, and seeking closeness. It actually is that deep.