Millennial dating involves a lot of sexy moves – so why does it so rarely lead to sex? | Zoe Williams

<p>Modern courtship entails a complex set of escalations, from texts to voice notes to photos, before everything fizzles out. Give me gen X messiness any day</p><p>It’s well known that dating apps are a nightmare, that hell is empty and all the demons are on Hinge, to the extent people aren’t really allowed to complain about it any more. It would sound like whining about getting run over after you couldn’t be bothered to use an underpass, so you just ran across a motorway and hoped for the best.</p><p>And yet, as it was my great privilege listening to some millennials to discover, young people are still going on dates, and a lot still goes wrong, without the involvement of any tech whatsoever. It’s all in that bit of the Venn diagram where “I couldn’t work out what he/she was thinking” meets “I didn’t know whether I was that into it”, which is to say, the grey lacuna marked “nothing happened”. It could be a super-efficient, young-professional walk-through-a-park date, and then nothing happened, or a five-hour pub crawl, and then nothing happened. One young friend went to Spain<em> </em>to see a guy, and still nothing happened. One new acquaintance was on a date with a woman who passed him her knickers under the table halfway through dinner – and yet nothing happened.</p><p><em><strong>Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tone/letters"> letters</a> section, please <a href="mailto:guardian.letters@theguardian.com?body=Please%20include%20your%20name,%20full%20postal%20address%20and%20phone%20number%20with%20your%20letter%20below.%20Letters%20are%20usually%20published%20with%20the%20author%27s%20name%20and%20city/town/village.%20The%20rest%20of%20the%20information%20is%20for%20verification%20only%20and%20to%20co