Mary Rooke Commentary and Analysis Writer
Gen Z’s approach to life and love is the culmination of societal experiments that formed a generation into one giant Frankenstein’s monster, obsessed with mental health.
It’s easy to dump on Gen Z for being emotionally coddled toddlers who, despite living in the greatest, most advanced time in human history, still feel the need to be overly anxious and depressed. However, after reading The New York Times and Cosmopolitan’s pieces on the “trend” in Gen Z divorces, I can’t help but feel sorry for how badly we have let them down. Their entire lives have been one big social and emotional experiment, perpetuated on them without their consent, and it’s the primary reason we see stories like these plastered on the front page of our newspapers.
The New York Times featured a divorce story that wasn’t actually a divorce because the couple (or couples?) weren’t legally married, but were simply living together. A Seattle violinist, who uses they/them pronouns, wanted to break up with what I can only assume is her boyfriend, although that wasn’t exactly clear because while the outlet used male pronouns, we can’t trust that he wasn’t really a she. But that’s not even the worst part about this situation. The couple was actually a throuple (three people in a relationship), and sadly, the third person was a woman who was known only as a mistress.
“If you have to dump your ex-husband,” violinist Kira Benson told the outlet, “co-dump him with his mistress.”
“Before the breakup, Mx. Benson, 27, who uses the pronoun they, checked in with their therapist, who said a divorce would be a ‘good choice,’” the NYT reported. “Out of queer solidarity, they informed their husband’s ‘mistress’ — this was kosher in Mx. Benson’s arrangement, which was not a legal marriage, but a domestic partnership — about their shared partner’s troubling behavior. The night of the breakup, Mx. Benson and the mistress spent a cozy evening together: ‘We were eating a lot of comfort food, playing a lot of Animal Crossing.’”
Reading this NYT article about divorce in Gen Z and the lead example is almost too much for me to bear lmao pic.twitter.com/odAwgpzQiK
— dylan (@narrenhut) October 6, 2025
The story is enough to make your head spin. But all of the examples of Gen Z divorce, either mentioned in the NYT or Cosmopolitan, featured women who worked non-traditional jobs: violinists, sex writers, and art directors. It’s as if there isn’t a single normal person working a traditional 9-5 job available for comment. However, that is likely because the other members of Gen Z are either not married or happily married to their normal husbands, living quiet lives together. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
The stories in the articles primarily convey mental health concerns and subtle relational incompatibilities as key drivers for ending marriages, rather than dramatic issues like infidelity or abuse. This generation was taught not to feel shame about ending their marriage. They want quick divorces and seemingly triumphant returns to “empowering self-reliance.”
There are several reasons to blame for their obsession with mental health and emotional well-being, most notably the start of the Social Emotional Learning (SEL) experiment, which became popular to include in classroom education during their formative years. Not surprisingly, this also coincided with the lack of religious formation during the same time.
SEL programs claim to teach skills like self-awareness, emotional regulation, empathy, relationship-building, and responsible decision-making, explicitly framing these as essential for mental well-being and resilience. By embedding these in education during their formative years, SEL has heightened Gen Z’s awareness of mental health indicators, encouraging them to identify and address issues like stress or anxiety proactively rather than suppressing them.
And while this sounds like a positive movement toward emotional enlightenment, what we are noticing is that this generation is more likely to cut important social building blocks, like family members and religion, out of their lives over disagreements that upset their increasingly fragile emotional health. (ROOKE: No, Charlie Kirk’s Murder Is Nothing Like The Death Of The Left’s Favorite Fentanyl Addict)
NEW STUDY:
After completing an SEL program, students were MORE depressed, MORE anxious, had MORE difficulty managing emotions, and reported WORSE relationships with their parents.
TEACHERS ARE NOT AND SHOULD NOT BE THERAPISTS! pic.twitter.com/dseccrWWpg
— Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” (@MrDanielBuck) January 24, 2024
Even more apparent is that Gen Z’s emphasis on mental health reflects a cultural shift away from religious foundations, where societal secularism has sidelined God, scripture, and tradition as sources of comfort, replacing them with therapeutic practices and self-help trends. They are attempting to fill the spiritual void with mindfulness apps or therapy, rather than turning to biblical principles like prayer and reliance on divine peace, and we are actively allowing them to do so with little to no societal or parental pushback.
It’s no wonder this generation has an intensified focus on personal emotional states when they are searching for a substitute for faith-based resilience, unaware that it is already available for them to rely on. While it’s easy to laugh at the “queer solidarity” throuple from Seattle, the story is a tragic tale of what happens when we replace God with ourselves.
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