Almost everyone I know wants a relationship. Friends, colleagues, people at the gym. And somehow it feels harder than ever to actually find one. I don’t think we got worse at dating. I think the way we live now makes it really hard to meet anyone, and we’re the ones who built it that way.

Take dating apps. For a lot of people, that’s where dating starts now. You make a profile, set your filters, pick the five photos where you look your best. (Funny enough, after all that effort with the photos, the first date mostly comes down to whether the other person is nice to the waiter.) Plenty of people meet their partners like that. But it means the first impression is something you’ve put together and polished, and I think that sets the tone for a lot of what comes after. And that habit doesn’t always go away once you’re together. You can live with someone, share a couch and a Google Calendar, and both be on your phones all evening. It’s comfortable, and it’s also an easy way to never let the other person really see you, which is the thing that actually brings you close. You know that feeling with someone where you can just be yourself and it costs nothing? You usually only get there because at some point you let your guard down and it went fine. If you never do that, you don’t really get to find out what it would be like.

Then there’s time. People always tell you that you’ll meet someone when you stop looking. Great advice if you live in the same village your whole life. If you saw the same people at work for ten years and at the same club every Tuesday, you’d get to know someone slowly, without trying.

That’s not how it works anymore, at least not in a city like Munich. People move here for two years and leave again. Teams get reshuffled. Half the office works from home on any given day. At the gym I’ve noticed that by the time I’m comfortable enough to ask someone where they’re from, they’ve switched to mornings or stopped coming. So waiting for it to happen by itself mostly doesn’t work, and someone has to actually say something.

And saying something is always a bit of a risk, even if it’s a small one. A conversation that’s totally safe for both sides is usually also totally forgettable. The ones that go somewhere are where someone says what they actually think, or admits they’re nervous, or just takes the chance that the other person isn’t interested. That can get a bit awkward, and I think that’s okay, as long as whoever starts it carries that and makes it easy for the other person to say no.

Public places used to be where this happened. If you went to a café or a Biergarten or a concert, someone might talk to you. Not always someone you’d pick. Sometimes you had to wrap it up politely. But that was the deal, and it’s how a lot of strangers turned into friends and dates and, eventually, partners.

Now it’s flipped. Going out means being left alone, and a stranger talking to you counts as an intrusion. Catcalling, following people, guys who won’t take no for an answer: that’s real, and it ruined it for everyone else. But a normal hello got thrown into the same bucket. In the first few seconds you can’t tell them apart, so every approach gets treated like the bad kind.

I also think the fear has outgrown what actually happens. People go out already braced for it. Headphones in, eyes on the phone, on the U-Bahn, at the gym, in the queue at the bakery. Some of that comes from bad experiences. A lot of it comes from stories online, which make the rare bad moment look like an everyday thing. On a normal day, most people who say hello just want to say hello.

For any one person, though, keeping your headphones in makes total sense. If even one in twenty approaches is unpleasant, why risk it? But when everyone does it, nobody gets bothered and nobody meets anyone. Headphones keep out the few creeps and everyone else too, including the person you might have liked. And I’d bet a good share of the people with headphones in at the gym are swiping that same evening, wishing they could just meet someone normally.

So everyone wants the same thing, everyone is doing the sensible thing, and together we make it nearly impossible. A clear “no thanks” is enough to end a conversation you don’t want. You don’t need to shut everyone out in advance for that. I’d rather live somewhere a hello is normal and a no is just as normal, than somewhere the hello is already the problem.

There’s another part to this that I think nobody talks about. Talking to someone you like is a skill. You learn it by doing it, badly at first. People used to get that practice whether they wanted it or not. You couldn’t do much alone, so life kept pushing you into doing things with other people. And there were dances, youth groups, the dance course lots of us took as teenagers, where boys and girls met with clear rules. You learned how to ask someone, how to be polite, how to take a no. And if you messed it up, it wasn’t a big deal. By the time it mattered, you’d done it a hundred times.

If you grow up online, you can skip all of that. You might still want to meet someone, but nothing makes you go and talk to them. Then you’re 28, you’ve basically never done it, and you’re supposed to walk up to a stranger and get it right the first time.

Mostly it doesn’t go great. Nobody wants it to be awkward, but it often is, or it comes out too intense, or the timing is just terrible. (There is no good moment to say hi to someone between two sets of squats.) The person usually doesn’t mean anything bad, but it still feels bad on the other end. And then the other person thinks, “See, I took my headphones out once and some creep talked to me.” Sometimes they’re right! But that’s the loop: fewer people try, fewer people learn, the ones who try are worse at it, more headphones.

The strangest thing to me is that people post really personal stuff online for thousands of strangers, then freeze when one person talks to them in a room. I think it comes down to control. Online you pick the photo, write the caption, delete the comment, block whoever. It looks vulnerable, but you’re running the whole show. In person you can’t edit the awkward pause, it just happened, to both of you at the same time. If you’re used to only feeling safe when you’re in control, that’s scary. So public places turn into something you just get through on the way somewhere else.

I don’t think anyone planned this, it just kind of added up. And life is comfortable enough that you hardly notice. There’s always another episode, another chat. The loneliness can sit in the background for years.

I don’t think meeting someone has become impossible. It just doesn’t happen on its own as much anymore, so somebody has to go first, which in practice mostly means taking the headphones out now and then, saying hi, and being okay with it if the answer is no.