Why Friction Will Always Find You
By Ben Fulton
July 26, 2026
My college-age daughter and I recently saw Obsession, director Curry Barker’s much-hyped horror film about a struggling young man who makes an improbable wish on a novelty toy that the girl of his hardest crush, with whom he works in a music store, will fall madly in love with him.
Reportedly marking the return of movie-going among Gen Z, the film is a hair-raising stab of romance not simply gone wrong, but one of taking many wrong turns straight to hell. Turning the twenty-something bedroom into a theater of torture, emotional and physical, it ratchets scene after scene far past the ways couples stew in mutual dysfunction. It weaves jealousy, abuse and co-dependence to—one suspects—pay witness to many tragic domestic violence incidents we hear about on the nightly news. For anyone who has survived an abusive relationship at the hands of a controlling or narcissistic partner, it triggers artilleries. As my daughter remarked once it was all over, and as we strolled cautiously through the movie theater lobby, “That was a lot.”
Relationship advice is in special vogue right now thanks to ever-advancing marriage ages matched with social anxiety about falling birthrates. “Incel” is common currency, profiling the mounting angst young men feel about rarely, if ever, enjoying sex or constructive relationships with women when perhaps they have mostly themselves to blame. So they settle for endless days of life online cycling back and forth between video games, OnlyFans, and three-hour podcasts from the right-wing manosphere. Then comes “heteropessimism,” or “heterofatalism.” This is the sinking feeling among women, after years attempting to launch a relationship with men—any man—the odds have dwindled closer to zero. It is the dawning realization that today’s men lack the courage, energy, or both to even jumpstart a relationship.
The question of why this state of affairs exists has become so intense that journalists, commentators, and influencers have lent it the feel of an MC Escher image. Looking at the problem, it is clear that forces combine and feed into one another for an end effect. Problem is, no one can say where the exact cause of these changes is located, or when it begins its destructive work. All we know is that, matched with economists’ anxiety over plummeting birthrates, the heterosexual dating world seems to be everyone’s business.
The New York Times has for years now produced not just opinion columns and pieces but, thanks to the cavernous capacities of the internet, vast opuses of exchange between hosts, pundits, and authors on every topic imaginable. Most are not worth the trawl, which speaks to the diminishing role of content editors everywhere. Some, as in this recent exchange between Times culture editor Nadja Spiegelman and researchers Christine Emba and Carter Sherman, hit more than a few nails on the head.
How can I state this with such confidence? I can state it because Sherman and Emba’s dialogue around the idea of “friction,” or the risk-taking inherent in relationships, rings altogether true for this 60-year-old veteran of the relationship battlefield. In fact, it should ring true for anyone. Dare it be said that the malaise reportedly plaguing today’s relationship market is that friction has been reduced to a minimum?
The Times article linked above chronicles this aptly and well. Scrolling through Tinder and Bumble profiles? Frictionless. Escape into internet troves of pornography? Seedy, mostly. But also frictionless. Refuge in idealized romance novels? Narrative Novocaine, and also frictionless.
Gen Z analyses abound of personal interpretations regarding Burry’s minor masterpiece of a horror film. Obsession translates the social anxiety young people feel about relationships into horrors they can relate to. (Which should horrify older people, frankly.) Obsession depicts the dark places of a relationship to which young people fear they, too, might travel, never to return.
The film’s catalyzing moment is not a single one of its many scenes of manipulative terror, but the weakness of its central male character, Baron “Bear” Baily (played by Michael Johnston). Obsession’s first 20 minutes or so show him hedging the risk of simply asking his heart’s desire, Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette), out on a simple date. Bear aches. He wants. He desires. Just not enough to risk his feelings. His character takes the name of an animal with aggressive potential, but as a character, Bear gives the impression that he would rather hibernate than paw his way toward the first sign of mating ritual. Unable to risk his heart, he risks his struggling adult maturity instead on an absurd fairy-tale wish. Because Obsession is a horror film, the result is agonizing fear and pain. If Obsession were real life, the result would be agonizing loneliness. Or, if you buy the lengthy Times conversation on why the world of relationships has hit a collective dead end, it becomes the blissful euphemism of “solitude.” Either way, loneliness and solitude share the same frictionless world. And loneliness and solitude become, in time, their own sort of intolerable friction. Risk in romance is friction with the potential of reward. Being alone is the friction of no prospect of reward whatsoever.
Gen Xers and younger boomers remember all too well the vaunted answering machine attached to our landlines. A large part of our “friction” was making sure we were home straight after work to receive the hoped-for call from a potential paramour. The hours waiting, sometimes before giving up altogether and going to bed, were grueling. The “difficult conversations” were, for the most part, face-to-face. None of this is to say that modern texting is agony-free. We spend time waiting for a text as a ring from the landline. But in the halcyon days of the cell phone, we move from place to place, freed from the lonely walls of our apartment or home. In a way, this robs single people of a valuable incentive to find that special someone. Yet again, the friction-free possibilities of technology free us toward greater movement, while at the same time binding us ever closer to our lonely selves. And if that anticipated text never arrives, we can scroll our way into the friction of an alienation so deep there is no one to wait for at all.
