In an earlier article, I laid out why dating and marriage have become harder for this generation: financial precarity, a cultural script that no longer converges on partnership, choice-overload from dating apps, and biological headwinds like declining testosterone and antidepressant-related sexual side effects. Those forces are real, and most of them are outside any one person’s control. But there’s a fifth piece I want to focus on here, because it’s the one place I think we actually have leverage: we spend twelve to sixteen years putting young people through an education system built almost entirely to transmit facts, and almost not at all to teach them how to be in relationship with another human being. If AI can now teach facts more patiently, more adaptively, and more scalably than a classroom of thirty ever could, that frees up an enormous amount of developmental time and attention. The question worth asking is what we do with it. My answer: we use it to teach the things school has quietly stopped teaching — intimacy, frustration tolerance, conflict resolution, and how to build a life with another person.
Why Factual Instruction Is the Right Thing to Hand Off
Most classroom time is still organized around one teacher delivering the same material to twenty-five or thirty students at the same pace, regardless of who’s already lost or who’s already bored. AI tutoring systems don’t have that constraint. They can adapt in real time to a student’s specific gaps, explain a concept five different ways until one lands, and do it for every student simultaneously rather than for whichever few raise their hands. This isn’t a hypothetical — adaptive learning tools are already outperforming standard instruction on narrow, well-defined academic tasks in controlled studies. Facts, formulas, grammar, historical dates, the mechanics of algebra: this is exactly the kind of content that benefits from infinite patience and personalized pacing, and it’s exactly what AI is good at.
Handing that layer of instruction to AI isn’t a demotion of teachers. It’s a reallocation. A teacher spending less time lecturing through a textbook chapter and more time facilitating a room full of teenagers negotiating a group project, working through a disagreement, or role-playing a hard conversation is doing something AI cannot yet do and may never do particularly well: modeling, in real time, what mature human relating actually looks like.
The Curriculum We Stopped Teaching
Here’s what I’d put in the time that opens up. Not a single “relationships” elective bolted onto senior year, but a sequenced curriculum that runs the length of a child’s schooling, the same way math does:
Frustration tolerance and emotional regulation. How to sit with discomfort without immediately escaping it — through a phone, through avoidance, through outburst. This is a trainable skill, and the earlier it’s practiced, the more automatic it becomes.
Conflict resolution. Not conflict avoidance, and not “winning” an argument — the specific skill of staying in a disagreement with someone you care about until you’ve actually resolved something, rather than withdrawing, escalating, or “winning” at the relationship’s expense.
Reading and accepting other people’s limitations. Every long-term relationship requires tolerating a partner’s, a friend’s, or a colleague’s weaknesses without treating those weaknesses as disqualifying or as personal injuries. That’s a skill, and it’s one a lot of young adults tell me, in one form or another, they were never taught — they were taught to optimize and to filter, not to tolerate and to work with.
Basic social fluency. Making eye contact, reading a room, initiating a conversation with a stranger, sitting through small talk without narrating it in your head. These sound trivial until you’re the adult who’s forgotten how, and there’s real survey evidence that a majority of Gen Z already feel their in-person social skills have declined, with a meaningful share reporting their verbal communication has gotten worse too.
**How the sexes actually communicate differently, on average.**Not stereotypes, but honest, evidence-informed conversation about common differences in communication style, emotional expression, and relational needs between men and women — taught the same way we’d teach any other subject where getting it wrong has real consequences.
**What building a life with someone actually requires.**Budgeting as a shared exercise, not an individual one. Division of labor. What it means to merge two families’ habits, expectations, and extended relationships into one household. These are the mundane, unglamorous mechanics of a life together, and almost no one is taught them before they need them.
COMPOSITE PATIENT VIGNETTE
“Priya,” a 26-year-old in her first serious relationship, described panicking and shutting down every time she and her partner disagreed about anything. She was academically accomplished — valedictorian, a competitive graduate program — and had never once been in a room where an adult modeled how to stay present through a disagreement rather than end it. She hadn’t lacked intelligence. She’d lacked practice.
The Evidence That This Kind of Teaching Works
This isn’t a speculative proposal — a version of it already exists and already has an evidence base. Social-emotional learning programs, the closest thing schools currently run to what I’m describing, have been the subject of more than a dozen independent meta-analyses covering hundreds of studies and hundreds of thousands of students across grade levels. The consistent finding is medium-to-large improvements in behavior, emotional regulation, and school climate, alongside modest but real gains in academic performance itself — contrary to the fear that “soft skills” instruction comes at the cost of hard ones. What’s never been tried at scale is treating relational competence as a core subject, sequenced and reinforced year over year the same way we sequence math, with the classroom hours to support it because AI has absorbed the factual-recall workload that used to consume the day.
RESEARCH NOTE
A Learning Policy Institute review of twelve independent meta-analyses found social-emotional learning programs produced medium-to-large effects on emotional regulation, behavior, and school climate across every K–12 grade band, with sustained impact months after programs ended. Separately, a 2024 survey found more than half of Gen Z respondents believe their own in-person social skills have declined, with about a quarter reporting their verbal communication specifically has gotten worse.
The Honest Objections, and Why I Still Think This Is Right
Two objections deserve a straight answer rather than a dismissal. The first: teaching “how the sexes interact” risks sliding into stereotype or ideology depending on who writes the curriculum. That’s a real risk, and the answer is the same one we apply to any other sensitive subject — ground it in evidence, revisit it as evidence changes, and keep it descriptive rather than prescriptive about how any individual should be. The second: handing factual instruction to AI assumes the technology is reliable, equitably distributed, and won’t simply become a new source of disengagement. Those are legitimate implementation concerns, not reasons to abandon the idea, but they do mean this can’t be rolled out carelessly or unevenly across school districts with very different resources.
Neither objection changes the underlying diagnosis: we are sending young adults into the most consequential relationships of their lives — partnership, marriage, parenting — with more academic preparation than any generation in history and comparatively little practice at the actual skills those relationships require. If AI genuinely can take the burden of rote instruction off the school day, the honest question isn’t whether we have the time to teach intimacy, conflict resolution, and how to build a life with someone. It’s why we weren’t already making the time.
Never learned the relational skills you needed?
Dr. Mark Agresti provides integrative psychiatric care for young adults in Palm Beach and throughout Florida via telemedicine, helping patients build the emotional regulation, communication, and relationship skills that weren’t taught in school.
44 Cocoanut Row, Suite M202, Palm Beach, FL 33480 | [(561) 760-4107](tel:(561) 760-4107) | [email protected] | DrMarkAgresti.com