The Plot Against Love - by Abigail Shrier (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The roots of our modern dating crisis run far deeper than iPhones, hookups, and dating apps. Young women have been encouraged to see themselves as broadly superior to their male peers, argues New York Times bestselling author Abigail Shrier. The result is an epidemic of loneliness that makes everyone miserable.

In The Plot Against Love, Shrier exposes the web of politicians, tech corporations, educators, and philanthropists who conspired to kill romance for good. Drawing on over one hundred private interviews with young singles and new research on mating and attraction, Shrier argues that female desire has been frustrated by ambient messaging that denigrates men. She uncovers the school policies that pathologize masculinity and the social pressure to treat ordinary male characteristics as contemptible. And she meets the young men who have turned to porn and the bitterest voices in the manosphere to cope with the absence of love they still hope to find.

None of this was inevitable--and we don't need to accept it. With her characteristic fearlessness and humor, Shrier provides a playbook for rejecting the toxic ideas that keep young people apart and equipping them for life's greatest adventure: falling in love.

About the Author

She received the Barbara Olson Award for Excellence and Independence in Journalism in 2021 and the Samizdat Prize for Courageous Reporting and Analysis in 2025.

She is the author of Bad Therapy, a New York Times bestseller and an NPR "Books We Love" selection, and Irreversible Damage, a national bestseller and an Economist Book of the Year.

Her books have been translated into 25 languages.